The foreign minister has said the European Union should prioritize replacing jobs lost to the coronavirus epidemic.
After attending an EU foreign minister video conference, Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said that before the pandemic, ministers had talked about “the need for legal migration and importing labor to the EU”. Now “hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs.”
According to MTI, the meeting focused on renegotiating a 20-year agreement between the EU and 79 countries in Africa, the Pacific and the Caribbean on economic and migration cooperation. “Aid must be delivered to where the problem occurs; problems shouldn’t be imported to places that are problem-free,” Minister Szijjártó said.
The minister added that aid to Africa, the Pacific and Caribbean should be in the form of economic development programs implemented there “rather than bringing people here”. “We must be clear and straightforward: we continue to consider illegal migration, as well as any attempt to legalize illegal migration, to be unacceptable,” he said.
The Hungarian government made it clear to the European Commission that it would only support a new agreement with the 79 countries “if no reference is made to the United Nations Migration Compact,” he said.
Photo credit: koronavirus.gov.hu