Tusk says people who are looking for a better life but are not fleeing war should not risk their lives or their money paying smugglers to bring them to Europe.
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Asked about barbed wire fences, Tusk said: “I’m afraid that sometimes you need tougher measures if you, we want really to apply Schengen. Greece or any other European country will no longer be a transit country”, Tusk said after his meeting with Tsipras according to the Financial Times.
“Excluding Greece from Schengen is neither an end nor a means in this crisis”.
The European Council president has warned refugees against coming to Europe for economic benefit as thousands of people remained trapped at the Greece-Macedonia border after being blocked from continuing their journey.
The Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Melvut Cavusoglu is due to visit Athens on Friday ahead of the summit, while Tusk will be in Turkey to wrap up his tour across several capitals over the past few days to discuss the refugee crisis.
It comes as German Chancellor Angela Merkel said clashes at Greece’s northern border on Monday showed the urgency with which the European Union needs to act.
A €700m (£542m) emergency aid package to help Greece and other countries to cope with the influx of refugees from Syria and Iraq has been unveiled by the European Commission.
He also referred to changes made in the e-visa system for Iraqis and Libyans, who constitute another bulk of refugees intending to go to Europe, a move that has caused the number to “fall even further”.
He said Turkey had to do more to stop smugglers taking people on the short but perilous trip across the Aegean Sea to Greece.
The clampdowns have left Greece with a huge bottleneck of migrants stuck on the border with Macedonia as authorities there let only a trickle through, with the European Union estimating the number stranded could be as high as 12,000.
More than one million people crossed the Mediterranean into Europe in 2015, with majority entering the continent through Greece, while some 131,000 arrived in the continent in the first two months of 2016.
EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos last week warned that failure to make “convergence and agreement” with Turkey at the summit on stemming the flow of migrants would spell “disaster” for the bloc.
The funds would be allocated over three years, with €300m this year and €200m in each of the following years under the plan, which must be approved by member states and the European Parliament.
The EC confirmed that 308 north African migrants would be sent from Greece to Turkey as it stepped up efforts to return those with invalid claims.
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“I think we can get to reasonable decisions on all of this on Monday”, he said. But of those have re-introduced internal border controls since September in to help stem the most significant migration flows Europe has seen in decades.
