Tens of thousands of people are fleeing civil war and unrest to find new homes in Europe—sometimes with tragic consequences. The U.N. estimates that more people have been displaced than at any time since World War II. Scroll down to see the stories on this topic.
An Iranian migrant cries while carrying his son at a beach on the Greek island of Kos on August 15. (Yannis Behrakis / Reuters)
Images like this of migrants trying—and sometimes dying—to reach Europe have drawn international attention to the crisis, along with criticism that countries are not doing enough. Here are some voices of European officials, citizens, and of the migrants themselves.
European Leaders
Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel’s voice is a powerful one within the European Union. Her country has accepted more refugees than any other in the region, and on Monday, announced it would set aside 6 billion euros to help refugees.
“If Europe fails on the question of refugees, if this close link with universal civil rights is broken, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for,” Merkel said.
British Prime Minister David Cameron is among those who has argued that Europe cannot cope with the unprecedented numbers of refugees seeking a place to live—though he has appeared to relent under pressure. On Monday, Britain said it would accommodate 20,000 refugees from Syria.
“I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees,” Cameron said last week.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose country has become the focus of the crisis, is one of the strongest critics of accepting migrants.
“If we would create ... an impression that ‘just come because we are ready to accept everybody,’ that would be a moral failure,” Orban said. “The moral, human thing is to make clear: Please don’t come.”
European public
Many Europeans want their governments to take in more refugees.
In Iceland, author Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir set up a Facebook group as an open letter to Iceland’s welfare minister to show the country can cope with migrants. Eleven thousand Icelanders in the group offered their homes to Syrian refugees.
“They are our future spouses, best friends, the next soul mate, a drummer for our children’s band, the next colleague, Miss Iceland in 2022, the carpenter who finally finishes the bathroom, the cook in the cafeteria, a fireman and television host,” Bjorgvinsdottir wrote.
In Hungary, volunteers set up another Facebook group aimed at helping refugees in Szeged. Thousands joined the group, donations poured in, and volunteers are now able to provide 24-hour care to those stranded in the small town without food or warm clothes
One local volunteer, Dániel Szatmáry, said the first afternoon he planned to help for half an hour, but ended up staying all night.
“We can hear their stories: an 18-year-old Syrian guy told me that he had left because his parents and three sisters had been killed,” he said.
But there are European opponents, too. Hundreds gathered in German towns to condemn their entry, shouting “foreigners out” and throwing rocks and bottles. In the Icelandic Facebook group, some commenters demanded that incoming refugees denounce ISIS in writing before being allowed into the country.
The refugees
Jenan Moussa, the journalist, hosted a Twitter conversation with Abu Yazan, a Syrian man planning his journey to Europe.
I spoke with Lu Al Ghina, a Syrian woman who left to live with cousins in the U.S. She described her aunt Laura’s recent journey from Syria to Europe where she arrived Thursday. Her aunt, she said, left Turkey—aided by smugglers—in a rubber boat, and arrived in Greece. From there, they sailed to Bulgaria and crossed fences to reach Germany.
“It was unbearable for her to stay in Syria,” Al Ghina said. “She wanted a better future for her two little daughters.”
She says her aunt will stay in Germany until things improve in Syria.
“Most refugees, including me, will go back as soon as Syria is free,” she said. But for now, with ISIS and [Syrian President Bashar] Assad destroying the country, there’s now way for us to survive there.”
Abu Yazan was less optimistic.
“I will not go back to Syria,” he said. “All my memories there were destroyed.”
Migrants sit in the car of an Austrian citizen who volunteered to take them from Hungary to Austria. (Zsolt Szigetvary / AP)
Over the past week, public attitudes towards refugees pouring out of Syria have begun to shift dramatically. Today, leaders in France, Germany, and Britain announced that their countries would step up their efforts to take in refugees:
President François Hollande of France announced on Monday that his country would take in 24,000 asylum seekers over two years, Britain said it would take in 20,000 refugees from Syria, and Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany would set aside 6 billion euros, about $6.7 billion, to deal with the crisis.
Much of the coverage is about the massive scale of the dislocation: “waves” of asylum-seekers flowing into European countries in a “relentless stream.” But journalists have also given us several powerful glimpses from the view of individuals affected by the crisis.
