Austria wants to reduce migrant flow to 30000-40000 a year

The government plan restricts the number of asylum claims to 1.5 percent of Austria’s population.

Governments are anxious that the onset of spring, and with it warmer temperatures, will herald a fresh spike in arrivals in the coming months.

It is expected the UK’s membership of the European Union will dominate that meeting.

The measure seeks to limit the total amount of claims to “about 130,000” over the next four years, Faymann said, adding, “We have fixed this number as a guideline…”

Hundreds of thousands of people have streamed into Austria, a small Alpine republic of 8.5 million since September, when it and Germany threw open their borders to a wave of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Austrian officials said they would put together reports to propose options that were in line with Austria’s constitution as well as European law.

Austrian Chanceller Werner Faymann also told journalists border controls will be stepped up “massively”. However, a fraction have stayed.

Human rights groups have expressed fears that the restrictions’ knock-on effect risked leaving migrants – including many children – stranded in icy temperatures on the western Balkans route.

Austria was initially a supporter of Mrs Merkel’s controverisal “open-door” policy, and has borne the brunt of the refugee crisis alongside Germany, taking in some 90,000 asylum-seekers previous year. Calls for a cap on numbers by the centre-right People’s Party in the governing coalition have grown.

Long-term migration tensions in Austria grew still further in the new year when Germany began sending back over the border up to 300 people who did not want to file for asylum there.

Neighbouring Germany still favours a joint approach to the problem.

The move is a further sign that the government is hardening its stance in Europe’s worst refugee crisis since 1945.

But the EU’s executive body intends to replace the regulation with a permanent quota system, which would require each bloc member to accept a set number of refugees based on its population size and other factors.