Denmark hosted the meeting, co-organised with Italy and the Netherlands, which was attended by European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and the leaders of Cyprus, Greece, Malta, the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and Hungary.
The upheaval in Syria was one of the issues on the table, as some countries hope the toppling of Bashar al-Assad will allow for the return home of refugees who fled the country's civil war.
"If the situation in Syria is such that people can return, we will also work together on that," Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof told reporters in Brussels.
Since Assad's ouster a string of EU governments have suspended processing asylum requests from Syria, and Austria said it would look to start sending people back.
The gathering follows a similar get-together held on the sidelines of the previous EU council -- the meeting of the bloc's 27 leaders -- in October.
It seems bound to become a stable fixture, with Schoof saying the Netherlands will host the next round of informal talks, and crystallises the growing influence of the hard right within the bloc.
Migration was top of the agenda in October and will be discussed again on Thursday at the last EU summit of the year.
Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said in the Danish parliament this week that Copenhagen was “making contact already" by sending an ambassador to Damascus, where Denmark has an embassy office.
"This is to establish communication with the new regime, and the reason we want to do this is that we hope to contribute to a development in Syria that is hopeful. If it is hopeful, then a situation may arise in Syria where people can return, and we avoid more refugees coming from Syria," he said.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen meanwhile told journalists yesterday that she expects Syrian refugees to return to Syria, including those who have been in Denmark for over ten years and have established their lives in the Nordic country.
“One thing is what we can do legislatively and in relation to international conventions, but we must have an expectation that being a refugee is a temporary status,” she said ahead of the EU summit.
"People can be given protection, but then they must also step aside, so to say, so that others who are in greater need can receive protection in the future," she said.
"It is pretty clear that national leaders are very keen on keeping von der Leyen's feet to the fire," Jacob Kirkegaard, an analyst at Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, told AFP.
Italy said in a note that von der Leyen updated the group on the commission's work on a new legal framework to increase and speed up returns of irregular migrants -- one of the priorities set out two months ago.
The EU chief, who officially started her second term this month, has promised to deliver a proposal early next year.
Photos shared by Rome, which hosted the first pre-summit meeting, showed von der Leyen, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Greece's Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Denmark’s Frederiksen and others smiling as they huddled around a small table.
Irregular border crossings detected into the European Union are down 40 percent this year after an almost 10-year peak in 2023 -- but migration is high on the political agenda following gains by the far right in elections in several countries.
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