European Union leaders will use a summit Thursday to seek ways to make the bloc a more hostile destination for migrants and asylum seekers following a recent surge in support for the extreme right, which has fomented opposition to foreigners.
As the summit opens in Brussels, the 27 EU leader are looking at plans to speed up initiatives to get unwanted migrants out of the bloc and process asylum applications far outside their borders.
The tenor of the debate is a far cry from 2015, less than a decade ago, when the EU was faced with a migration crisis. Well over a million migrants and refugees sought help then, mainly from the Middle East and Afghanistan. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the EU's dominant national leader at the time, famously said, "We can manage that."
Now, EU leaders want to manage and seal off their borders ever more tightly, embracing initiatives that would have looked unacceptable only a few years ago.
In recent weeks, Poland has said it wants to temporarily suspend the right to asylum, Italy has opened two centers to process asylum seekers outside its borders in Albania, and Germany has reinstated border controls — all of them measures going in the same direction.
"Migration remains an essential internal issue," said a senior EU diplomat, despite the adoption in May of a sweeping asylum plan that is to become operational in 2026.
The plan lays out rules for the 27 member countries to handle people trying to enter without authorization, from how to screen them to establish whether they qualify for protection to deporting them if they're not allowed to stay. It also sets out a mechanism for burden-sharing, which has been rejected by Hungary and Poland.
But with the extreme right surging in the EU parliamentary elections in June and in other polls in Germany and Austria since, migration remains a trigger button for leaders.
Even if some 3.5 million migrants arrived legally in Europe in 2023, some 1 million others were on EU territory without permission.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen underscored that with an unusually detailed pre-summit letter to the leaders, insisting there was "no room for complacency" as she called for parts of the 2026 plan to be in place much sooner.
"If we look at events, even of the past summer, we know we must stay ambitious, including on our timeframe," the letter said.
This ambition also extends to setting up "innovative" projects, like Italy's outsourcing of asylum applications to Albania. "We will also be able to draw lessons from this experience in practice," wrote von der Leyen.
On Wednesday, an Italian navy ship docked at the Albanian port of Shengjin to bring the first group of 16 migrants intercepted in international waters for processing there.
Under a five-year deal signed last November by Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni and her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama, up to 3,000 migrants picked up by the Italian coast guard in international waters each month will be sheltered in Albania. They will be screened initially on board the ships that rescue them before being sent to Albania for further assessment.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk will also be presenting his plan to suspend the right for migrants to seek asylum, one of the fundamental rights established in Europe after World War II.
Poland has accused Belarus and Russia of organizing the mass transfer of migrants from the Middle East and Africa to the EU's eastern borders to destabilize the West. Tusk says it is part of a hybrid war as Moscow continues its nearly three-year full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Even though Tusk was criticized by several human rights organizations, others have shown understanding for Poland's predicament.
But EU nations have for years been deeply divided over how to deal with migrants arriving irregularly in the bloc and how to share the effort to deal with them, making it unlikely that any decisive action will come out of Thursday's summit.
The position of Spain, which takes in tens of thousands of African migrants who reach the Canary Islands, has underscored the scale of the EU's internal divisions.
Even if Spain agrees to hasten the implementation of the 2026 plans, it is opposed to some of the other policies being trialed elsewhere.
"Spain has expressed it is against contemplating the creation of centers in third-party countries," said government spokeswoman Pilar Alegría. "And it goes without saying that the position we are going to continue to defend in Europe is the humanitarian application" of the new migration pact.
But even so, critics already say that the plan will let nations detain migrants at borders and fingerprint children. They say it's aimed at keeping people out and infringes on their right to claim asylum.
