Why Europe turned its back on migrants

Worldly

Vox Media Podcast Network

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2018

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jenn, Zack, and recurring guest Alex Ward discuss Europe’s political meltdown over migration, which Zack got a firsthand look at during a trip to Hungary last week funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. They start by airing Zack’s interview with Ibrar Hussein Mirzai, a young migrant who made the harrowing journey to Hungary from Pakistan, and zoom out to explain how the anti-migration sentiment that made Ibrar’s journey miserable is fueling the biggest challenge to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government yet. On Elsewhere, they talk about Mexico’s election of a new president — the leftist anti-corruption crusader Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or AMLO, for short). Zack recounts a visit to the heavily policed Hungarian border fence, Jenn pronounces AMLO’s full name correctly, and Alex does his best Thomas Friedman impression. Links: The man we heard from in this episode, Ibrar, was also featured on NPR. You can hear more from him and see a picture of him in that story. An in-depth look at Merkel’s migrant deal from the New York Times. For more context on the Hungary-Germany relationship, Zack recommends this piece. A piece written for Vox about AMLO’s election and what it might mean. You can also hear more about AMLO on Today, Explained. They devoted a whole episode to him and to the Mexican election this week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:14.7	Welcome to Wordly from the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm here with Jen Williams as always and a frequent guest of ours Alex Ward a writer on our foreign team. We've heard a lot
0:19.7	recently about immigrants and asylum seekers in the United States.
0:24.0	But this is a global problem and the ongoing refugee and migration crisis is transforming politics across Europe.
0:30.0	A few governments, most prominently a Hungarian one, have been feuding with Germany over its openness to refugees.
0:36.0	And in the last few days, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made a radical policy
0:41.4	shift in the anti-migration direction. I actually just spent a week in
0:45.5	Hungary reporting on this story and other ones, so today on the show we're going to talk all about
0:51.2	immigration and asylum to Europe.
0:54.0	But first, Jen, let's start on the basics of Europe and immigration.
0:59.0	What has been happening and why is this such a big deal?
1:02.0	Yeah, so for the past several years,
1:03.5	there was this massive flood of people coming into Europe
1:06.7	from places like Syria and Afghanistan in particular,
1:09.8	as well as all across Africa and kind of beyond, in part driven by the Syrian Civil War, the
1:16.5	war in Afghanistan, climate change, things like that.
1:20.4	So you had this massive kind of flood of refugees that just suddenly kind of spiked trying to get into Europe and at first the EU in general was was fairly open right so they had this kind of open border policy. They were taking lots of refugees. Then there was this massive right-wing
1:35.2	backlash against migrants and against political parties and political leaders who were advocating for this more open border
1:41.3	policy and Hungary basically led the charge and built
1:44.5	two border fences to keep refugees from crossing the border into Hungary from
1:48.9	Serbia which actually isn't an EU country. So I was there about a week ago and I met a refugee in Hungary named Ivra, whose story really illustrates
1:58.1	what closing borders means for actual people on this restriction on migration and why it matters.
2:04.4	So I met him in Budapest at a place called Central European University, which is actually
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Vox Media Podcast Network, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Vox Media Podcast Network and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.