Why Hungary Dares to Lock Up Asylum Seekers

Immigration opponents in Europe and the U.S. often point to Australia as an example of how migrants should be handled: Detain them if they don't have a valid visa and vet them properly before letting them in or sending them back. Now, Australia has its first official European follower: Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Hungary.

On Tuesday, the Hungarian parliament voted overwhelmingly to detain all asylum seekers for the entire time it takes to process the application. The applicants will be fingerprinted, photographed and kept indefinitely in converted shipping containers, unless they choose voluntarily to give up their asylum claims and go back to the country from which they entered Hungary. The Central European nation was never particularly welcoming -- Orban was apoplectic throughout 2015, when hundreds of thousands crossed his country, mostly to ask for shelter in Germany or the Scandinavian nations, and he openly calls migration a "Trojan horse of terrorism." But automatic, indefinite detention isn't just tough -- it's illegal in the European Union.