Q&A: Migrants and asylum in the EU

 These migrants were plucked out of the water by a Maltese patrol boat

The arrival of boatloads of poor and desperate migrants in Europe has put pressure on the EU to find a solution.

Italy has been on the frontline - traffickers abandoned two cargo ships with hundreds of migrants on board within days of each other.

Mediterranean disasters, in which hundreds of migrants drowned, shocked Europe in 2013-2014.  There have been many calls for co-ordinated EU action to intercept people traffickers and assess asylum seekers before they reach Europe.

But championing the rights of poor migrants is difficult as the economic climate is still gloomy, many Europeans are unemployed and wary of foreign workers, and EU countries are divided over how to share the refugee burden.

How big is the migration challenge affecting Europe now?

The turmoil of the Arab Spring put new migration pressures on Europe, swelling the numbers of people prepared to risk their lives by crossing the Mediterranean in rickety, overcrowded boats.

The vicious civil war in Syria has sent the numbers of Syrian migrants soaring. That is now the dominant feature of irregular migration to the EU, as Syrians have overtaken the large numbers of Afghans, Eritreans and other nationalities fleeing poverty and human rights abuses.

In October 2014 the UN refugee agency UNHCR said more than 165,000 irregular migrants had tried to cross the Mediterranean to Europe in the past nine months, compared with 60,000 for the whole of 2013. Almost half of the 2014 arrivals were Syrians and Eritreans.

The main pressure point is the Central Mediterranean route - Italy received more than 140,000 of the 2014 arrivals, the UNHCR reported.

In 2014 more than 3,000 died or went missing at sea, compared with just over 600 in 2013, the UNHCR estimates.

Back in 2011 the big challenge was thousands of Tunisians arriving at Italy's tiny island of Lampedusa. Far fewer Tunisians are making the voyage now, but Lampedusa remains a migrant bottleneck because it lies closer to North Africa than to Italy itself.

Italy and Malta have appealed for more help from the EU. Their reception centres, like those in Greece, are overcrowded and under-resourced.

In November 2014 Italy ended its search-and-rescue mission, called Mare Nostrum. It was replaced by a cheaper and more limited EU operation called Triton, focused on patrolling within 30 nautical miles of the Italian coast.

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Source:Bbc.com