Germany and France have taken up a critical stand on the European Commission’s migration plan, an ambitious proposal by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to temporarily relocate 40,000 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece to other European countries on a mandatory basis.

In a joint statement, the EU’s two most populous member states demanded that such a relocation must be built on “responsibility and solidarity,” meaning that the formula for allocating migrants must take what countries are already doing on the issue much more into account.

“We assess that the balance between these two principles is not yet reached in the proposition presented by the Commission,” the statement says.

Last Wednesday, Dimitris Avramopoulos, Juncker’s commissioner for migration, presented the legal proposal for a two-year-long relocation of 40,000 asylum seekers “in clear need of international protection” from Italy and Greece to other EU member countries. The proposal is based on a redistribution key determined by 40 percent population, 40 percent economic growth, 10 percent unemployment rate, and 10 percent former admission of asylum seekers to that country.

Berlin and Paris now believe this formula is flawed: “The redistribution key must first of all take into account the efforts already achieved by the member states.”

Spain also criticized the redistribution key for only marginally considering the unemployment rate.

In their joint statement, Germany and France also insisted that more consensus could be built around the proposal only “if all the member states at the first point of entry … take, with support from the European budget, all the financial and legal measures possible to boost surveillance of the external borders.”

“Hotspots” to identify and register migrants

Both countries also made a proposal to establish reception centers, called “hotspots,” situated close to the arrival points of migrants. “There, an identification and registration of the migrants will be proceeded, with the support of the European Asylum Support Office and in accordance with the current European rules.”

Irregular migrants not entitled to asylum – for example those who came purely for economic reasons – “should be rapidly sent back,” the statement says. In that sense, contacts with the countries of origin should be reinforced “in order to assure the return of the migrants.”

A further demand is that “Dublin rules must stay,” which is another stumbling block with the Commission, which had made clear that it wants to carry out a revision of the Dublin regulation. The provision states that asylum seekers have to remain in the first European country they enter, which is in most cases Italy or Greece.

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“When the Dublin system was designed, Europe was at a different stage of cooperation in the field of asylum,” the official proposal of the Commission says. “We are going to have to revisit Dublin III,” the Commission’s first vice president Frans Timmermans said in a press conference on May 13.

The French-German opposition to an overhaul of the Dublin regulation is likely to upset countries such as Italy that have often asked to change this rule.