European leaders have sparred over the controversial idea of processing asylum seekers offshore at a summit dominated by plans to toughen up EU migration policy.

Plans for the offshore processing of asylum claims or vaguely defined “return hubs” in non-EU countries have gained traction in recent weeks, after large gains for the far right in European elections in June unnerved mainstream leaders across the continent.

In a move that insiders say would have been unthinkable a few years ago, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has said the EU should explore the idea of creating “return hubs” outside its borders to help in deporting unwanted migrants.

However, as leaders arrived in Brussels on Thursday, details were scant and officials had not made clear which countries might host the centres.

The EU, von der Leyen said, should learn from the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni’s, deal with Albania, an EU candidate country that is hosting two asylum centres to process the claims of men intercepted in international waters trying to reach Italy.

Meloni said that there were “many countries looking at the Albania model”, and praised von der Leyen. “There is a desire to work on pragmatic solutions,” she said.

Amid turmoil in the Middle East, the Italian prime minister is also urging fellow EU leaders to review their policy on Syria so refugees from that country can “return home voluntarily, safely and sustainably”.

The proposal, yet to be fully fleshed out in public, underscores how Europe has moved on since 2015. Then, the EU’s most powerful leader, Angela Merkel, declared “we can manage it” as 1.3 million people sought refugee, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Before this summit, 11 national leaders took part in a meeting organised by Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands to discuss “innovative solutions”, a mantra for leaders seeking alternatives to the status quo. The leaders of Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Cyprus, Malta and von der Leyen attended the meeting.

The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said that until now, raising such issues had been “a bit like shouting in an empty sports hall”. Now there were “many countries that work together on this”, said Frederiksen, a Social Democrat with a hard line on immigration.

“A great number of Europeans are tired of us helping people from outside who commit crimes. Some are radicalised,” she said. “It can’t go on like this. Therefore, there is a limit as to how many people we can help.”

The Dutch prime minister, Dick Schoof, who leads a government dominated by the party of the far-right leader Geert Wilders, said: “We see that there is a different mood in Europe.”

His government said on Wednesday it was considering a plan to send rejected African asylum seekers to Uganda. It was not immediately clear whether such a plan would be legal, feasible, or acceptable to Kampala.

The commission has also promised legal proposals to increase deportations of people denied asylum and ordered to return to their country of origin – currently only about one in five people.

“Returns are the missing link in our migration policy,” the Greek prime minister, Kyriákos Mitsotákis, said. “I am happy about the fact that we recognise that we need to think outside of the box to address this pressing concern.”

But Mitsotákis also voiced scepticism about whether the Italy-Albania model could be replicated across the EU. Speaking to the Financial Times, he called for efforts to increase legal migration, as well as clamp down on irregular arrivals. “Who is going to pick our olives?” he said, stressing the need for skilled and unskilled labour.

Other EU leaders cast doubt or offered more lukewarm support for offshore centres. “These so-called migration hub solutions have never been shown to be very effective in the past and the cost is very, very expensive,” Belgium’s prime minister, Alexander De Croo, told reporters.

Ireland’s taoiseach, Simon Harris, said the EU needed to be very careful its proposals were not misrepresented. He had “deplored everything” about the previous British government’s scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, he added. “I thought it was downright stupid, to be quite honest. It didn’t really work, didn’t really result in anything happening.”

The Rwanda deal was more radical than the Italian-Albanian agreement, because even successful asylum claimants would not be allowed to return to the UK.

Around the table many leaders voiced support for Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk, who said his country was facing hybrid war from Russia and Belarus. The Polish government has accused Belarus and Russia of seeking to destabilise the EU by luring migrants from the Middle East and Africa to “storm” the Polish border.

Countries along the EU’s eastern land borders have recorded a 192% increase in migrant arrivals (13,200) so far this year, according to the EU border agency Frontex. But overall the number of irregular border crossings has fallen to 166,000 during the first nine months of the year, a 42% decline on the previous year.

While EU leaders are keen to learn from Italy’s Albania deal, Italian opposition parties called the scheme “a total flop”, after the first people transferred under the agreement arrived at the port of Shëngjin on Wednesday. Of the males – 10 from Bangladesh and six from Egypt – four were sent back to Italy, including two who were underage and two vulnerable individuals.

Opposition parties and Italian newspapers criticised the initiative, which will cost about €1bn over five years, as a failure, highlighting that the government spent €250,000 to transport the 16 people on a military ship from the Sicilian island of Lampedusa to Albania.

The project was devised to alleviate the pressure on Lampedusa, where thousands of migrants land annually from north Africa, pushing the small island’s reception capacity to its limits.

“A thousand migrants have landed in Lampedusa in the last few hours, and only 16 left Lampedusa for Albania on an 80-metre military ship with 70 sailors on a cruise that cost at least €250,000 just for fuel,” said Dolores Bevilacqua, from the Five Star Movement, speaking in the Italian senate on Wednesday. “These numbers best describe the failure of the Albania plan, through which Meloni aimed to ease the congestion of the Lampedusa reception centre.”