(AP) The European Union’s top migration officials struggled Thursday to sell their new plan to overhaul the bloc’s failed asylum system amid concern they have sold out to anti-migrant governments.
Critics say the proposal focuses on rapidly deporting people who don’t qualify as refugees and persuading African countries to stop them from coming.
The program, dubbed the “New Pact on Migration and Asylum,” is aimed at ending years of chaos at Europe’s borders and a political crisis that has seen some EU countries turn their backs on Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain, where most people seeking better lives enter.
It has already received a cautious welcome from Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary, whose anti-migrant governments, along with those of Poland and Slovakia, refuse to bow to pressure to take in refugees and ease the load on their Mediterranean coastal partners.
