EU struggles to find common approach to control influx

Some 400,000 people are now smuggled into the EU every year, according to one estimate, with the illegal refugees often paying huge sums to traffickers. Until the summer of 1999, when the Treaty of Amsterdam came into force, immigration and asylum were strictly matters for national governments, with no formal role for the Brussels bureaucracy. That is changing as the Union is grappling with the realisation that its huge single market in goods and services has created a single market in people, crime and immigration.