German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet some of her European Union peers on Sunday to try break a deadlock on migration and head off a possible clash over the bitterly-contested issue at a June 28-29 EU summit.
Merkel will be joined by French President Emmanuel Macron, as well as the leaders of Bulgaria and Austria, among others, to explore how to prevent people from moving around the bloc after they have already claimed asylum in one of the Mediterranean states of arrival.
Such secondary movements are illegal under EU law but have been widespread since immigration to Europe peaked in 2015, when more than a million refugees and migrants arrived from the Middle East and Africa.
The bloc has since been bitterly at odds over how to share out the responsibility of taking care of them.
The eastern EU states led by Poland and Hungary refuse to host some of the new arrivals to alleviate the burden on coastal Italy and Greece and the wealthy countries like Germany where people mostly want to end up.
Immigration figures are now much lower, with only 41,000 sea arrivals so far this year, according to U.N. data.
via CNBC