When [an 18-year-old Syrian refugee named Monahad] set foot on Hungarian soil, walking past a pair of police officers who barely glanced in his direction, he let out a laugh.
“That’s the fence?” he asked, pointing to a low coil of razor wire resting limp on either side of the tracks. “I thought it was two meters high. It’s so easy to cross.”
The Guardian’s Egypt correspondent Patrick Kingsley offers another view from just north of that same border:
In a field 500 metres north of Hungary’s border with Serbia, Mouti, a 50-year-old oil engineer, points at the muddy field around him. Several hundred mostly Syrian refugees have been camped here overnight, surrounded by a thin blue circle of Hungarian policemen. They’ve slept in the cold, if they’ve slept at all. A man lies unconscious, roused only by a splash of water. Mothers rock their babies, looking miserable.
“This is the so-called developed Europe?” asks Mouti. “It’s supposed to be different to the fucking Arab world.”
One brother was holding an umbrella, to shade himself from the noon sun. The other was holding up a color photograph of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.
“This is my mom,” the second brother said. “I think she is the only one who cares about us.”
Although it’s not about the present crisis in Europe, it’s worth reading this account from Rukmini Callimachi, an international terrorism correspondent for The New York Times, as she describes her own family’s journey to escape communist Romania, more than thirty-five years ago:
It was March 7, 1979, and you needed special permission to leave the totalitarian country; passports were issued only to those who could prove they were returning. That meant that anyone who tried to leave for good was forced to break the law, and the consequences for getting caught made the decision to leave as final and harrowing then as it is today for the thousands of migrants arriving on Europe’s shores.
For weeks leading up to our departure, my mother talked loudly about the plans she had for expanding the balcony of our Bucharest apartment. She also cashed in her savings to buy a color TV, the first our family had owned, in the hopes that the Securitate agents assigned to track our family would be fooled into thinking we planned to return. My father agreed to stay back, sacrificing himself in an effort to make it appear as if the family were still rooted in Romania.
The night of our departure, I lined up my stuffed animals and “interviewed” them to find out which ones wanted to come with me to Paris. I decided they all wanted to come, and so I shoved them into a suitcase and struggled to zip it shut, only to be scolded by my mother, who said I could take two at most. I chose a doll and my stuffed rabbit, and then when she wasn’t looking, I slipped in a miniature elephant and several coloring pencils.
Europe is seeing the largest flow of migrants since World War II, and that flow has been accompanied by tragedy. Their long march from Hungary toward Germany has prompted both large shows of welcome, as well as opposition.
As we witness the “tragedy of tens of thousands of refugees that flee death in conflict and hunger and are on a journey of hope, the Gospel calls us to be close to the smallest and to those who have been abandoned,” the pope said in his prayer today.
Europe is struggling with what to do with the migrants, many of whom are fleeing civil war in Syria. Here’s more from The New York Times:
The European Union, which operates by consensus among its 28 member states, is debating what to do, but considerable resistance remains among central European states like Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, as well as from Britain, to accepting mandatory quotas of migrants, as France and Germany have proposed.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has been praised for her moral leadership for saying that all Syrian migrants would be allowed to come to Germany and apply for asylum.
But some have argued, like Mr. Orban and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, that simply opening the European door will cause many more thousands of migrants and asylum seekers to abandon refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, and embark on the hazardous and expensive journey to Europe, promoting more people smuggling, and not less.
David Stewart, in the Catholic magazine America, responds at length to the pope’s Sunday address. He also challenges a key distinction:
I’m going to avoid writing “migrant” when, I suggest, we should be saying “refugee.” There is a burgeoning online campaign here trying to persuade the BBC to do the same. The difference between talking about migrants and refugees matters. The UNHCR defines a refugee as one who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his [sic] nationality.” According to some, many of Europe’s refugees are not that; they are economic migrants. This needs challenging. To label someone a migrant demands much less of you than a refugee would, be that legally or morally, on this thinking. We need to recognize this fact.
But this raises a further question, one that needs to be discussed. What is so terribly wrong about being an economic migrant? What is so despicable about wanting a decent life? Even if some of the people we’ve seen on the move are not fleeing, say, Asaad’s murderous regime or the horrors of Isis/Da’esh, we must ask the prima facie question of why we would refuse entry to a family fleeing poverty and hoping to establish a new life in the prosperous West. Our Christian morality, first forged and articulated by a people in flight from both violence and poverty, requires us to consider welcome first. [...]
