Hungary says it will soon borrow a page from some American Republican governors’ migrant crisis playbooks, offering asylum seekers arriving in the eastern European nation one-way bus tickets to Brussels.

Prime Minister Orbán’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyás, says the initiative is in direct response to a  200 million euro fine issued by a court in June because Hungary repeatedly broke European Union asylum rules. The country also faces an additional 1 million-euro fine for each day it fails to fall in line with EU policy.

“Brussels wants to force us at any cost to let migrants in,” Mr. Gulyás said at a news conference last week, referring to where the EU’s headquarters is based, adding that Hungary would offer each migrant one-way bus tickets to the Belgian city if they continued to force regulations upon the government.

EU officials have taken a hard line approach towards Hungary and what is viewed as its overly restrictive rules for asylum seekers. The EU wants Hungary to provide travel protections to those seeking to travel to embassies in neighboring countries such as Serbia and Ukraine.

“Hungary doesn’t want to pay this daily fine indefinitely, so we will make it possible for people to enter if they want and offer them a one-way ticket to Brussels,” Mr. Gulyás said. “If Brussels wants migrants, then it can have them.”

Hungary’s threat is akin to moves taken by Republican governors in America such as Greg Abbot of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, who have been bussing migrants to Democratic strongholds like New York, Chicago and Washington D.C.. So far this year, Texas alone has transported more than 120,000 migrants out of the state.

Attitudes against migrants and asylum-seekers have hardened among some Europeans recently, stoked by fears of economic burdens and overall security. The sentiment correlates with members of the European Union continuing to see migrants crossing their borders in large numbers.

In 2023 alone, EU nations registered 385,445 arrivals via the Mediterranean Sea’s eastern borders­ — nearly double the rate of a year earlier but still short of the 1 million plus during the height of the continent’s refugee crisis in 2015.

Germany has been setting up temporary control points along its borders in recent months to combat human trafficking smugglers and various threats as they occur. The checkpoints were first set up in October 2023, leading to a 60 percent decrease within the first month.

The EU member nation announced on Monday that they were once again setting up temporary control points on all the country’s land borders, according to Reuters. The measure will begin next week for a six-month period to curb the amount of refugees illegally crossing their borders and  to combat extremist threats.

“We are strengthening internal security and continuing our hardline against irregular migration,” Interior Minister of Germany, Nancy Faeser said.