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On January 22, MCC hosted the presentation of the Taking Back Control from Brussels report, bringing together policymakers and experts to assess the failures of European migration policy and outline possible legal and institutional alternatives.
In his opening remarks, Balázs Orbán, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of MCC and Political Director of the Prime Minister, emphasized that the report goes beyond political messaging and provides a serious legal background analysis of both the problem and the necessary responses. He argued that the European Union has failed over the past decade to stop illegal migration and that repeated EU level attempts have not delivered results. According to him, if the current trajectory continues, conditions will deteriorate further in the coming decades, placing an increasing burden on member states. He highlighted that Hungary is forced to pay one million euros per day in fines while working to ensure public safety and stressed that preserving peace and security in a turbulent international environment remains a central responsibility. Orbán concluded that since the EU has failed to curb illegal migration, both international law and EU legal frameworks must be fundamentally rethought. In his view, humanitarian and refugee law, together with EU legal practice, currently incentivize illegal migration by offering asylum as a near automatic entry mechanism into Europe. The coming period, he said, will be defined by the full re regulation of international and EU law in this field.
The subsequent roundtable discussion expanded on these themes. Rodrigo Ballester, Head of MCC’s Center for European Studies, argued that Europe does not have the time for a new migration pact or technocratic solutions. He stated that after thirty years of transferring competences to the EU, the outcome has been disastrous and that powers once given to Brussels are extremely difficult to reclaim. In his assessment, the EU should only act where it is clearly better placed than member states to deliver results, raising the fundamental question of who can decide more effectively at national or EU level. Ballester also pointed to existing opt outs in countries such as Ireland and Denmark, questioning why similar flexibility is denied to others. He underlined that Frontex was originally created to assist member states in protecting their borders and should remain focused on that task, without NGO driven mechanisms embedded in its internal functioning. He further criticized the European Court of Justice, arguing that its case law shows a bias toward migration, illustrated by the decision to multiply the fine imposed on Hungary by 64.5. For him, this reinforces the need to return control and competences to member states.
Viktor Marsai, Executive Director of the Migration Research Institute, presented the core diagnosis of the report. He argued that European migration policy is fundamentally broken and that asylum has effectively become a free ticket to enter the continent. According to Marsai, the majority of those crossing borders are not the most vulnerable but individuals from the middle class who possess the financial means to relocate. Each year, roughly one million asylum seekers arrive in Europe, a dynamic that has transformed many European member states into migrant states. Changing this trajectory, he warned, requires immediate and decisive action.
The discussion also featured Jerzy Kwaśniewski, President and co founder of the Ordo Iuris Institute, who linked the new report to the institute’s earlier Great Reset report. He argued that the EU has not seriously attempted to stop illegal migration and that the current migration pact does not even define halting illegal migration as its primary objective. In his view, EU policy seeks to enforce a forced transformation of society and culture under the paradigm of diversity, a model he explicitly rejected. Kwaśniewski stressed that the report does not merely diagnose the problem but also proposes workable solutions within the existing framework of EU law. He warned of what he described as direct collaboration between smugglers and NGO funded networks, noting that NGOs, while claiming independence, are not democratically controlled and are financially incentivized to shift lawmaking away from member states.
The roundtable was moderated by Yann Caspar, Researcher at MCC’s Center for European Studies. The event concluded with a clear message shared across interventions: Europe’s migration challenge cannot be addressed through incremental or technocratic adjustments. Meaningful change requires restoring legal clarity, political accountability, and decision making power to the level of the member states.
Read the full report here:
