Migrant centers win support
EU: Asylum-seekers can be screened in N. Africa, Balkans
BRUSSELS — The idea of screening Europe-bound asylum-seekers in North Africa and the Balkans gained support from several European Union leaders Sunday as tensions over how best to handle new arrivals threatened to undermine the bloc’s unity.
At emergency talks in Brussels, a group of 16 countries led by France and Germany were thrashing out who should take responsibility for the thousands of migrants landing primarily in Italy, Greece and Spain, how long they should take care of them and how much their European partners should do to help out.
Failure to agree on how to deal with the challenge of migration threatens the EU’s border-free travel area, one of the biggest accomplishments in the bloc’s 60-year history.
The number of people arriving in Europe has dropped significantly this year — the U.N.’s refugee agency forecasts around 80,000 people will enter by sea in 2018 if current trends continue — but the EU’s political turmoil over the topic has soared. Anti-migrant parties — and governments in Hungary and Italy — have been fomenting public fears of foreigners and have won support doing so.
Encouraged by a deal with Turkey that has slashed migrant arrivals from there by 97 percent since 2015 — when hundreds of thousands of people entered, mostly migrants fleeing war in Syria and Iraq — the 28-nation EU is ready to greenlight plans to set up screening centers in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Niger and Tunisia.
Plans to set up migrant reception centers in Albania are also under discussion.
Libya is the main jumping off point for countries bound for Europe, other African countries and the Balkans.
The International Organization for Migration and the UNHCR are cautious about setting up “hotspots” outside of Europe to filter people fleeing violence at home from those trying to get to the continent to improve their lives economically. No country has so far agreed to host any screening centers.