EU leaders summit opens with more tightened migration policy in the works

European Union leaders arrived at a summit in Brussels Thursday (Oct. 17) to seek ways to make the bloc a more hostile destination for migrants and asylum seekers following a recent surge in support for anti-migration parties.

As the summit opened, the 27 EU leaders prepared to look 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.

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.

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.

On Wednesday (Oct. 16), 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.

Unauthorized migration to the bloc declined sharply in the initial eight months of the year, regardless of increasing political rhetoric, violence aimed at migrants, and gains by far-right anti-immigration gatherings.