The abolition of border controls between European Union nations has been a central pillar of European leaders' dreams of stitching together a continent of common values and interconnected economies. But in just weeks, the mounting migration crisis has begun to erode a system that took decades to build.
Hungarian authorities shuttered Budapest's grand fin-de-siecle train station for hours on Tuesday morning, stopping rail traffic for all passengers while they worked to clear crowds of hundreds of migrants who had gathered at the station in recent days.
The asylum-seekers, many of whom are fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, hope to make it onward to Germany, which has promised shelter and sustenance for Syrians. By midday in Budapest, the train station had been reopened, but migrants were being kept away, Hungary's state-owned news agency reported.
Austria has also significantly increased inspections of vehicles crossing the border from Hungary since Sunday, causing backups of trucks that stretched for miles, another sign of the fast-mounting barriers between nations that years ago closed their border checkpoints. Authorities on Monday had allowed thousands of migrants to board trains to Austria, prompting complaints from Austrian leaders.
"Just allowing them to board in Budapest . . . and watching as they are taken to your neighbor, that's not politics," said Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann in an interview late Monday with the ORF broadcaster.
There are no signs the crisis is abating. Greece's coast guard said Tuesday that it had rescued 1,192 migrants and refugees from Monday to Tuesday near eastern Greek islands that are close to the Turkish coast. That was a significantly higher figure than in recent weeks. From Greece, migrants try to move northward through the Balkans, to Hungary and onward to Western Europe.
Appeals to take in desperate asylum-seekers have run into skepticism that swift changes would actually take place.
In a news conference Tuesday alongside Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the two leaders had agreed that a common European solution to the refugee crisis was needed.
She reiterated her call that even as genuine refugees should be granted asylum, economic migrants should be weeded out. She said the European Commission should define "safe countries of origin," adding that registration centers should be established in Italy and Spain so that those migrants who do not have an honest legal claim to asylum could be returned to their countries more quickly. Those who do have genuine claims, she said, should then be more distributed more fairly within Europe.
Germany is taking the lion's share of refugees — an estimated 800,000 this year alone.
Rajoy called the refugee question "the biggest challenge for Europe in the coming years."
But there was little E.U. unity ahead of an emergency meeting to be held in two weeks, despite a growing agreement that Europe's unpredictable asylum system has spurred migrants to take dangerous steps to scale the continent's high walls. The problem has grown worse by the day.
If the migrants reach Western Europe, generous benefits can await. But if they are caught by poorer E.U. countries along the way, their future can be grim, a disparity that has spurred many to pay smugglers to sneak them into the heart of Europe.
That gamble can have tragic consequences. Last week, the bodies of 71 presumed migrants were found in the back of a delivery truck on an Austrian roadside. They are thought to have suffocated.
Top E.U. officials plan to meet Sept. 14 to try to streamline the fragmented asylum process.
The leaders of Germany and France want to achieve that goal by speeding deportations of economic migrants while allocating more resources to people fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. They have also proposed a quota system under which each of the 28 E.U. nations commits to resettle a certain number of refugees, taking aim at countries such as Hungary, which is building a fence to keep migrants out.
But there were signs that unity within Europe's consensus-driven policymaking would be elusive. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico on Monday firmly rejected any decision that would force his nation to take in a fixed number of refugees.
"We strongly reject any quotas," Fico told reporters in the Slovakian capital, Bratislava, according to the news agency Reuters. "We will wake up one day and have 100,000 people from the Arab world, and that is a problem I would not like Slovakia to have."
Britain, too, seems unlikely to throw open its doors. Over the weekend, British Home Secretary Theresa May said she wanted to cut back even legal migration from other E.U. nations.
The patchwork of responses in Europe appears to be fueling a booming trade for smugglers, who help migrants get from less-generous nations such as Hungary into Germany, which awards far more benefits to refugees.
Migrants are under pressure because of the wide disparities in the way European countries have responded to the crisis. A quirk of European law allows nations to deport asylum-seekers to the first E.U. country where their presence was registered by authorities.
Hungary's far-right leaders have had the toughest response in Europe, stringing a line of razor wire along their country's 109-mile border with Serbia and building a taller fence behind it.
The unpredictable policies have fueled many migrants' willingness to pay as much as several thousand euros to smugglers who move them to their destinations out of sight from authorities.
"The only people who benefit from unilateralism are the smugglers," said Alexander Betts, director of the Refugee Studies Center at the University of Oxford. "About the only area where there's consensus in Europe is that the current system is dysfunctional."
Refugee advocates also want to establish a process by which asylum-seekers could file applications with Europe even before they cross the continent's borders. Armed with the proper paperwork, they could bypass the dangerous sea journey altogether.
But even the most generous E.U. nations may be wary of creating too streamlined a process for refugee claims, fearful that they would make it too easy for the millions of Syrians who have fled to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to move to Europe, analysts say.
"It's not the fear of who comes this year, but of how many could come next year, and the unknown, that sometimes holds politicians back from establishing a process that would help countries like Turkey and Lebanon," said Elizabeth Collett, director of the Migration Policy Institute Europe.
Faiola reported from Berlin. Washington Post staff writer Stephanie Kirchner in Berlin contributed to this report.
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