EU leaders to press Turkey to reduce flow of migrants into Europe

European Union leaders to push for Turkey to do
more to reduce migrant flow, repatriate economic
migrants
A record 1.2 million people registered for asylum in
the European Union last year
The vast majority of European-bound migrants
arrive via Turkey.
European Union leaders are holding an
emergency summit with Turkey aimed at
staunching the flow of migrants into the continent,
as a desperate bottleneck of more than 10,000
people continues to swell at the Greece-Macedonia
border.
About 134,900 migrants have crossed the
Mediterranean Sea to Europe so far this year, the
International Organization for Migration says, with
more than 500 having died making the dangerous
journey.
The vast majority of the migrants have come via
Turkey.
EU heads of government are expected to push
Turkey to do more to prevent migrants from leaving
its shores, by targeting human trafficking networks
and repatriating so-called economic migrants --
people who have left their homelands in hopes of a
better life, rather than out of fear for their lives.
In return, the EU will support Turkey in managing
the millions of refugees the country has already
taken in.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said in a
statement that his priorities were "breaking the link
between getting on a boat and getting resettlement
in Europe" by smashing trafficking gangs and
stepping up the return of economic migrants;
supporting Turkey, which already hosts 2.6 million
migrants; and providing technical assistance to
Greece to speed up the processing of migrant claims
and repatriation of illegal migrants.
Officials will be looking to build on an EU-Turkey
joint action plan agreed upon late last year to
increase funding and humanitarian aid for migrants
in Turkey, and to target people-smuggling networks
-- a mission that has seen NATO warships deployed
to the eastern Mediterranean this year.
Speaking ahead of the summit Monday, Turkish
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said "the only
way to respond to this challenge is solidarity."
"At the end of the day, our continent is our
continent altogether," he told reporters in Brussels,
Belgium.
A record 1.2 million people registered for asylum in
the European Union in 2015 -- more than double
the number from the previous year, the EU's
statistics agency Eurostat said. Of those, Syrians,
Afghans and Iraqis accounted for more than half of
the first-time applicants.
Bottleneck at the border
Turkey's European neighbor, Greece, is the entry
point into Europe for the overwhelming majority of
the migrants, who arrived at an average rate of
1,800 a day last month.
But as countries along the main overland migration
route to Western Europe have increasingly closed
their borders in response to the migrant crisis, a
major backlog of about 35,000 has built up in
Greece, a country already struggling under the
weight of a debt crisis.
On Monday morning, a huge bottleneck of
migrants had built up amid miserable conditions at
a camp at Idomeni, a village on the Greek border
with Macedonia, CNN's Arwa Damon reported from
the scene. Doctors Without Borders says there are
more than 11,000 people crammed into the camp,
which was designed as a transit camp for only
1,500.
Authorities are letting only a few hundred Syrians
and Iraqis through to Macedonia each day, raising
fears that Greece is at risk of becoming a mass
refugee camp.
Damon said those sheltering in tents at Idomeni
had told her they hoped Monday's meeting in
Brussels could result in the borders opening. But
the reality is that the past six months have seen
more barriers built than removed.
Many said they had already experienced the effects
of Ankara's efforts to crack down on migrants on
the Turkish coastline, with some reporting having
been turned back multiple times before they
eventually made it across the Aegean Sea to Greece.
The Aegean, a stretch of the Mediterranean
separating Turkey and Greece, is the main route
used by traffickers bringing migrants into Europe.
Twenty-five migrants died in its waters in an
attempt to reach Greece on Sunday when their boat
capsized off of Turkey's western coast, Turkey's
semiofficial Anadolu news agency reported.
Consensus on crisis?
Last month, ministers from countries along the
main Balkan migration route through Europe --
Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria
-- agreed to tighten border controls to slow arrivals
to a trickle.
That response, which undermined pledges to present
a united European front to the crisis and share the
migrant burden, was criticized by international
organizations, with the U.N.'s refugee agency
warning last week that Europe now faced an
"imminent humanitarian crisis, largely of its own
making."
Arriving at the summit in Brussels on Monday,
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras stressed it was
a common European problem: "So we have to find
collective, European solutions."
Unfortunately, since the previous summit on the
crisis, "there were agreements that didn't implement
for everybody," he said -- an apparent reference to
the restrictions along the Balkan migration route.
He said he looked forward to "substantial results"
from the meeting on decreasing migrant flows,
breaking trafficking networks and accelerating
efforts to relocate asylum seekers throughout EU
countries.
EU leaders agreed last year to accept 160,000
refugees among its member states, but so far less
than 1,000 have been processed.