European Union interior ministers are meeting in Brussels on Thursday to discuss how to deal with migrants arriving by sea as Italy and Germany worry about rising immigration and Berlin announced border controls despite being in a free movement zone of the Schengen zone, Reuters reports.

• It should be noted that there were hopes in Romania that the expansion of the Schengen area would be put on the back burner at this JVC Council, but Austria remained against this idea, so this issue did not make it onto the agenda. The JAI Board will meet again this year on October 19-20 and December 4-5.

Interior ministers meeting in Brussels will try to reach an agreement on a mechanism for distributing asylum seekers arriving in Europe and will discuss whether the 27-nation bloc should try to reach a deal with Egypt to prevent migrants from landing on the country’s southern shores. Mediterranean.

Critics say a similar deal recently struck with Tunisia does not respect human rights, but new potential deals are on the horizon after Italy sounded the alarm that arrivals from Lampedusa have already surpassed those from Lampedusa in 2022, when Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Maloni won the internal elections. with an anti-migration agenda.

“There is a lot of worry in Europe’s (immediate) neighbours,” a senior EU diplomat told Reuters.

“When asked whether we should have more deals of this type, the answer from the majority at the table is likely to be yes,” he added.

All eyes are now on Germany

All eyes are now on Germany to see if Interior Minister Nancy Feiser can bring a deal to Brussels on a governing coalition that would allow Berlin to back a so-called “crisis mechanism” to distribute refugees and migrants within the bloc to avoid overburdening Italy and others country of first entry.

On Wednesday, Feser announced the introduction of border controls with Poland and the Czech Republic after Germany saw an almost 80 percent increase in asylum applications this year, raising concerns for the center-left ruling coalition, which faces a challenge from the far right in local elections. in Bayern next month.

Such checks within what should normally be the EU’s free movement zone (Schengen) highlight how the difficulties of managing those fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia are testing cooperation within the bloc.

The EU has been pushing for tougher anti-migration policies since more than a million people arrived on its southern shores in 2015, catching the Union by surprise and outpacing countries like Italy.

Since then, the governments of the 27 member states have been trying to overhaul the EU’s asylum and migration rules, including the “crisis mechanism”, mainly because they want to appear in control to their voters ahead of European Parliament elections in 2024.

The most migrants since 2015, Italy is overcrowded

More than 127,000 migrants have arrived in Italy this year, almost double the number for the same period in 2022. This month, 120 boats with 6,000 people landed in one day.

The head of the Italian government, Giorgia Maloni, visited the island of Lampedusa on September 17 together with the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and asked Brussels for more help in solving the problems related to the mass wave of illegal immigrants. migrants arriving in southern Italy.

Ursula von der Leyen then unveiled the EU’s emergency plan on the Mediterranean island to help Italy cope with record migrant arrivals on its territory.

The Maloney government has decided to take a number of measures that will extend the period of detention of illegal migrants and increase the number of people repatriated.

Asylum applications registered in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland increased by 28% in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period last year, the EU Asylum Agency reported two weeks ago. About 519,000 asylum applications were submitted in those 29 countries between January and the end of June, the agency said, estimating that “based on current trends, the number of applications could exceed one million by the end of the year.”

The tension in the EU is quite high. Georgia Maloney recently wrote to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz saying she was “shocked” to learn of the German government’s initiative to fund migrant NGOs working in the Mediterranean.

Germany fears that large numbers of migrants could be diverted to its borders by other EU countries. Germany’s foreign minister has opposed the inclusion of so-called crisis clauses in EU migration law reform, saying they would allow other European countries to send very large numbers of migrants to Germany.

France “will not accept migrants” from the Italian island of Lampedusa, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanen said last week, demonstrating the government’s “firm position” on the matter.

Read also:

• Head of EU diplomacy: “Migration can become the force of the disintegration of the European Union”
• The British Home Secretary has sparked outrage after criticizing the Geneva Convention on Refugees