At a time when southern Europe has nearly 10 times more refugees and migrants arriving by sea, the UK plan has been described in Brussels as “very unbalanced” and “not good enough”. More than 4,100 people have crossed the Channel in small boats so far this year, compared with 39,283 who traversed the Mediterranean to Italy, Greece, Spain, Cyprus and Malta. At the height of the migration crisis in 2015, more than a million people arrived on the continent’s southern shores.