Border rules tightening
CRISIS: Hungary to arrest smugglers, deport migrants who cut through fence
BRUSSELS — Austria and Slovakia rushed Monday to join Germany in reintroducing border checks, putting even more pressure on European Union ministers meeting in Brussels to come up with a common strategy to handle Europe’s unwieldy immigration crisis.
German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel defended the new checks, saying they were not designed to keep those fleeing violence in their homeland out of Germany but were aimed at producing a more orderly flow of people. He also predicted, in a letter to his Social Democrat Party, that Germany alone would see at least 1 million asylum seekers this year — and demanded that other EU nations do more to help.
“(Border checks are) a clear signal” to our “European partners that Germany, even if we are prepared to provide disproportionate assistance, cannot accommodate all of the refugees alone,” he wrote.
Hungary was set to introduce much harsher border controls at midnight — laws that can send smugglers to prison and deport migrants who cut under Hungary’s new razor-wire border fence. The country’s leader was emphatically clear that they were designed to keep migrants out.
With the Schengen system of unfettered travel through much of the continent under increasing pressure, interior ministers from the EU’s 28 nations opened emergency talks, trying to narrow a yawning divide over how to share responsibility for the thousands of refugees arriving daily.