In high stakes experiment, EU migration policy moves front lines to Niger

Mahmane Elhadji, his arms dusted with flour to the elbow, does not look like an advertisement for the European Union. But as he supervises a team kneading dough and cutting it into rolls in his cramped backstreet bakery, Mr. Elhadji finds himself a flag carrier on the front line of Europe’s drive to stifle illegal migration from Africa.

Mr. Elhadji was once a “coaxer.” When disoriented migrants arrived at the bus station here in Agadez, a sweltering adobe-walled town in the southern reaches of the Sahara, his job was to steer them to the people-smuggler for whom he worked. Today, with help from a small EU grant, he runs “Eat Today, Eat Tomorrow,” the name he has chosen for his new business.

“It wasn’t much money and it took a long time to come,” Elhadji says. “But without it I would have gone back to coaxing.”

As divisive political tensions around migrants rise in Europe, governments there are making their broadest-ever bid to choke off the flow close to its source. Elhadji’s story, and those of his neighbors who have gone back to smuggling, illustrate the progress and the

Thinning traffic'The desert is vast'Cautionary talesProblems in the pipelineHigh stakes