Hollande, Merkel agree on common response to refugees crisis

It manifests itself not just through donations, but also through a number of private initiatives aimed at providing support to people when they arrive in Germany in a direct and down-to-earth manner.

That’s still less than two per cent of the global head count. Turkey hosts more than three times as many per capita.

With the migrant crisis deepening in Europe, open hostility has errupted over the numbers of people accepted by different countries.

The European Union migrant crisis will eventually push the 28-nation bloc to adopt uniform rules for refugees and end a patchwork of norms that have exacerbated the emergency, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said.

Hungary, which is part of Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone, is building a fence along its border with Serbia to contain what it calls a threat to European security, prosperity and identity.

The Luxembourg Presidency of the Council of the European Union has called an extraordinary meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Ministers on 14 September in Brussels.

Why the alarm? It would be easy to blame racism. In previous months, Hungarian police, typically appearing with colleagues from Germany and Austria, have eliminated migrants with out the required journey paperwork from the trains.

Austrian authorities say a total of 3,650 migrants arrived in Vienna on Monday. Motivated by liberal guilt, Europeans allow them in. As outlandish as the plot seems, the book returned to the bestseller list only a few years ago. In Birmingham and Leicester, the majority are visible minorities. But those countries are mostly in northern or western Europe. The population is both aging and shrinking. These economic migrants use and by default clog up the asylum system because it constitutes the only available legal route to Europe. But there are a lot of caveats also about whether these people are eligible to be refugees and stay here.

Heather Conley, the director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and global Studies, says people who land in Greece might prefer Germany, which has more generous asylum policies.

In some ways, both sides are right. Most are coming from Syria, where they were caught between violent rebel groups such as Islamic State and the Assad regime dropping barrel bombs from above. Officials in Budapest, meanwhile, asked Berlin to clarify its position on how illegal migrants could travel around the EU.

Sergio Carrera, senior analysis fellow on the Centre for European Coverage Research, believes some nations are merely shirking their obligations. The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, recently put it very succinctly: “Germany has brought the world so much disaster and is indebted to so many countries that ours is the last country that can afford to reject refugees and people who are persecuted”.

Winton was a banker who, in 1938-39, bankrolled and managed part of what became known as the Kindertransport, by which some 10,000 mostly Jewish children were moved and admitted to the United Kingdom.

Turkey is hosting 1.93 million refugees from neighboring Syria, including 217,000 in 22 camps, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

However, despite months of refugees arriving at Europe’s borders, European Union leaders have failed to develop a coordinated response to the crisis, and have turned a blind eye to the situation. If we think empathy need not trigger individual action because it is the state’s job to discharge our duties on our behalf, then we easily drop the pressure on the state to do just that.

Yet there’s reason for this unprecedented human migration.