Several European leaders to meet Sunday to seek migration consensus

Several European leaders, including from France, Germany, Italy and Austria, will hold talks on Sunday on migration, an issue bringing bitter political divisions to a head in Europe and increasingly in the United States. 

Sources said the leaders of Greece and Bulgaria would also attend the gathering, which will explore how to stop people from moving around the European Union after claiming asylum in one of the Mediterranean states of arrival.

The talks, announced by the executive European Commission, precede a June 28-29 EU summit at which leaders will try to agree a joint migration policy three years after more than a million people poured into Europe, mostly fleeing conflict in the Middle East and Asia.

Immigration is increasingly shaping politics in rich countries, and in Germany, the issue threatens to wreck Chancellor Angela Merkel's relationship with her CDU's Bavarian sister party, part of her coalition.

The Christian Social Union (CSU) on Monday gave Merkel two weeks to get a Europe-wide deal.

Horst Seehofer, CSU leader and Germany's interior minister, wants to turn away migrants who have already registered in other EU states, but Merkel opposes any unilateral move to reverse her 2015 open-door policy and undermine her authority.

"We can no longer look on as this refugee tourism across Europe happens," Bavarian CSU Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, whose country takes over the EU presidency July 1, said Wednesday that the gathering "is not about German domestic politics; it's about a solution of the migration question that is long overdue.

"We have reached a point where the position of most countries goes in the right direction, where most agree that open external borders are the wrong way," Kurz said after a cabinet meeting in Linz.

Europe needs immigrants, Francis says

Pope Francis said in an interview with Reuters that populists were "creating psychosis" on the issue of immigration, even as aging societies like Europe faced "a great demographic winter" and needed more immigrants. He said that, without immigration, Europe "will become empty."

But the EU is bitterly divided. It has struggled to reform its internal asylum rules, which broke down in 2015, and has instead tried to tighten its borders and prevent new arrivals. To that end, it has given aid and money to countries including Turkey, Jordan, Libya and Niger.

Hungary, among the nations to resist processing large numbers of migrants, went a step further on Wednesday.

Parliament in Budapest approved a package of bills that criminalizes some help given to illegal immigrants, defying the European Union and human rights groups and narrowing the scope for action by non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Under the law, individuals or groups who help migrants not entitled to protection to submit requests for asylum or who help illegal migrants gain status to stay in Hungary will be liable to prison terms.

The increasing tempo of migration diplomacy coincides with the summer peak season for migrants sailing in small boats from north Africa to Europe's southern shores.

The Italian Coast Guard ship Diciotti arrived at the Sicilian port of Pozzallo overnight and 519 migrants on board were being disembarked, relief workers said.

They were saved in seven different rescue operations off the Libyan coast, and some spent days at sea as the new Italian government looks to slow the influx of migrants.

"They are in terrible conditions, not only medical conditions but [also] psychological conditions, and they really need urgent medical care and psychological care," UN Refugee Agency spokesperson Marco Rotunno told Reuters TV. "We are very worried because, after these people were rescued, along with the people that were rescued in the other events, there was a long delay before people could reach a safe port."

In a report on migration trends, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said the leading source of refugees had been Afghanistan, followed by Syria and Iraq — the countries that have headed the list for the past three years.

Asylum applications to OECD countries fell 25 per cent in 2017 from the record-high of 1.64 million a year earlier, the report said. Applications to EU member states nearly halved.