French president Emmanuel Macron met with German chancellor Angela Merkel this week to try and hash out a solution to the immigration crisis the European Union is currently facing.
The meeting comes after a number of recent incidents regarding refugees and migrants in Europe, including a catastrophe last week when the new Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte refused to allow a ship of 900 Libyan migrants to dock in an Italian port. The EU has been a hotbed of conflicting ideas over how to prevent scenes like this one, with some countries urging European nations to pool their resources and efforts, and others insisting that this could lead to a bailout policy in the eurozone. Angela Merkel has long been a champion of migrants and refugees, since she accepted a million asylum seekers into Germany back in 2015. Macron has yet to put most of his talk about open doors into action, but the two have come out equally strong by proposing new policies like a shared EU immigration office and an overturning of the controversial Dublin Regulation.
Both Merkel and Macron are on deadline to seal some kind of immigration deal, but neither of them appears to be wasting any time in setting a new standard for European solidarity.
