The migration issue is back again – big time – for EU leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday.
How to deal with the many undocumented migrants – mainly Africans – who continue to risk their lives in the Mediterranean, hoping to start new lives in the EU? It will be the main topic at this summit.
The migrant flows include refugees fleeing the Syrian war and other conflicts, urgently seeking asylum.
It is not a crisis on the scale of 2015, when thousands were coming ashore daily on the Greek islands. The European Council – the EU’s strategic leadership – says the numbers illegally entering the EU have dropped 96% since their peak in October 2015.
But this month’s tensions over migrant rescue boats, barred from entry to Italian ports, put the issue firmly back in the EU spotlight.
The Lifeline was only allowed to dock in Malta after intense diplomacy among several EU states, who agreed to share out the migrants, to ease Malta’s burden.
The Dublin principle – that asylum seekers should stay in the country where they enter the EU – is not working. Italy and Greece, receiving the most, demand that their neighbours share the burden.
What are the new pressures on EU leaders?
Italy’s new populist government has made getting an EU-wide deal on immigration and asylum a priority.
The issue played a major role in the Italian election, catapulting nationalist League leader Matteo Salvini into power. But it is a powerful election issue EU-wide.
Austria’s right-wing government takes over the EU’s rotating presidency next month and it has a hardline stance on irregular migrants. So do its Visegrad Group neighbours: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. That group rejected an EU scheme to relocate 160,000 refugees from overcrowded camps in Greece and Italy.
Much attention will focus on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her Bavarian coalition partner, the CSU, has threatened to start blocking migrants at the border if they have already registered in another EU country, defying Mrs Merkel’s policy. Without the CSU, she would lose her parliamentary majority.
European Council President Donald Tusk told the leaders in his pre-summit letter “the stakes are very high and time is short”.
He warned that the EU’s problems with migration policy were giving ammunition to populists, who “offer simple answers to the most complicated questions”.
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Source: BBC
