LONDON -- Economic migrants crossing the Mediterranean should be returned home, Theresa May has said.
Writing in today's Times, the Home Secretary said that the country "cannot do anything which encourages more people to make these perilous journeys," adding that the UK won't participate in a planned quota system aimed at relocating migrants across Europe.
"Gangs are profiting from the misery of their fellow humans, selling them false promises before loading them on to dangerous vessels and sending them - in many cases - to their deaths," she wrote.
"We cannot do anything which encourages more people to make these perilous journeys - or which makes it easier for the gangs responsible for their misery."
"That is why the UK will not participate in a mandatory system of resettlement or relocation."
The EU's executive body was set to unveil proposals on immigration which impose a migrant quota on the union's 28 nations on Wednesday.
More than 1,800 migrants have died this year, the BBC reports, and the UN estimates that 60,000 people have already tried to cross the Mediterranean in 2015.
May insisted that a distinction needed to be made between people fleeing persecution and economic migrants.
"If you look at people coming across the central Mediterranean... they're coming from Nigeria, Eritrea, Somalia," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"These are very often economic migrants who have paid criminal gangs to transport them across Africa, to put them into vessels, which those gangs know are not seaworthy."
EU ministers held urgent talks in April to discuss the ongoing crisis.