Migrants will never return to their home countries, foreign minister tells Rheinische Post

Berlin (MTI) – Migrants who come to Europe “will never return to their home countries”, Hungary’s foreign minister said in an interview to the Saturday edition of German regional daily Rheinische Post.

If, however, migrants remain near their home countries, then they will go back at some point, Péter Szijjártó told the paper.

Hungary has continuously pushed for three measures that it believes would be more effective in handling the migrant crisis than imposing mandatory migrant redistribution quotas on European Union member states, Szijjártó said.

The first of these measures is the implementation of tighter border controls, the minister said.

Secondly, the EU must provide more financial aid to Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and the Kurdish region of Iraq so those countries can look after the refugees stranded there, he said.

Thirdly, the EU should make changes to the way it allocates aid to other countries. The EU is giving billions of euros of aid to countries that people are fleeing and most migrants arriving in Europe are not coming from warzones or countries where their lives would be under threat, Szijjártó said. Therefore Europe should lay out strict conditions for the distribution of aid to these countries, he said. The governments of these countries should only receive EU aid if they prevent their people from fleeing, he said.

The minister rejected the suggestion that migration could serve as a solution to Europe’s labour shortages and demographic problems. In Hungary’s view, the key to tackling the problem of low birth rates is a better family policy, he said. Szijjártó described the state of the labour market in southern, central and eastern Europe as “tense”, noting that the unemployment rate is over 30 percent in certain regions. Instead of creating new problems, Europe should deal with these existing ones first, he insisted.