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Over the past few years, Hungarian institutions funded by, and supportive of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s policies, have forged close working relationships with American far-right groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the conservative conclave, CPAC. What is less known is that Hungarians have also forged links with American anti-immigrant outfits established by John Tanton.
Tanton was a white nationalist who created what has come to be called “The Tanton network,” a grouping of anti-immigrant organizations founded and funded over decades by the Michigan ophthalmologist. Tanton came to see immigrants as destructive to American society and culture and, sharing similar views, consorted with white nationalists. The network includes the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA, among others. These organizations worked for years domestically, eschewing international entanglements.
Until now. In recent years, CIS and NumbersUSA have forged alliances with Hungarian organizations similarly concerned that immigrants are a blight on established societies.
CIS is led by Mark Krikorian and has a history of spreading hate against immigrants, republishing tracts by white nationalist and antisemitic authors and pushing for punishing anti-immigrant policies. During the Trump administration, CIS was a key player in immigration policy. In October 2016, CIS and NumbersUSA representatives claimed that they had direct contact with the administration through telephone calls with either Trump or senior members of his campaign. When white nationalist Stephen Miller was named as a senior advisor for then President Trump, Miller heavily cited CIS research to back his abusive immigration policies during the Trump Administration, affording CIS even more influence.
CIS is a key supporter of the Heritage Foundation’s rights-stripping initiative, Project 2025, which recommends the rounding up and deportation of immigrants in the U.S. among other harsh anti-immigrant policies. CIS was not always embraced by far-right groups like Heritage. Former Heritage employee Jason Richwine, who co-authored Heritage’s 2013 report on the “costs” of a recent immigration reform bill, resigned from Heritage that year and joined CIS after being outed as having racist views.
Now, the two groups work hand in hand. Heritage officials, such as Margaret Thatcher Fellow Robin Simcox, often join CIS officials at common events. So do other Project 2025 supporters, such as Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow from the Claremont Institute. Multiple CIS staffers and allies are involved in Project 2025, including Andrew “Art” Arthur, Julie Axelrod, Jessica M. Vaughan, Jason Richwine, George Fishman, and Jon Feere, who aided Heritage in the drafting of their “Mandate for Leadership” manifesto.
Like Heritage, CIS is now forging bonds with far-right Hungarian organizations that share Orbán’s anti-immigrant positions. CIS’ fascination with Hungary appears to date back to at least 2016, when Orbán butted heads with EU member states over how best to deal with the large numbers of refugees, mostly Syrian, who fled the war for Europe. Orbán took a hardline stance, refusing to implement “migrant quotas” put in place by the EU, and militarizing Hungary’s southern border by installing a large border fence.
CIS wrote in support of both of these efforts, advocating for the U.S. to adopt them on the southern border with Mexico. They also leaned into anti–George Soros sentiment, something the Orbán regime has long done, leading nationwide campaigns against the Jewish liberal philanthropist and his organization, Open Society.
Ties to Hungary increased starting around 2019, when CIS staffers began taking sponsored trips to Hungary to observe the border wall. Todd Bensman, CIS’ analyst who regularly reports from the U.S. border, traveled to Hungary on March 20, 2019, where he visited the border and met with several Orbán administration officials. Upon returning, he published a CIS report entitled “What America can learn from a small nation that stopped mass migrant caravans cold,” praising Hungary’s border wall, which includes electric fencing and barbed wire. The piece exclusively quoted Gyorgy Bakondi, a senior advisor to Orbán, and Sandor Gallai, the former director of Hungary’s Migration Research Institute from 2018-2019. Later, in May 2019, Bensman was also an invited speaker at the MCC Budapest Summit on Migration. The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) is a pro-Orbán, right-wing university with a massive endowment received from the Hungarian treasury.
