BRUSSELS: European Union leaders agreed on Thursday to push ahead with plans to boost cooperation with North African countries and beef up the bloc’s borders in an effort to stop migrants entering Europe.

A statement from their summit in Brussels emphasized the need to step up cooperation with countries that people leave and transit through to seek shelter or better lives in Europe.

They said that work with those countries on “investigating, apprehending and prosecuting smugglers and traffickers should be intensified.” They also called for a joint smuggling task force to be set up.

Well over 1 million migrants entered Europe in 2015, most of them Syrians and Iraqis fleeing conflict, but numbers have dropped significantly since the EU began outsourcing the challenge to Turkey.

Turkey has been offered at least three billion euros ($3.4 billion), ostensibly in Syrian refugee aid, to stop people leaving there for Europe, and the bloc wants to reproduce that model elsewhere.

The EU has had to look outside to solve the problem because reforms to its asylum system are blocked by the refusal of some countries to accept refugee quotas or to share the burden of hosting them in a fair way.

European countries in the Mediterranean like Greece, Italy and more recently Spain feel abandoned to manage the influx alone, and tensions over how best to handle migrant numbers which pale in comparison to refugee arrivals in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan have increasingly fuelled support for far-right parties in Europe.

“We can’t just say that a country with a border on the sea is suddenly the only one responsible” for migrants, said Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel.

Published in Dawn, October 19th, 2018