Hungary, Poland continue to oppose migrant settlement quotas

Hungary and Poland continue to oppose “EU-sponsored migrant settlement quotas” because they believe repeated waves of migration pose a health risk in Europe, Péter Szijjártó, Hungary’s foreign minister, said in Warsaw on Thursday.

The European Union faces two challenges, he said, referring to “the extremely slow acquisition of vaccines” and “the health risk implied by imminent waves of migration“.

After his one-day visit to Poland, Szijjártó slammed “efforts in the EU to impose mandatory migrant quotas on member states”.

“Allowing hundreds of thousand non-vaccinated people to enter Europe would give a fresh impetus to the pandemic”, he told MTI. Meanwhile, he added, vaccine deliveries to Europe “are much slower than expected”.

Szijjártó noted that the European Commission had recently agreed with 79 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to facilitate the inflow of migrants into Europe from those countries.

Szijjártó said he had agreed with Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski “on thwarting and vetoing to the greatest possible extent” the EU’s related efforts.

The minister and his Polish partners agreed on “preventing their countries and central Europe as a whole from adopting the new type of migrant settlement quota and allowing new waves of migration.”