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EU Mulls Migration Pact in Shadow of Lesbos Fire

Lisa Bryant

   PARIS - Five years after a wave of asylum seekers flooded into Europe,
   the region is facing another reckoning on migration, with familiar
   bickering and lack of consensus on the way forward.

   The numbers of arrivals are far smaller today than they were in 2015.
   The iconic images now driving migration back into the headlines are no
   longer of drowned toddlers, but rather of the thousands of migrants
   left homeless by fires at a squalid Greek island camp.

   Whether the European Union can finally come together on migration will
   be tested when its executive arm next Wednesday unveils a long-awaited
   migration and asylum pact that will need member state approval to
   become reality.

   "It's going to be a very tough negotiation," predicted former EU
   official Stefan Lehne, now an analyst at the Brussels-based Carnegie
   Europe policy institute.

   "Everybody agrees the current situation is a mess," Lehne said of the
   patchwork of migration initiatives, but, he added, there remains little
   agreement on how to fix it.

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