The European Union plans to accommodate 160,000 refugees from overstretched border states as United States said that it would accept more Syrians to ease the crises.
As fresh unrest in Hungary underscored the scale of the problem, Germany pushed Europe to go further and agree long-term binding quotas with no limits on actual numbers to deal with a surge of asylum-seekers.
With Greece, Hungary and Italy struggling to cope, European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker urged the continent to look to its history, ignore populist parties and take decisive action.
In response to appeals for help from an increasingly strained Europe, Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States was studying how it can resettle more refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria.
“We are committed to increasing the number that we will take,” Kerry said. “And we are looking hard at the number that we can specifically manage with respect to the crisis in Syria and Europe.”
The migrants’ plight has touched hearts around the world, spurred especially by pictures last week of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi, whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel — whose country is leading the way by saying it could take half a million refugees annually over several years — said Europe needed a “binding” long-term deal for the “fair” sharing of the burden.
With pressure mounting for the EU to address the crisis, Juncker urged interior ministers who are meeting next Monday to back his new plan for the relocation of 120,000 refugees from Hungary, Greece, and Italy, and a plan dating from May to relocate 40,000 others in Italy and Greece.
“It is 160,000 that Europe has to take into their arms, this has to be done in a compulsory way,” said Juncker. Countries that refuse could face financial penalties.
The EU quota plans must be approved by a majority of EU states, and Berlin said it was open to a special EU refugee summit after the ministers’ meeting and ahead of the next scheduled EU summit on October 14. Germany would take more than 31,000 migrants, France 24,000 and Spain almost 15,000, under the plan.