Perhaps they do indeed pose a threat to our culture. If that’s a culture of individualistic and materialistic selfishness, maybe such a threat is no bad thing?
Migrants wait for trains at Keleti station in Budapest today. (Leonhard Foeger / Reuters)
For now, at least. Thousands of migrants who were holed up in Budapest’s Keleti railway station this week arrived at the Austrian border early Saturday, the AP reports. By the afternoon, 5,000 had made it to Austria and Germany.
The train station looks very different now, but hundreds more, fleeing their homes to escape war and poverty, are expected to cross into Hungary this year.
By Thursday of this week, more than 3,000 people crowded the transportation hub in Hungary’s capital. Hungarian officials suspended train service from the station to Austria and Germany—the countries that most migrants are trying to reach—and attempted to move people to government-run refugee centers in Hungary. The migrants refused to go anywhere but west, and by the end of the week, Hungarian officials were overwhelmed. On Saturday, Austria and Germany agreed to open their borders to the refugees in “an attempt to solve an emergency situation,” the AP reports.
Hungarian buses transported thousands of migrants to Austria this morning. Many boarded trains there, bound for Austrian and German cities, including Vienna, Salzburg, and Munich.
Here’s the welcome they received in Vienna, per the AP:
When the first 400 migrants and refugees arrived in Vienna, charity workers offered a wide choice of supplies displayed in separately labeled shopping carts containing food, water and packages of hygiene products for men and women. A mixed crowd of friends and Austrian onlookers cheered their arrival, with many shouting "Welcome!" in both German and Arabic. One Austrian woman pulled from her handbag a pair of children's rubber rain boots and handed them to a Middle Eastern woman carrying a small boy.
Here’s the scene captured by the BBC’s Ron Brown:
Buses arriving thick and fast in Nickelsdorf, Austria. Lots of people here to welcome the refugees with supplies. pic.twitter.com/ADqXtsY6Rl
And here’s a breakdown of the migrants’ westward travel, per the AP again:
About 4,000 migrants crossed into Austria from Hungary by mid-morning, according to Austrian police spokesman Helmut Marban. Vienna city official Roman Hahslinger said 2,300 had arrived in Vienna by midday. And officials in both Austria and Germany said the unregulated flow of migrants Saturday from Hungary meant that up to 10,000 might cross by nightfall.
German officials said Saturday that Hungary, as a member of the European Union and an early stop on many migrants’ journeys to other nations, needs to do more to persuade people to file asylum papers there. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that her country would not impose a legal limit on the number of asylum seekers it might accept.
Earlier this week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called the refugee crisis “a German problem.” Hungarian officials said Saturday they won’t be providing bus services for migrants again.
The number of migrants who have crossed the EU’s borders this year: 340,000. The European Union’s population: 508.2 million. (Incoming migrants are 0.067 percent of the total population).
Syria—which is in the midst of a bloody civil war—is the largest source for these migrants. The conflict has created 4 million refugees.
Of these, 1.9 million are in Turkey (population 75 million), 1.1 million are in Lebanon (population 4.4 million), 629,245 in Jordan (population 6.459 million).
The U.S. has about 1,500—though that number could increase. There are zero in the wealthy Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia.
A girl covers her face as migrants try to board a train at the Keleti station in Budapest, Hungary, on Thursday. (Petr David Josek / AP)
Hungary’s prime minister says the migrant crisis that has produced scenes of chaos and desperation at Budapest’s Keleti station are “not a European problem. The problem is a German problem.”
“Nobody would like to stay in Hungary,” Viktor Orban, the prime minister, said at a news conference in Brussels. “All of them would like to go to Germany.”
Hungary reopened the Keleti station to migrants today, but said there would be no services to Western Europe. The announcement produced confusion among those hoping to board trains to Germany and elsewhere. More than 2,000 migrants have waited outside the station for days in the hope of boarding a train to Germany.
Some were put on a train that stopped in Bicske, about 20 miles west of Budapest. The town is the site of a refugee camp.
