Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has declared that conservatives “must fight” against an international campaign to abolish national borders linked to billionaire financier George Soros.

“International asylum law makes it clear that no one in the world has the right to choose where they want to live, and every country has its own population. For someone to live somewhere other than where they were born, they also need the consent of the people who live there,” Orbán told Kossuth Rádió.

“If someone wants to live in Hungary, they must seek the permission of the Hungarian people. There can be no international principle, norm, court or organisation which says that it doesn’t matter what the Hungarian people think about their own country and about whom they want to live together with, and that someone else will decide for us. This is impossible,” he said, addressing questions about a European Court of Human Rights ruling ordering Hungary to pay compensation to two deported Bangladeshis.

“There is no such international principle. There is, however, a well-established international campaign, which has been ongoing for more than a decade. It can be linked to the name of George Soros, and it seeks to prove that borders make no sense, and that nations have no right to decide for themselves whom they wish their peoples to live together with.

“According to this, international legal institutions must be created to oversee the nations and to tell us or decide for us who may live where, and together with whom. There is even an extensive intellectual support framework for this, and a number of high-profile works have been published on this subject. These are extremely dangerous.

“So let me repeat: these [open borders theories] are conceived in the Soros workshop, and these have also infiltrated a number of international institutions. We must fight these battles. We must argue against them. We must make their operations transparent, and we must make clear that often it’s not about the principles of human rights, but about greed and the migrant business.”

The Fidesz leader also heaped praise on the “young Hungarians in the uniforms of the military and the police defending the safety of the Hungarian people in difficult circumstances” at the borders, and poured scorn on pro-migration NGOs which “accuse them of not doing their job properly, saying that in fact they’re wolves in human form who take pleasure in physically abusing the migrants who come here”.

Orbán denounced this as a “monstrous lie”, and restated his commitment to preventing such groups from undermining the country’s robust and effective migration policy with foreign money without any transparency about their financing.

“After all, what’s the point of these young Hungarians defending the Hungarian border if international networks then open up all sorts of legal loopholes? Why do they apprehend illegal border crossers, why do they risk their own physical safety, if all along these networks in Budapest and Brussels treacherously undermine us with legal loopholes?” he asked.

“I must say that in my view this situation is morally untenable. These NGOs, or non-governmental organisations as they call themselves, aren’t civil society organisations. They have nothing to do with civil society organisations … they have been profiteering at our expense. This is what is happening. This is a migrant business.”