Migrant chaos rises in Europe
Migrants pour into capital as leaders search for solution.
Thousands of people wait in an ad hoc city outside a train station as Hungary refuses to let them move on.
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY — A ragged metropolis of thousands of weary and bedraggled migrants continued to rise Wednesday outside Keleti train station.
The Hungarian authorities, saying they were merely obeying European migration regulations, continued to keep migrants out of the station, despite having allowed thousands onto westbound trains Monday.
At the same time, the desperate migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan — most of them hoping to reach Germany — continued to pour over the border from Serbia, where the construction of a razor-wire fence seems to have barely slowed them down.
While European ministers squabbled and made preparations for a series of meetings to discuss the crisis, the squalid city outside Keleti grew and festered, developing new suburbs by the hour.
“We are sleeping in trash,” said Ramadan Mustafa, 23, a chef from the Syrian city of Qamishli. “We don’t know what to do. It’s a matter of human rights.”
Hundreds of thousands of migrants have been seeking refuge in Europe, only to fifind themselves confronted with a patch- work of incoherent asylum polic ies across the 28-member European Union. At the same time, anti-immigrant sentiment, stoked by far-right politic al parties, is fostering a backlash in some countries, including Britain, France and Hungary.
Keleti was not Wednesday’s only flashpoint.
At least 11 migrants drowned trying to make the sea crossing from Turkey to Greece — from which they hoped to begin the diffifficult journey to Hungary. A photo of a police offifficer cradling a drowned child’s body on a Turkish beach became a worldwide social media meme for the crisis.
One of the proudest glories of the European Union — the ability to travel freely, without border checks, from Estonia to Portugal — was splintering under the pressure.
Police offifficers from Hungary and adjoining nations conducted spot checks on trains, demanding documents from suspected migrants.
Still, German authorities expected more migrants to fifind ways to evade the restrictions — and even hinted that , with a possible agreement on handling the crisis in the works, some might even be permitted to travel directly from Budapest in coming days.