James Mates, the Europe editor for Britain’s ITV news, tweeted the events:
The Associated Press reported that the migrants on the train that stopped in Bicske refused to go to the camp, resulting in scuffles with police. Eventually, police began to remove them from the train.
The question of how to defuse the human gridlock in Hungary was being hotly debated Thursday in Brussels … . Hungary, which for months had done little to prevent applicants from head west after short bureaucratic delays, now says it won't let more migrants deeper into the European Union. “We Hungarians are full of fear. People in Europe are full of fear, because we see that European leaders, among them the prime ministers, are not capable of controlling the situation,” Orban said.
Orban blamed Germany and confirmed his government’s plan to send up to 3,500 troops to Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, stepping up efforts to stop as many migrants as possible from entering the country. His top aide said 160,000 migrants had reached Hungary this year, nearly 90,000 of them since July 6.
Germany, which is the favored destination for many migrants, favors a system under which the EU’s members accept migrants based on quotas. Hungary—which is building a fence along its border with Serbia—and many Eastern European countries oppose such a quota.
Orban dismissed criticism that Hungary’s approach to the migrants is inhumane.
“If we would create ... an impression that ‘just come because we are ready to accept everybody,’ that would be a moral failure,” he countered. “The moral, human thing is to make clear: Please don’t come.”
A Turkish officer carries the body of a migrant child near Bodrum Wednesday. (AP)
The boy was found today on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum. He was reported to be one of at least 12 Syrians who drowned while trying to reach Greece.
Just last month, 107,500 migrants crossed into Europe, and the U.N. estimates that the number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean this year exceeds 300,000. Nearly 2,000 landed in Greece overnight.
We decided to look at where the migrants are coming from and which EU countries they are going to using data for the first quarter of this year from Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency. Here’s what we found:
Europe’s refugee crisis has been described as the worst of its kind since World War II, at the end of which there were more than 40 million refugees in the region.
The crisis led to the creation of international laws and organizations that would become the foundation of the world’s refugee response today.
In 1943, the U.N. established a branch to provide humanitarian aid to refugees liberated by Allied forces. It was soon replaced by the International Refugee Organization, which became the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in 1950.
After the war, hundreds of thousands of Jews who survived the Holocaust were living in displaced-persons centers in Allied-occupied parts of Germany, Austria and Italy. They were transported to France, Belgium, and Greece.
In Eastern Europe, Germans either fled or were expelled from their home countries, writes Bernard Wasserstein, a University of Chicago history professor. Yugoslavia removed nearly all of its 500,000 Germans. Romania reduced its pre-war population of 780,000 by more than half. Czechoslovakia expelled 2.2. million Germans.
“At the peak period, in July 1946, 14,400 people a day were being dumped over the frontier” in Germany, Wasserstein writes. By 1950, 11.5 million Germans had left Eastern Europe.
Polish communities were also forced out. The Soviet Union expelled almost 2 million Poles, 500,000 Ukrainians and others from parts of the country it had annexed. Meanwhile, the Allied nations returned more than 2 million Soviet citizens to areas under Soviet control in exchange for citizens of Western countries.
Here’s Wasserstein again, on where the refugees ended up:
By 1959 some 900,000 European refugees had been absorbed by west European countries. In addition, 461,000 had been accepted by the USA, and a further 523,000 by other countries. But many 'hard-core' refugees still remained in camps.
Fast-forward to 2014: 219,000 refugees crossed the Mediterranean into Europe, the U.N. says. So far this year, more than 300,000 people have made that journey, many of them from fleeing Syria and Libya to escape civil wars.
Last June, the U.N. reported that the global number of refugees, people seeking asylum, and people displaced within their own countries had, for the first time since the post-WWII era, exceeded 50 million people.
Migrants face Hungarian police in the main railway station in Budapest on Tuesday. (Laszlo Balogh / Reuters)
Hungary has closed the main train station in Budapest to migrants—many of them refugees—to prevent them from traveling through the European Union.
The move appears to be an attempt by the country, itself an EU member, to enforce the rules of the bloc, which requires that migrants be first processed in the EU country they enter. Hungary had earlier allowed the migrants to board trains without registering them or checking their paperwork.
Earlier today 3,650 migrants reached Vienna, and many of them boarded trains that would take them to Germany—which is expecting to take in 800,000 refugees this year.
