European Union leaders will use a summit Thursday to seek ways to make the bloc a more hostile destination for migrants and asylum seekers following a recent surge in support for the extreme right, which has fomented opposition to foreigners.
As the summit opens in Brussels, the 27 EU leader are looking at plans to speed up initiatives to get unwanted migrants out of the bloc and process asylum applications far outside their borders.
The tenor of the debate is a far cry from 2015, less than a decade ago, when the EU was faced with a migration crisis. Well over a million migrants and refugees sought help then, mainly from the Middle East and Afghanistan. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the EU's dominant national leader at the time, famously said, "We can manage that."
Now, EU leaders want to manage and seal off their borders ever more tightly, embracing initiatives that would have looked unacceptable only a few years ago.
In recent weeks, Poland has said it wants to temporarily suspend the right to asylum , Italy has opened two centers to process asylum seekers outside its borders in Albania and Germany has reinstated border controls - all of them measures going in the same direction.
