“The list of horrors swells,” says Will Hutton in The Observer. Last week, 71 migrants suffocated in an abandoned truck in Austria, adding to the tally of thousands drowned in the Mediterranean. In spite of the risks, the number successfully entering Europe is expected to rise to 3,000 a day over the next few months.
The favoured destination for what Ukip leader Nigel Farage describes as “an exodus of Biblical proportions” is Germany, where the number of asylum seekers is set to hit 800,000 this year, equivalent to 1% of its population. While Germany has been welcoming, Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that, without a “fair distribution” of refugees, the European Union’s prized Schengen area of passport-free movement will be under threat.
The European Commission is hosting an emergency meeting in Luxembourg this month to “hammer out a migrant distribution deal”, but it looks set to be a “bitter battle”, says Bruno Waterfield in The Times. Germany and France support quotas, but Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic oppose them. Austria and Hungary – hastily erecting a fence along its border with Serbia – blame Germany’s decision to suspend the Dublin rule (which requires asylum seekers to be returned to the nation through which they enter the EU for their application to be processed) for an influx of more than 7,000 migrants a day. Budapest sealed a major railway station this week. Given the scale, it isn’t surprising that systems on Europe’s flanks have been overwhelmed and that the Dublin rule has become “all but unenforceable”, add Alex Barker and Jim Brunsden in the Financial Times.
And once they’ve entered what The Times’s Libby Purves describes as “the magic ring” of Schengen, refugees can “pick and choose where they want to stay”, says Roger Boyes, in the same paper. This isn’t just about desperate people fleeing war and persecution in Syria and the like. Of the 196,000 who have claimed asylum in Germany this year, 42% are from the Western Balkans. They are fleeing poverty in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia. We should take Merkel at her word and “encourage the suspension of Schengen for a year”, to give us “breathing space”. “Border controls within the EU will allow the continent to take stock” and assess how best to help. Although Britain enjoys its Schengen opt-out, there is no reason why we should not accept some Syrian refugees.
Labour leadership hopeful Yvette Cooper has made an impassioned plea for the government to do so, says Matt Dathan in The Independent, calling on Theresa May, the home secretary, to exclude Syrian refugees from immigration targets. “We can’t carry on like this,” she said. “It’s immoral, it’s cowardly and it’s not the British way.” Her speech could be a much-needed game-changer, says Dan Hodges in The Daily Telegraph. David Cameron has no desire for his legacy to be that of the prime minister who “sat back” and watched refugees die.