WARSAW: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday said Christianity was waning in EU countries taking in migrants and defended countries like his which have refused to take them in.

Orban spoke during a visit to Poland, which is also against the European Union’s plan to relocate asylum seekers from Greece and Italy to other member states as a way to deal with its worst migrant crisis since World War II, which has seen more than one million people flee the Middle East and Africa. Orban said Europe today was split into two camps.

There were those who were “betting everything on immigrants” including their “future, demographic balance and the labour market — and these are typically the former colonial powers.”

The other group were nations who “don’t want to become immigration countries and want to resolve their demographic problems through family policy and by stimulating the economy,” Orban told reporters alongside his Polish counterpart Beata Szydlo.

“I think the future of the EU depends on the possibility of communication between these two groups ... Instead of showing mutual respect, immigration countries want to force us to become like them,” Orban added.

“We don’t want a mixed population... as is the case to the west of us, where different civilisations live side by side and where as a result of this mix the Christian element is losing its role.” In 2015, Brussels came up with a controversial scheme to spread up to 160,000 Syrian, Iraqi and Eritrean asylum seekers among the 28 member states.

But recent EU figures show that just under 28,000 migrants had been relocated from Italy and Greece by September this year.

Orban has been at the forefront of a rebellion in eastern and central Europe against the quotas.

At the height of the migrant crisis, Budapest erected fences on its southern borders and recruited 3,000 “border hunter” police to patrol the frontiers.

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2017