YOU would be hard-pressed to find a more unlikely supporter of Geert Wilders, an anti-immigrant Dutch politician, than Khalid Jone, a Sudanese asylum seeker. Mr Jone lives in an empty office building in Diemen, near Amsterdam, where 60 failed asylum-seekers have been squatting since April. In 2002 he fled to the Netherlands from his native Darfur, escaping ethnic cleansing. He was denied asylum and has been in limbo ever since, filing appeals.

There are hundreds of thousands of migrants like Mr Jone across Europe, caught in the gears of asylum systems. He is so fed up with the uncertainty, he says, that he wishes Mr Wilders had won the Dutch election in March: “At least he is not lying to me.” More important, Mr Wilders wants to pull the Netherlands out of the European Union, and Mr Jone hopes that this would “get rid of the Dublin agreement”—the EU rule that migrants can apply for asylum only in the first member state where they set foot.

On this point many policymakers agree with Mr Jone: to fix Europe’s asylum system, the Dublin agreement needs to be revised. The reform camp includes the European Commission and the governments of Italy and Greece, where most migrants first arrive in Europe. Under Dublin rules, those two countries would have had to accommodate nearly all of the people flooding in from the Middle East and Africa, more than 1.5m of them since 2015.

Since the migrant crisis started, it has been clear that this system is inadequate, and that some of the burden must be borne by Europe’s wealthy northern states. For a while Germany, Sweden and other countries waived the Dublin rules. In 2015 the EU instituted a temporary scheme to redistribute 160,000 asylum-seekers among member countries.

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Now the EU’s reformers want a more permanent arrangement. In 2016 the commission proposed changing the Dublin accord as part of a comprehensive European migration system. In October a committee of the European Parliament approved the idea. The proposed law calls for agreements with source countries to send failed asylum-seekers home quickly, and would allocate asylum-seekers among EU countries, lightening the burden on Mediterranean states. The commission also wants new places for legal immigrants, to encourage them to apply for visas rather than turning to smugglers.

But these proposals face tough going in the EU’s Council of Ministers. A group of central European countries vehemently opposes the plans. Hungary and Poland are led by populist governments that have campaigned against Muslim immigration. Hungary and Slovakia challenged the relocation scheme of 2015 in the European Court of Justice, with Polish support. The court ruled against them in September, but whereas Slovakia has backed down, Hungary and Poland have not, and strongly oppose the plans. The proposed changes “take away elements of sovereignty”, says Zoltan Kovacs, a Hungarian government spokesman; he talks of a “quota system that we flatly reject”.

Germany, which has taken the lion’s share of Europe’s asylum-seekers, is the biggest force behind the drive for a shared EU system. The chancellor, Angela Merkel, is determined to show Germans that her refugee policies have not left their country taking the whole burden, and has warned that countries which fail to show “solidarity” will face consequences. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is also on board.

Once the system’s details are ironed out (perhaps next year), Germany and its allies could push it through the council by majority vote, as they did with the first relocation scheme in 2015. But they are reluctant to deepen Europe’s troubling east-west divide. Already, the European Commission is pursuing infringement proceedings against Hungary and Poland.

The scheme that angers the Hungarians and Poles has not accomplished much. It aimed to relocate 160,000 asylum-seekers through 2017, but handled just 31,472 by November 3rd. About 10,000 migrants remain crammed into camps on Greece’s Aegean Islands. In Italy, where 112,000 migrants have arrived this year, an estimated 200,000 or more are still in reception centres. Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative, a think-tank, fears the debate “is constantly ideological, without reference to whether it can be implemented”.

Europe’s asylum systems are vastly improved since 2015. German authorities’ average processing time has fallen from ten months to two; applicants get an initial interview within a few days. Düsseldorf hosts 6,000 asylum-seekers in 17 centres run by the Diakonie, a big social-services organisation linked to Protestant churches. Container-sized housing units have been assembled into gaily painted complexes surrounded by playgrounds. “We have less need for emergency help now, and more for integration,” says Daniela Bröhl, a consultant for refugees at the Diakonie.

The repatriation of failed asylum-seekers has picked up. To stay in control of refugee flows, countries must ensure that those who do not qualify go home. This year Germany’s voluntary returns surged from 1,392 in January to 24,569 in September. The EU has won time by reducing the inflow. A deal with Turkey in March 2016 has slashed arrivals in Greece. Migration to Italy has plummeted since July, as it has begun training and supplying the Libyan coastguard—and, allegedly, local militias—to stop smugglers. (Italy denies aiding the militias.) EU programmes in Niger have encouraged that country to block migration across the Sahara.

But the respite is fragile. The calm in the Aegean is dependent on the goodwill of Turkey’s mercurial president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Greece, for its part, has failed to fix its glacial asylum process, and rejected applicants are swelling in number on the islands rather than being sent back. In Libya, human-rights advocates warn that the militias holding back migrants also engage in trafficking. “This is not a management strategy, it’s a triage strategy,” says Elizabeth Collett of the Migration Policy Institute Europe.

Italy has sped up its initial reviews, but its appeals process runs through its ponderously slow courts. And in Germany the Green Party is stonewalling coalition negotiations over the government’s decision to deport Afghan failed asylum-seekers. The politics of refugees are hard enough to handle within countries. At the EU level, they are that much harder.