Turkey banned Syrian, Yemeni and Iraqi citizens from flights to Minsk on Friday, “potentially closing off one of the main routes that the EU says Belarus has used to fly in migrants by the thousand to engineer a humanitarian crisis on its frontier,” reports Reuters.

The move by Turkey comes as tensions continue to rise between the European Union and Belarus over the fate of migrants at the border between Poland and Belarus.

EU officials on Wednesday “accused Belarus of state-sponsored ‘trafficking’ of human lives by luring desperate migrants to the Polish border — the edge of the EU — where many are now stuck in makeshift camps in freezing weather,” the Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko has threatened to cut deliveries of gas to Europe via a major pipeline as he “promised to retaliate against any new EU sanctions imposed in response to the crisis at the Poland-Belarus border,” the Guardian reported.

Click here for live updates from CNN on the crisis.

With migration increasing throughout the Americas, “border policy is no longer a sufficient means to control immigration,” writes Andrew Selee, President of the Migration Policy Institute in a recent opinion piece published in the New York Times.

“The United States must enlist other countries in the hemisphere to become partners in measures to prevent recurrent political and humanitarian crises that force people to flee their homelands,” writes Selee.

He notes that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Colombia’s foreign minister, Marta Lucía Ramírez, convened a hemispheric conversation in October to begin this process.

“The temptation will be to create a new regional arrangement to make borders harder to cross by increasing enforcement and deportations,” writes Selee.

But cooperation around deterrence “is particularly hard to sustain among countries with varying capacity to welcome migrants and distinct concerns about migration,” he notes.

Selee floats the idea of countries in the region seeking to reach a common understanding of what cooperation around migration means. “However, these almost certainly have to be broad principles rather than specific agreements, which will have to be negotiated around much more specific issues with countries that share similar concerns and approaches.”

The Migration Policy Institute is a nonpartisan think tank that seeks to improve migration policies.

Selee is the author of “Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together.”