European Union scraps plan for mandatory acceptance of migrants

Citing security concerns, Austria partially shut a highway linking Vienna and Hungary on Friday.

The global Organisation for Migration said Friday over 430,000 migrants and refugees had crossed the Mediterranean to Europe so far in 2015, with 2,748 dying or going missing en route.

The railways press department says the move was prompted due to lack of capacity to deal with the thousands of people at the Nickelsdorf crossing wanting to board trains daily to the Austrian capital.

The response of Hungary, which has received some 175,000 migrants this year – the vast majority just passing through – has been to lay a razor-wire barrier along its border with Serbia and begin erecting a fence four meters (13 feet) high. Rail transport from the frontier to Vienna has faltered under the crush, and with buses and taxis unable to make up the shortfall of places, hundreds and then thousands on Friday started the long walk to the capital.

“It was inhumane and it really speaks for these people that they didn’t fight over the food despite being clearly very hungry”, said Austrian volunteer Michaela Spritzendorfer, who filmed the scenes at Roszke camp near the Serbian border. Even mainstream political leaders in these countries have described refugees and migrants as welfare opportunists, terrorists and carriers of disease.

While anti-immigrant sentiment is substantial in parts of Europe, particularly its poorer eastern regions, a telephone poll in Germany, conducted for ZDF television, said two-thirds of respondents believed it was right for the government to have announced it even would take in asylum-seekers who had entered Europe elsewhere and were supposed to seek to stay in that point of origin.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a fiery populist who has framed the crisis as a battle to preserve Europe’s prosperity and “Christian identity”, angrily criticised the behaviour of the mostly Muslim migrants who have been filling up central Budapest and disrupting traffic along roads running westward to Austria. But it said “the United States could and should do more“.

Eighty-five percent of those polled said they believe the decision to let in the refugees will lead to still more setting off for Germany.

Hungary’s reputation for taking a hardline stance on the European Union migrant crisis has been further boosted by revelations that the government is using prisoners to construct a fence at its border with Serbia.

Some Syrians in derelict refugee camps or cramped apartments across the border are willing to tough it out a few years, but they increasingly realize they can’t live like that forever. Police briefly closed the A4 expressway to Vienna to vehicles because of the potential dangers posed by so many people on its shoulders.

The Central European nations – the so-called Visegrad-four – have all rejected the proposed compulsory quotas.

The European quota system requests the resettlement of refugees among the bloc’s members based on population, gross domestic product, average number of asylum applications and ratio of refugees to one million inhabitants, as well as the unemployment rate in the country. And Steinmeier said Germany expects some 40,000 migrants to arrive this weekend.

Peter Bouckaert of the rights group claimed migrants and refugees were “kept in pens like animals, out in the sun without food and water”.

Hungary in particular has become a key point on the journey north for the migrants, with more than 150,000 people arriving this year.

The global Organization for Migration has put the figure of those arriving in Europe this year at more than 432,000.

The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, said it was sending 300 pre-fabricated housing units to Hungary.