A leading Swedish politician has called on the European Union (EU) to withhold funds from member-states resisting mass immigration in an interview with EUobserver.

Cecilia Wilkstroem, a senior MEP with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) who serves on a number of influential European Parliament committees, is preparing a report on plans to overhaul the Dublin III regulations which govern asylum procedures within the EU.

Governments which have not shared German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s enthusiasm for open borders, particularly the Visegrad Group, have resisted proposals for mandatory migrant quotas by the European Commission, the EU’s unelected executive.

Wilkstroem has stopped short of endorsing the Commission’s supplementary proposal to punish resistance by imposing €250,000 fines on reluctant member states for every migrant they refuse to accept, which she believes would be “very complicated” to administer.

Instead, she suggests the bloc simply withhold EU funds from member states which resist the quota regime, as the most stubborn rebels all receive more from the bloc’s budget than they pay in.

“The Commission’s proposal was only whips. I have also included carrots, to make it more balanced,” she claims.

Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán, who has been the staunchest opponent of Europe’s mass immigration advocates, has said that 2017 will be a “year of rebellion” against the EU, with member states pushing back against Brussels “sometimes openly, sometimes by stealth”.

“There will be a tough fight between the politics defending the self-interests of the European states and the centrist will of the European Union trying to take away more and more competencies,” he said. “This will be the defining dramatic tension of the year 2017.”

Top security expert Henry Bolton OBE, a former head of the Borders Unit at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has previously told Breitbart London how Dublin III cripples Britain’s ability to tackle illegal immigration.

On paper, the regulations require migrants to register asylum applications in the first EU member-state they enter, so they cannot pick and choose their destination. However, the regulations also stipulate that migrants who disregard this requirement and press on to the UK cannot simply be returned to the last safe country they passed through – usually France – but must be returned to the member-state they initially arrived in.

When this cannot be determined, often due to migrants refusing to divulge the information and destroying their documents, they cannot be removed. Consequently, only 14 out of several thousand illegal arrivals from France were sent back across the Channel in 2014.

EU proposals to reform Dublin III have not focused on tackling these abuses, however, but on burden-sharing. Countries such as Germany, which exacerbated the migrant crisis by stating there was “no limit” to the number of people they would take in, now want the EU to spread the problem around the bloc. Border states such as Greece were put under enormous pressure by the influx which followed Germany’s open invitation, with tourism collapsing in several islands, are also keen for more “solidarity”.