ABSTRACT
This chapter continues to explore how the populist radical right reinforced the boundaries of the nation in relation to migrants from Muslim-majority lands in the context of the refugee and migrant crisis in 2015. Following the theoretical lines of Zygmunt Bauman and Mary Douglas, it argues that the ‘polluting migrant’ served to reinforce the ethno-nationalist boundaries of Hungarian-ness as propagated by Fidesz and Jobbik, strengthening the image of Hungary as the righteous protector of a white, Christian nation and European civilization in danger. An Islamophobic layer emerged in the radical right’s grammar of exclusion that traditionally has targeted the country’s Roma minority and Jews. The initial state securitization of migrants was not grounded in the logic of ‘human waste’. On the contrary, it was the hyperinstrumentalization of migrants as an economic threat that prompted their further racialization and dehumanization in the image of the ‘crimmigrant’ Other (Aas 2011). Concerned Hungarians contested racialized securitization, re-inscribing bios to migrants deemed ‘human waste’ by the state. The contradictory interpretations of migrants as waste or value, burden or benefit, parallel struggles over statehood and identity in globalized Hungary – between a society open to diversification processes and one that closes its borders to difference, on a sliding path towards an illiberal state.
