‘Don’t come to Europe,’ president of EU Council tells economic migrants

THE president of the EU Council yesterday told economic migrants not to risk their lives or money to make a perilous trip to Europe ‘for nothing’.

Supporting beleaguered Greece, which has been a primary gateway of migrants flooding into Europe for more than a year, Donald Tusk said anyone who was not a refugee should stay away.

‘I want to appeal to all potential illegal economic migrants wherever you are from: Do not come to Europe. Do not believe the smugglers. Do not risk your lives and your money. It is all for nothing,’ Mr Tusk said.

He added that the ultimate aim was to eliminate the illegal sea transit of migrants from Turkey to Greece, although he said no specific numbers had been agreed with the Turks. ‘It’s not about numbers, it’s about the ongoing and permanent process ... which means for me, the total reduction and the total elimination of this sad phenomenon,’ he told a joint news conference with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Ankara.

Mr Tusk was on a trip through Balkan states and Turkey to try to drum up support for cohesion on how to deal with hundreds of thousands of migrants – a crisis that threatens to tear the bloc apart - before an EU summit on Monday. Up to 30,000 refugees and migrants have been stranded in Greece from progressive border closures further up the ‘Balkan corridor’, the route taken to get into wealthier central and northern Europe.

‘At Monday’s summit, Greece will demand that burden sharing be equitable among all countries in the bloc, and sanctions for those that do not,’ Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said after meeting Mr Tusk. ‘We ask that unilateral actions stop in Europe,’ Mr Tsipras said in a view echoed by Tusk.

Austria and countries along the Balkans migration route have imposed restrictions on their borders. Many of the migrants hope to reach Germany. Macedonian police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of migrants who stormed the border from Greece on Monday.

The European Commission will today present a list of necessary steps to lift emergency border controls that are currently in place inside the Schengen zone and restore the proper functioning of the free-travel area, officials said.

EU officials told news agency Reuters that European governments, and particularly Germany, are looking to Turkey to reduce the number of migrant arrivals in Greece to below 1,000 a day at most as an initial condition for discussing taking some Syrian refugees directly from Turkey.