According to Bensman’s biography on his personal site, he returned to Hungary in November 2023 as a visiting fellow for the MCC’s Migration Research Institute, during which time he traveled to “Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece.” The Migration Research Institute (Migrációkutató Intézet, MRI) is an anti-immigrant “think tank” founded as a partnership between the MCC and the Századvég Foundation, another Hungarian-based think tank which produces polling and surveys that favor the government’s positions. The MRI was set up by the prime minister’s advisor Balázs Orbán (no relation) in 2015, and is led by the historian Tamás Dezső, who holds the position of president of the Batthyány Lajos Alapítvány (BLA) foundation, which doles out public money to Orbán-aligned projects and organizations. The MRI is known in Hungary for being one of the handful of pro-Orbán think tanks that serves to provide a list of experts who provide pro-Orbán spin on Hungarian television (see GPAHE’s reporting on the Migration Research Institute, the MCC, and the BLA here). Today, Bensman, who still holds his position at CIS, appears on the MCC site with the title “Senior National Security Fellow” and “visiting lecturer.”
Bensman also appears to have a working relationship with Russian propaganda outlets. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings from Ghebi LLC made on behalf of Russia Today (Rossiya Segodnya, RT) that were obtained by GPAHE show that Bensman appeared on several shows that the Russian disinformation network broadcast in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022. Around this time, the Kremlin decided to dump millions of dollars into Ghebi to represent their media interests in the U.S., and produce content sympathetic to the Russian state. Since around 2019, Bensman appears to have become a regular commentator for RT sister outlet Sputnik, which specifically caters to Western audiences, where he spoke on issues related to migration, immigration policy, “migrant crime,” and the U.S. border.
Following this initial collaboration, it would appear that CIS and the MRI have become rather close. Beginning around 2022, both organizations began putting on common events and panels on immigration-related issues, and sending staff from each others’ organizations to serve as fellows. On March 7, 2022, CIS, with support from the Hungary Foundation, co-hosted a panel with MRI called “The Hijacking of Asylum,” which featured MRI National Security Fellow Kristof Gyorgy Veres, MRI Operations Director Szabolcs Janik, and MRI Research Director Viktor Marsai. The U.S.-based Hungary Foundation (HF) is a Hungarian organization set up by the Orbán government to influence American officials, as well as to provide a means to create partnerships between far-right think tanks in the U.S. and Hungary (see GPAHE’s reporting on the Hungary Foundation here). It has been reported that the Hungary Foundation has given “at least $236,000” to CIS as of January 2024.
Another joint panel was held on May 11, 2022, on the topic of “Ukrainian Refugees,” featuring Kristof Gyorgy Veres, who by this time had officially become a CIS fellow, MRI researcher Mark Vargha, and Jadwiga Emilewicz, former cabinet member and deputy prime minister in the far-right Law and Justice (PiS) government in Poland. Later that month, CIS published an article citing MRI’s efforts to monitor the Hungarian border for Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion, touting how Hungary had “opened its arms and its healthcare resources to Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war,” and long-time CIS director Mark Krikorian traveled to observe the situation.
Viktor Marsai, now the director of MRI, was hosted by the Hungary Foundation for a research fellowship at the CIS in 2023. He joined the MRI in 2017 and quickly ascended the ranks of the organization. While at CIS, Marsai wrote a number of pieces, participated in several panels on the topic of migration issues in the EU and U.S., traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border with CIS, and appeared on American television, including Fox News.
In June 2023, he published a report titled “Gatekeeper Countries — Key to Stopping Illegal Immigration,” which was heavily influenced by the experience of the 2016 refugee crisis. Marsai is very well connected, meeting with European government officials and think tank representatives, representatives of pro-Orban groups, and taking research trips to parts of Africa. He put CIS’s Krikorian in touch with anti-immigration figures in Europe, such as the Machiavelli Center, a think tank that is close to the far-right party Lega (League) party in Italy.
