The southern German province of Bavaria, which borders Austria, has complained increasingly stridently to Berlin that it is reaching the limits of its capacity to receive refugees.
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Meanwhile, rescuers plucked more than a thousand migrants from overcrowded boats near Libya on Wednesday morning, Italy’s coast guard said, the most reported saved in a single day in three weeks.
“Unless something is done, we will see more and more fences and border controls, and then we will have a Schengen crisis, and if we have a Schengen crisis, we will have an European Union crisis”, said Mortera-Martinez. “This dynamic worries me”, he said, adding that the situation was “difficult and tense”.
The 242 survivors of the Lesbos shipwreck were offered assistance by volunteers and doctors in makeshift shelters. Many women suffered from shock or hypothermia and received first aid in a chapel at the port.
At least 11 people – mostly children – died in five separate incidents in the eastern Aegean Sea on Wednesday, as thousands of people continued to head to the Greek islands from Turkey in frail boats and stormy weather.
The latest as hundreds of thousands of people seeking safety flood into Europe in search of a new life. Well over half a million have arrived so far this year. That changed on Wednesday when Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner told public ORF radio “of course it’s about a fence, but not just that, it’s also about fortified structures in the border crossing areas”.
Slovenia and Austria have discussed the possibility of building fences on their borders to control the massive influx of migrants and refugees.
As Mr Al Sadoun is talking, an Austrian police approaches and tried to move him into the line of refugees, only stopping when he realised that he already has Austrian citizenship. The walls range from chain-link fences like the one separating Morocco and Spain on the continent of Africa, to a sand beam in the Western Sahara, to barbed wire on the ground in Macedonia.
As part of a collective measure, the bloc’s leaders have agreed to send 400 border guards a week to Slovenia, and the country is warning members to fulfill the pledge before it resorts to its own drastic measures.
“Austria’s behavior in all this in the last few days has not been in order”, said Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister. To think that the Austrians have talked about building a fence.
In the meantime, Germany has said that it expects the number of deportations of failed asylum seekers to go up. Austrias Interior Minister gave no exact date for the start of the project.
The European Union said Wednesday it had “not been notified” of Vienna’s decision to build a fence.
Slovenian police say more than 100,000 refugees have entered the small alpine nation in less than two weeks.
Tensions are also now rising between usual besties Austria and Germany.
She said that the process of drawing up plans for technical barriers next to Spielfeld border-crossing point would take ten days.
Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar firmed up those plans Wednesday.
Authorities on the German side planned to increase the number of buses used to bring migrants to emergency accommodation or reception centres.
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The measures agreed to, though modest, reflected Germany’s attempts to push burden-sharing.
