Hungary to spend additional money to build border fence against illegal migrants

The Hungarian government will spend an additional 22.2 billion forints (about 79 million U.S. dollars) to build a fence along the Hungarian-Serbian border and to temporarily house migrants, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said on Hungarian television channel M1 on Wednesday.

This amount is in addition to the 6.5 billion forints (about 2.3 million dollars) being used to fence the Hungarian-Serbian border which is already under construction.

Kovacs said tent cities would go up in unpopulated areas to temporarily house migrants. Exactly where they will be located will be decided in the next month or two, he said, adding that over 3,500 migrants are currently staying at reception centers.

Kovacs also noted that the European Union (EU) had done little to help Hungary cover the costs of this migration wave.

The fence, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said last Saturday, would be finished by Aug. 31, a date confirmed by the cabinet at its Wednesday meeting. The fence has been deemed necessary since over 90 percent of the migrants entering Hungary illegally cross the Serbian border.

The government hopes that the fence will slow down the wave of migrants, which has been growing since the start of the year and numbered over 95,000 as of this past weekend, Kovacs said on Tuesday.

He voiced concern that the number of migrants entering the EU through Hungary could grow to 250,000 to 300,000 by year's end unless something was done to curb the growth. Enditem