Krikorian has been invited to Hungarian-aligned conferences such as NatCon II in 2021, NatCon III in 2022, CPAC Hungary in 2022, and NatCon IV in 2024. When speaking to a reporter from The New Yorker, Krikorian said “I can’t get a speaking gig at an American CPAC to save my life, but I fly four thousand miles over here [to Budapest] and I’m welcomed with open arms.” When he was asked about whether he was worried about being associated with Orbán, he responded “What are they gonna do, call me an ultra-hate group? … Fuck them!” Krikorian alleges that anti-immigrant groups, such as the CIS, were quietly pushed aside at CPAC in order to portray the party as more sympathetic to immigrants and open to immigration reform following Mitt Romney’s 2012 unpopular support for “self-deportation.”
Another individual from MRI who was hosted by the Hungary Foundation to work with the CIS was Kristóf György Veres, who received a fellowship in September 2021. Later, he would go on to work at the Danube Institute, a pro-Orbán think tank financed by the Hungarian state, as a senior researcher in July 2023, as well as the Center for the National Interest, and the Warsaw Institute (see GPAHE’s reporting on the Danube Institute here). Veres regularly appears on Hungarian news to comment on migration-related issues, and writes often on Ukraine and Russia almost exclusively with another fellow hosted by the Hungary Foundation, Monika Palotai, who works at the Hudson Institute, and the Religious Freedom Institute. The two have written articles, for example, that blame the recent rise in antisemitism following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on mass migration. Together, Veres and Palotai participated in a CIS panel in October 2022 on the topic of Ukraine. Other affiliates of MRI who have participated in CIS events include Deputy Director Szabolcs Janik, MRI researcher Mark Vargha, and Research Director Nikolett Pénzváltó.
In November 2023, MCC announced the formation of the International Network for Immigration Research (Nemzetközi Bevándorláskutatási Hálózatot, INIR), a “migration realist” research body that would include member institutions from the U.S., Hungary, France, and Israel. The new network includes the France-based Immigration and Demography Observatory (Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie, OID), CIS, NumbersUSA, MRI, and the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, all known for favoring anti-immigrant policies.
While the INIR was formed by a collection of anti-immigrant outfits, it appears that most of the collaboration has taken place between CIS and MRI. To date, there is little evidence of collaboration with the other supporters of the network, though on occasion they have worked together. OID is known for two reports with dubious statistics that claimed the “net annual cost” of migration to France is upwards of “35 to 40 billion euros,” which the authors present as a “structural burden that calls for a 180-degree … turn in migration policy.” That view was endorsed by National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN) candidate Jordan Bardella, who cited the report during the recent French elections. Earlier in 2021, OID published an opinion article in the far-right magazine Causeur that defended the thesis of the white nationalist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, with the title “The great replacement is now!” OID President Nicolas Pouvreau-Montimet most recently met with CIS staff during an INIR meeting on January 10, 2024, while OID co-founders Nicolas Monti and Maxime Aymar appeared on CIS’ podcast in December 2023.
The Israeli Immigration Policy Center is an Israel-based think tank that takes hard-line approaches to non-Jewish immigration to Israel from the African continent and the Middle East. While they have been less active in INIR than other organizations, they still hold similar anti-immigrant beliefs, expressing their preference for immigrants with a Jewish background in order to maintain “the country’s Jewish majority.” During the inaugural meeting of the INIR, Israeli Immigration Policy Center founder Yonatan Jakubowicz touted the far-right government in Israeli’s decision to end benefits for immigrants which, according to Jakubowicz, led to 10,000 African migrants “returning home.”
The most recent collaboration between allies of Orbán and CIS took place on July 18, 2024, when Krikorian was joined by Hungarian MP Balázs Orbán, a close Orbán loyalist and advisor, on the CIS podcast “Parsing Immigration Policy” to discuss “discuss the strategies Hungary has taken to prevent illegal migration despite continuing pressure from the EU.”
The Tanton network’s increasing transnational alliances mark a turning point in the movement’s development and appear to signal further alignment with authoritarian movements abroad. Just as Hungarian groups are believed to have influenced the direction of Heritage and Project 2025, so too is it possible that these alliances with American anti-immigrant groups will mean additional influence from the Orbán government on American anti-immigrant policies.
Credit of cover image – Tamás Gyurkovits/MCC
