All of them entered Serbia from Macedonia, where police on Saturday re-opened the border with Greece after spending three days trying to hold back the streams of migrants, when hundreds braved barbed wire fences and stun grenades to force their way through.
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Long lines of migrants, many of them refugees from Syria, snaked through southern Serbia by foot on Monday before jumping on trains and buses north to Hungary and the last leg of an increasingly desperate journey to western Europe.
It has been described as Europe’s worst refugee crisis since the Second World War as more evidence emerges of how EU countries are struggling to cope with the influx of migrants.
An AFP photographer witnessed them finally arrive in Hungary from Serbia via a cross-border railway track, close to the southern Hungarian village of Roszke.
More than 120,000 migrants have arrived there this year, triple the number in 2014.
Thousands more, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, are expected to arrive in Macedonia in the coming days after being ferried to the Greek mainland from the islands.
Refugees were heading for an overcrowded asylum centre in the Serbian border town of Presevo.
Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, who had travelled to the Macedonia-Greece border, called for an urgent new strategy to deal with the “humanitarian disaster”.
“That’s why I choose to come to Europe”, he said, as his family was waiting to enter Macedonia and continue northwards to the EU.
They are now making their way across Serbia to Hungary before moving on to richer countries such as Germany, Sweden and Britain.
“We urgently need coordinated action across Europe”, he told ORF radio.
Meanwhile, Greece’s coast guard was searching for at least five people missing at sea after the dinghy they were using to cross from Turkey overturned off the coast of the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos.
Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said Monday that although the migrant influx is “huge”, Serbia won’t “build walls or put them in containers and drive them out of the country”.
In what has become a regular occurrence, Greece’s coastguard said Monday it recovered the bodies of two migrants who drowned when their boat sank off its shores.
The 28 member states of the European Union must ensure “equitable distribution” of asylum-seekers, she told a news briefing in Geneva, adding: “We honestly believe if correct measures are taken this is something that Europe can handle”.
Speaking to Deutsche Welle, one Syrian refugee said he and his parents will pay a total of about €4,500 to a man known as the “Pakastani” in order to be smuggled across the border all the way to Germany.
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More migrants seek refuge in Germany than any other European country – and the government expects 800,000 to apply for asylum by the end of 2015.
