FILE PHOTO: A soldier stands guard near the fence on the Belarusian-Polish border in the forest near Bialowieza, Poland, June 4, 2024. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/File Photo
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -European Union leaders agreed on Thursday to use all their leverage, including trade, development aid and visa policy, to speed up returns of migrants illegally entering the bloc and asked the European Commission to urgently draft a law.
Immigration is a highly sensitive topic in most of the bloc's 27 member states, even though irregular migrants arriving in Europe last year were a third of the 1 million seen during the crisis in 2015, and numbers fell further this year.
