Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Muncher and with me are Zuzana Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about the EU migration deal. After many years, really many years, the EU has finally managed to get a deal done on migration.

It's not a subject I understand very well, but Jack, you understand it

better. Explain to us what the agreement contains and why it is so important. Yeah, so the first

thing is that the agreement, it is a massive step forward from previously, but it is not totally,

totally agreed. So what the member states have managed to

agree on, with the exception of Poland and Hungary, who voted against the agreement and the council,

is basically a burden-sharing mechanism. So after the 2015 migration crisis, this was the big

topic of contention, because as many of our listeners will understand,

you have a split between states that are relatively close to, especially the Mediterranean,

and receive a lot of migrants and asylum seekers overland, like Greece and Italy,

versus countries in central and eastern Europe, especially, who were

basically further away and didn't want to receive anybody. So the tension there was between,

again, countries like Italy saying, well, we basically have tons of people coming, and while

we're processing them, or once they've been granted refugee status and are being settled,

we need them to kind of go somewhere else.

And other countries saying, well, we don't want any reallocation because basically we don't really want to accept them.

That became a little bit more complicated, too, after the beginning of the Ukraine war,

because Ukrainian refugees started coming into the EU, but the Ukrainian refugees came in under a different

mechanism. So that also made things a little bit more complicated because Poland started complaining

about having to kind of deal with burden sharing when they were also taking a ton of Ukrainian refugees.

What member states, with the exception of Poland and Hungary, who voted

...