European Union interior ministers on Thursday were debating ways to beef up the 27-nation bloc’s borders, including by erecting walls or fences, and examined yet again how to kick-start desperately needed reforms to the EU’s malfunctioning asylum system. The EU has been mired in a deep political crisis since well over 1 million people, many of them refugees fleeing war in Syria, began entering in 2015. Greece was overwhelmed by migrants landing on its islands on rafts and dinghies from Turkey. Other countries were slow or reluctant to help.
The old asylum system, based on the notion that the country where migrants first arrive must deal with them, collapsed. New reform proposals have failed to overcome the fundamental problem: who should take responsibility and what kind of help other countries should provide. So far, talk has tended to focus on outsourcing the EU’s migrant challenges to the countries that people leave or transit through to get to Europe and on beefing up borders.
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