Many of those coming to Europe are fleeing civil wars in Syria and Libya. Others are fleeing unrest in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. The flow of people has been described as the world’s worst migrant crisis since World War II.
Hungary’s decision to close off the Keleti station in Budapest to the migrants sparked protests. They chanted “Germany” and waved their train tickets, the BBC reported:
About 1,000 migrants congregated outside Keleti station, in the east of the city, as it was evacuated on Tuesday.
It was closed briefly and public announcements said no trains would be leaving.
But it soon reopened to non-migrant passengers, with lines of police preventing migrants from going through the main entrance.
The move came amid chaotic scenes after hundreds of migrants had tried to board services to Austria and Germany.
Some complained that they had paid hundreds of euros for tickets, and called for the station to be reopened so that they could continue their journey.
Many of the migrants have been waiting at Keleti station for days. Reporters said they are mainly Syrians, Afghans and Eritreans.
As we have been reporting, 107,500 migrants crossed into Europe last month. The U.N. estimates that the number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean this year exceeds 300,000.
EU officials will meet in Brussels on September 14 to discuss the crisis, which was exacerbated last week when the bodies of 71 refugees was discovered in an abandoned truck in Austria.
Refugees from the Middle East walk on railway tracks in Roszke, Hungary, on Sunday. (Darko Bandic / AP)
EU officials will meet for an emergency session in Brussels on September 14 as Europe tries to tackle the flow of people—many of them fleeing civil wars in Syria and Libya—into the region.
The announcement comes following last week’s discovery in Austria of the bodies of 71 migrants in an abandoned truck, and after hundreds of people died when the boats carrying them capsized in the Mediterranean.
The Luxembourg EU presidency announced the September 14 meeting— which will bring together the bloc’s justice and interior ministers—after a special request by Britain, France and Germany.
“The situation of migration phenomena outside and inside the European Union has recently taken unprecedented proportions,” the Luxembourg EU presidency said in a statement. It added that the meeting will discuss “the return policy, international cooperation, and investigation and measures to prevent trafficking of migrants.”
As we have previously noted, the world is in the midst of the worst refugee crisis since World War II. Migrants are trying to escape civil wars in Syria and Libya, and instability in other parts of the Middle East and Africa.
Many of them pay human traffickers large sums of money to take them to a Europe that is increasingly unable to cope with the flow. Just last month, 107,500 migrants crossed into Europe. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that the number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean this year exceeds 300,000.
Last week’s discovery of the 71 bodies—among them children—put a human face on the issue. As my colleague Uri Friedman noted:
Embedded in … [the] horrific news is a harrowing reality: The 71 migrants who perished en route to Austria were escaping a hell they must have considered far worse than the forbidding truck they crowded into.
The artist Banksy posted his own take on the EU’s response the migrant crisis. It’s not complimentary.
A great deal—even though the terms are often used interchangeably.
But the distinction becomes important because the world is witnessing the worst refugee crisis since World War II—one with sometimes-tragic consequences. Here’s how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees defines refugees:
Refugees are persons fleeing armed conflict or persecution. … Their situation is often so perilous and intolerable that they cross national borders to seek safety in nearby countries, and thus become internationally recognized as “refugees” with access to assistance from States, UNHCR, and other organizations. They are so recognized precisely because it is too dangerous for them to return home, and they need sanctuary elsewhere. These are people for whom denial of asylum has potentially deadly consequences.
Migrants, on the other hand, “choose to move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives by finding work, or in some cases for education, family reunion, or other reasons.” The UN agency continues:
Unlike refugees who cannot safely return home, migrants face no such impediment to return. If they choose to return home, they will continue to receive the protection of their government.
Countries grant refugees certain protections under their international treaty obligations. This is why some states are reluctant to grant those people who are fleeing unrest in their home countries refugee status. Here’s more from the UN agency:
Politics has a way of intervening in such debates. Conflating refugees and migrants can have serious consequences for the lives and safety of refugees. Blurring the two terms takes attention away from the specific legal protections refugees require. It can undermine public support for refugees and the institution of asylum at a time when more refugees need such protection than ever before.
But who you are can sometimes dictate how you are perceived. Here’s Karl Sharro, a London-based satirist and architect:
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