Need to reduce migrant flow: Paris, Berlin

Six migrant children die after boat sinks off western Turkey, eight people rescued

France and Germany are “firmly convinced” of the need to reduce the flow of migrants into Europe, they wrote in a joint letter to the EU Commission seen by AFP on Tuesday.

“It is clear that the control of common external borders should be rapidly reinforced,” said interior ministers Bernard Cazeneuve and Thomas de Maiziere in the letter, dated December 3, calling for a “substantial reinforcement” of the EU’s Frontex border agency.

The ministers said Frontex should be able to call on “rapid intervention forces” in emergencies, and have access to EU security databases. It may also need to carry out missions in countries outside the EU where necessary. Germany announced this week that it has welcomed around 9,60,000 asylum-seekers so far in 2015.

“We very strongly reject confusing migrants for terrorists,” the ministers said.

The migrant crisis has become an even more polarising issue since two of the jihadists that attac-ked Paris in November were found to have used the refugee route to enter the continent.

Experts say this may have been deliberately done to provoke animosity against migrants, but it has been seized upon by far-right parties such as France’s National Front (FN), which saw record results in regional elections on Sunday.

The two ministers also criticised the slow pace of building arrival centres for refugees, calling for them to be operational “without the least delay”.

Meanwhile, at least six children died and eight other people rescued on Tuesday after a boat carrying migrants bound for Greece capsised off Turkey’s western coast near the city of Izmir, local media reported.

Responding to a distress signal sent at midnight on Monday, the Turkish Coast Guard extended a search operation into Tuesday’s daylight hours, Dogan News Agency reported.

State-run Anadolu Agency said the Coast Guard found the bodies of six children including a baby, adding that the migrants on the boat were Afghans. It was not immediately clear how many people in all were on board.

A record 5,00,000 refuge-es from a four-year-old civil war in Syria have travelled through Turkey then risked their lives in rickety boats to reach nearby Greek islands in 2015, their first stop in the European Union before continuing to wealthier countries in the north and west of the EU.

Nearly 600 people have died in 2015 on the so-called eastern Mediterran-ean sea route for migrants, according to the International Organisat-ion for Migration.

More than half a million migrants have streamed in 2015 into Greece, which has become the front line of a massive westward population shift from war-ravaged Syria and conflict-or deprivation-plagued countries beyond.

Turkey struck a deal with the EU on November 29 pledging to help stem the flow of migrants into Europe in return for 3 billion euros of cash for the 2.2 million Syrians Ankara has been hosting, visas and renewed talks on joining the 28-nation bloc.