Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban stuck to his anti-immigration stance on Thursday but insisted it was not rooted in racism after his recent remarks that Hungarians did not want to become “peoples of mixed race” drew fire at home and abroad.

Orban has spoken about maintaining “ethnic homogeneity” in Hungary before, taking a hard line on immigration since 2015.

But his comments in Romania on Saturday, when he said that in contrast to Western Europe’s “mixed-race world” where people mixed with arriving non-Europeans, Hungary was not a mixed race country — hit a nerve, drawing condemnation from the United States, the European Union, Jewish groups and academics.

“I am the only politician in the E.U. who stands for an openly anti-immigration policy,” Orban told a joint news briefing with Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer in Vienna. “This is not a race issue for us, this is a cultural issue,” he said.

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