Migrants Overwhelming Europe: Unfairness Impeding the E.U.

More than 100,000 migrants, many of them refugees from conflicts in the Middle
East and Africa, entered Hungary from January to August 2015, the vast majority en
route to the more affluent northwestern E.U. states. A record 50,000, many of them
Syrians, reached Greece by boat from Turkey in July alone. Meanwhile, Hungary was
building a fence along the states border with Serbia, where 8,000 migrants were
staying in parks, to keep more migrants from entering. 1 I contend that the
disproportionate power of the state governments relative to that of the federal
government accounts in part for the difficulty that the E.U. has faced in coming to
grips with the tremendous influx. This case suggests why redressing the imbalance
in the federal system has been plagued with difficulty.
The complete essay is at Migrants Overwhelming Europe.

1 Reuters, As Migrants Head North, Hungary Decries Humiliating EU Policy, The World
Post, August 25, 2015.