The EU is sucking up to Turkey to help reduce migration – but it could seriously backfire

You might have thought, mightn’t you, that a million arrivals in a year to a single European country, Germany – well, more than 800,000 and counting – would be enough to be going on with, wouldn’t you? After that, you wouldn’t actually be going out of your way to solicit more incomers into Europe in the long term, even if you were going to be sensible about the influx and were admitting refugees on a purely temporary basis until they could safely return home? But that’s not how the EU works.

Turkey at present hosts about two million refugees, mostly from Syria.  EU governments would obviously prefer them not all to come here. So as part of the EU’s courtship of the authoritarian Turkish president Recep Erdogan, the presidents of the European Commission, the council and the parliament have been urging the president to name his price when it comes to Turkey’s willingness to keep its Syrian migrants inside its borders rather than allowing them to make for Europe.