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Germany willing to accept 500,000 refugees annually

Critics worry benefits inspire dangerous treks

Refugees were smuggled through fields and forests Tuesday near Roszke, Hungary, in an attempt to evade the police.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

BERLIN — A top German official said his country could take half a million refugees a year “for several years,” even as some critics questioned Tuesday whether generous asylum policies serve to entice more migrants to make the dangerous trek to Western Europe.

“I believe we could surely deal with something in the order of half a million for several years,” Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told broadcaster ZDF late Monday night.

He spoke amid signs that the migrant flow — many of them refugees from war-battered Iraq and Syria — is increasing in a humanitarian crisis that has sharply tested European cooperation and fundamental policies such as open borders.

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The crisis has also increased pressure on the Obama administration to take more aggressive actions.

The White House Tuesday said it is reexamining whether it should increase its assistance, including resettling more Syrians in the United States, according to The New York Times. Officials said a “working group” at the State Department is considering a range of options, including refugee resettlement.

Meanwhile, the collision of exasperated migrants with overwhelmed authorities created chaotic scenes Tuesday at choke points up and down the route being traveled by tens of thousands of people seeking refuge.

From the idyllic Greek islands to the fertile plains of southern Hungary, a pileup of people impatient to cross seas and borders produced tense standoffs and desperate flights as migrants sought to bypass registration systems that have broken down amid the crush of new arrivals.

At the Serbian-Hungarian border, hundreds of people chose to dash into a cornfield as police looked on rather than sleep another night on the patch of dirt where they had been confined while they waited to be registered.

Nashat Murad, a 28-year-old lawyer from Damascus, Syria, evaded police by slipping over coils of razor wire at the border, leaving his fingers covered in wounds.

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‘‘Just let us cross to Germany,’’ he said as he jostled with other migrants to board a westbound train at the Budapest station. ‘‘We've already suffered a lot.’’

The crisis spiraled as European leaders prepared to wrangle over a plan that observers say will almost surely fall short.

On Wednesday, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker is set to propose a quota system for relocating 120,000 asylum seekers from the front-line nations of Greece, Italy, and Hungary and spreading them across Europe, according to European accounts of the draft plans. Together, Germany, France, and Spain would take more than half, according to a draft tally published by Spain’s El Pais newspaper.

The remainder would be distributed across the rest of Europe. But the plan is likely to include an option so that nations opposed to taking in refugees could pay money to help other European Union countries shoulder the burden.

In contrast to the German welcoming of migrants, the leaders of the Czech Republic and Slovakia both dismissed calls to accept binding quotas this week. The Slovaks in particular have said they will take in small numbers and only Christians — effectively rejecting the bulk of the asylum-seekers, who are Muslims from war-torn nations such as Syria.

On the other end of the spectrum, Germany estimates that it may shelter as many as 800,000 asylum-seekers this year. The country’s vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, braced the nation for what could be half a million refugees a year for ‘‘several years.’’

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Germany pledged Monday to hire 3,000 more police officers and spend $6.7 billion more to address the crisis, including emergency housing for 150,000 people.

In the United States, the limit on the number of migrants from Syria is 1,500 per year, a tiny fraction of the millions who have flowed out of the war-ravaged country.

“The international community is looking at the United States right now to determine what additional steps we can take to try to confront, or help Europe confront, this difficult challenge,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. “We’re certainly mindful of the urgency around increasing the resources and response.”

Under a European Commission proposal to be released Wednesday, reception camps would be set up in Italy, Greece, and Hungary to route new arrivals to other European countries. That could eliminate most of the risky overland legs of the journey. But the incentives to set sail from Turkey, Libya, or Egypt would remain.


Material from The New York Times was used in this report.