Alfano plans to be on hand Friday morning at Rome's Ciampino airport to bid farewell to the Eritreans who are being relocated under the EU's plan to eventually share 160,000 refugees from countries hardest hit by the migration crisis. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and other officials have also called for non-European countries to accept their share of refugees in a system of global quotas. The German government is moving to improve coordination of its response to the migrant crisis and putting Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff in charge of the effort. Government spokesman Georg Streiter said after a Cabinet meeting Wednesday that Peter Altmaier will be in charge of "political coordination" of the response. Germany has seen hundreds of thousands of refugees and other migrants arrive this year — more than any other country in the European Union — and the influx is straining its capacity to house the newcomers and process asylum applications. A small group of Eritrean asylum seekers is to be moved to Sweden on Friday as the European Union's effort to relocate migrants away from overburdened Italy and Greece gains momentum. In reaction to the tens of thousands of people crossing the Mediterranean and the thousands of lives lost, the EU set up an operation that initially centered on saving those drifting on the high seas and would later also include directly targeting smuggling and trafficking operations.
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