Immigration Chaos at the Borders - in Europe

A look at the chaos happening with immigrants at national borders - human misery shows up far, far away from the United States.   PB
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From Reuters.com:

Chaos at Macedonia border as refugees tear through police lines

Thousands of rain-soaked migrants stormed across Macedonia’s border on Saturday as police lobbed stun grenades and beat them with batons, struggling to enforce a decree to stem their flow through the Balkans to western Europe.

Security forces managed to contain hundreds in no-man’s land.   But several thousand others – many of them Syrian refugees - tore through muddy fields to Macedonian territory after days spent in the open without access to shelter, food or water.

"In this Europe, animals are sleeping in beds and we sleep in the rain," said 23-year-old Syrian woman Fatima Hamido after running across the border.

"I was freezing for four days in the rain, with nothing to eat."

Macedonia on Thursday declared a state of emergency and ordered its borders sealed to migrants, many of them refugees from war who have been entering from Greece at a rate of 2,000 per day en route to Hungary and Europe’s borderless Schengen zone.

On Friday, riot police fired tear gas and stun grenades to drive back angry crowds, in the latest flare-up in a migration crisis that has brought ripples from the conflicts of the Middle East to Europe’s shores.

Calling out the army, Macedonia said it would ration access, and allowed some 600 through overnight; they squeezed onto a dawn train north to the Serbian border.

But far more have since arrived on the Greek side, converging on a filthy, chaotic strip of frontier with little sign of an organized aid effort.

Some industrious Greeks sold sandwiches and drinks to those prepared to pay.

A man with a generator charged 1.5 euros to charge mobile phones...
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Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/22/us-europe-migrants-macedonia-idUSKCN0QR06320150822
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From euobservor.com:

Record 107,500 migrants arrived in EU in July

The number of detections in 2015 (January-July) now totals nearly 340,000, compared to 123,500 recorded in the same period of last year.

At least 2,300 people have also died this year while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe, research by The International Organisation for Migration says.

The surge has created huge pressure on border control authorities...

Mediterranean Sea shores are the entry point to Europe for most migrants, but not the end destination.

Germany is to raise its forecast for the number of asylum seekers expected this year from a previous 450,000 to at least 650 000, German daily Handelsblatt reported on Tuesday.

Interior minister Thomas de Maiziere, who is scheduled to present a new prognosis by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees on Wednesday, will say that the number of asylum seekers coming to Germany in 2015 could go as high as 750,000...
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Link: https://euobserver.com/social/129918