Today in Europe there are more people made homeless by wars and conflict than ever before in recent history. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, called it “the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.”
Although the refugees flooding Europe are from many parts of the Middle East and North Africa, the largest concern has been the people fleeing the Syrian Civil War. Since April 2011, approximately 348,540 Syrians have sought refuge in Europe, including over 100,000 this year alone.
Those huge numbers represent only about six percent of the world’s Syrian refugees, with approximately 1.9 million living in Turkey and an additional 2.1 million living in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon.
This significant growth in migration in a relatively short time only adds to the humanitarian, economic, and security challenges already facing Europe because of the Greek debt crisis and Russian sanctions. There are limited resources to care for the migrants and limited opportunities for them to be integrated into the workforce. To make matters worse, European Union (EU) regulations require most of the migrants to remain in the country of first arrival, which is often Hungary, Greece, or Italy.
Last week, some European nations decided to undertake their own measures in response to this crisis:
- Germany welcomed Syrians requesting asylum to their country, no matter where they first land.
- 12,000 Icelanders signed an open letter to their welfare minister to take in more Syrian refugees, with many offering to house them or provide language lessons. Iceland’s refugee resettlement quota has been only a few dozen per year for the past two decades.
- In Hungary authorities closed Budapest’s main station to refugees and migrants. The country’s prime minister said the onslaught of refugees—many of them Muslim—threatened what he called Europe’s “Christian roots, culture…and values.” In the meantime, the Hungarian government is constructing a 109-mile-long barrier along its border with Serbia, the source of much of this migration.
The EU will meet on September 14th to discuss a unified response to the crisis. It will try to reach an agreement on how many migrants and refugees each country will accept to make for a fairer distribution of these individuals across EU members. No matter the short term outcome, Europeans will still need to grapple with questions about who can legally enter and remain in their countries, how to care for and integrate refugees into their societies, and when and how to make it possible for refugees to return to their homelands.
Alana Garellek is an analyst with The Cipher Brief.
