destroy smugglers' boats before they can be launched, and to deploy immigration officers to non-EU countries. May 2015 4 May: A boat with more than 130 migrants on board sank off the coast of Sicily. Up to 40 are believed to have drowned while the rest were rescued by a Maltese merchant ship. 11 May: The European Commission proposed that EU member states should take in refugees under a quota scheme. Countries which had received large numbers of migrants and asylum applications – such as Italy, Malta and Germany – supported the proposal. Others such as Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Estonia opposed it. June 2015 26 June: At a meeting of the European Council, it was agreed to relocate 40,000 migrants from Italy and Greece to other EU member states. It was also agreed to take in another 20,000 refugees from outside the EU. It was announced that the relocation scheme would be voluntary and there would be no mandatory quotas for each country. New figures from the UN Refugee Agency showed that 63,000 migrants had arrived in Greece and 62,000 in Italy during the first half of 2015. 23/24 and 29/30 June: A strike by ferry workers caused major traffic jams in Calais, France. Hundreds of migrants camped nearby exploited the situation by trying to break into lorries bound for Britain. This led to clashes with police, who used batons and pepper spray to hold back the migrants. Some lorry drivers were threatened by migrants wielding knives and iron bars. The disruption forced the closure of the ferry port and the Channel Tunnel. 27 June: The United Kingdom announced that it would begin building more than two miles of high-security fencing at the Channel Tunnel port in Calais, in an attempt to stop thousands of migrants breaking into lorries bound for Britain. July 2015 9 July: Twelve migrants drowned when their overcrowded dinghy sank off the coast of Libya. The Italian coastguard rescued 106 others. 13 July: Hungary began building a barrier along its border with Serbia. August 2015 4 August: Bulgaria began building a new section of razor wire fence along its border with Turkey to stop migrants entering the country illegally. It is the final portion of the fence, which began construction in November 2013 and will completely seal the border. 5 August: A boat carrying between 400 and 600 migrants sank off the coast of Libya.