Wow. Talk about "Fake News." The article states that illegal migration in europe is down to 2015 (crisis) levels and then blithely mentions that they are, in fact, higher in Spain, for instance. Then goes on to quote a person who says that somehow the parties responsible for inflaming the crisis, Merkel et al., were in fact responsible for de-escalating the crisis. I can't wait to read the article where an arsonist is praised for saving the lives of people whose building she has torched by calling the fire department, but putting things in perspective by pointing out that it was only a little fire.

The real crisis is that thousands still drown in the Mediterranean fleeing Libyan violence or languish in camps in Turkey and the Middle East fleeing Assad's bombs. Please report on that, NYT.

The “refugees” remain in Europe. The refugees arriving now are adding to that number. There is still a crisis. Most of those who arrived in Germany are young men. They will marry and start families.

Doctor to patient: "Your cancer may be responding to chemo, so let's stop the treatment".

Of course it's still a crisis. These 1.5 million "fake refugees," 90% of whom are NOT Syrian, and 2/3 of whom are functionally illiterate, will largely be on the dole for the rest of their lives. They'll need education, training, medical care, subsidized housing, public-transit tickets...the list is endless. And after five or ten years, the best many will be able to do is sweep floors or drive a forklift. Some will be financially independent, but many won't. And then they'll want to bring in their various wives, who won't work, and their children, who also don't know the language. Elderly parents might show up for "free" medical services, too. Chain migration is coming our way. It's going to cost Europe billions upon billions of dollars to pay for Merkel's mistake. Next time she ought to invite skilled immigrants from Spain, Portugal or Poland, but it just won't produce the same level of PC virtue-signalling.

Migration is down from Libya to Italy, but left behind in Italy from the great surge of 2013-2017 are something like 1 million undocumented, illegal, job-seeking migrants (and very few war refugees). So, yes, it's good that the numbers are down, but now the Italians will have to begin expelling the many migrants who are not refugees from their country. This in itself is going to be a huge, but necessary job if the message is to be sent back to Africa that illegal migration will not be tolerated.

NYT's before and after photo of central Budapest is effectively a thumbs up on Trumps solution. What did Hungary do? they built a border barrier and enforce it.

Yes, it is. Thanks for asking.

The authors are totally mistaken. You just ignore the migration desater which has already come to Germany! Since 2015 we have got 1.000.000 hardcore antisemite, homophobe and anti-women islamists in Germany. We experienced crimes never seenn befors: From 600 sexually assaulted women on New Years´s eve only around Cologne cathedral and gang bang rape of minors on city streets by daylight up to preparing biological war weapons and christmas market terror attacks. And you say: Hey, relax: Now its only aditionally 20.000 of these people per each month. How wonderful! It´s just as if you said: From 2015 to 2017 you got stomach cancer, Alzheimers disease and AIDS. But hey: in 2018 you only got aditionally rheumatiy fever: So, be happy! All is going well! Are you enjoing to fool Europe and your readers?

The only way to stop immigrants from fleeing third-world countries is to actually support and help those countries. Seems like if less money was spent on defense and more was spent on assisting with climate-induced issues, political instability, and family planning, more people would be happy to stay in their native country. I can't imagine their number one solution to these problems is to move thousands of miles somewhere else among people who don't have the same language or customs.

What Europeans, at least those who look forward and are lead by brains and not romantics, are worried about is the population explosion in Africa and parts of the Arab World. This growth leads to a huge amount of people who want to leave or are forced out by their families (after all, it counts as succes if, usually the son, makes it into the promised land and sends money home). The destination are not countries like Pakistan or Russia or India, the destination is Europe and preferably one of the wealthier countries on that small but already sufficiently populated continent. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN? Therefore it matters what message Europe now sends to those who want to leave their countries; that less refugees or migrants arrive this year than in 2015 is really beside the point when looking at the long-term. Providing temporary shelter to people fleeing war: yes Asylum: on strict terms Migrants: we’ll inform you when we need you and if you fit the profile, we will arrange for you to arrive here legally.

Western democracy will not be destroyed by immigration, despite some adjustment difficulties. The U.S. was built by them (including my grandparents). But it may be destroyed by fear/hatred of immigrants, of "them," leading to demagogues and autocrats who know how to take advantage of fear and hatred. Nothing like scapegoats for destroying democracy. (See: history of the world, esp. Germany, 1930s and '40s).

Yeah! The migrants are not coming to Europe in the same numbers now, but they are there, 1.5 million, and not integrating well and causing lots of under-reported crime. Under-reported in mainstream liberal feel-good media. Maybe, just maybe, word has gotten back to wherever home is that being stuck in squalid camps is not as great as the migrants thought it would be and that not every European is welcoming them with open arms and wallets anymore. So no, the crisis is not over.

Presumably, many migrants will be repatriated because they don't qualify as refugees so a winnowing process is going on behind the scenes just like is happening here in Canada. The people left will be true refugees and, depending on willingness to learn new ways, will be absorbed in the general population. Eastern Europe is too insular to share the refugee/migrant burden so willing countries are snowed under. The panic comes because of this. There's no overall plan that every country adheres to. We, in Canada, have shown that it's possible to absorb refugees just so long as the general populace agrees to take them. In Toronto, our mayor has put out an urgent call for more places for refugees to stay but he's not clamouring to get rid of them.

The NGOs operating in the Mediterranean have essentially been cut off. The Aquarius is no longer operating, according to a BBC video. The NGO rescue ships have always maintained that the migrants would set out to sea even if there were no rescue boats and that the deaths by drowning would increase. The task of rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean is now, for the most part, handed over to the Libyan coastguard who has just received additional vessels from Italy. It will be interesting to see the outcome.

Migration is only down because of resistance from the EU, and EU efforts to contain prospective migrants in North Africa and Turkey, where those migrants explicitly would prefer not to be. The title of this piece is sure to mislead many readers by making the implication that the number of people who would like to migrate to the EU from the middle east, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sub-Saharan Africa has dropped as well. There is very little reason to believe that this is the case.

Perhaps the actual crisis is about the EU; the un-democratic rule by fiat, the Rape of Greece, the self-serving devotion to free market fundamentalism (aka Neo-liberalism), the arrogant dismissal of local concerns. The EU was originally intended to knit the Europeans together in a way that would prevent Germany (or another large nation) from throwing it's weight around. But then the Chancellor decided, without consulting anyone, to throw the doors open, knowing all along that there are millions of Africans and others who would be very happy, understandably so, to move to Europe. At this point Ms. Merkel and the bankers basically rule in Europe, as sure as the Emperor once did. The immigrants are just scapegoats.

Hitler's Germany didn't have an immigration problem. Neither did Stalin's Soviet Union. And now Western Europe and the United States have less and less of one. For the same reason: dictatorship, and the stimulation of fear and violence against fellow human beings. But having stimulated that fear and desire to harm, and stymied immigration, what do do with that hate and cruelty? It turns inward. Whoever can be deemed "other" - Jews always, Muslims now, and any brown non-Muslims with ancestry from Africa or Asia - will see their citizenship, as well as their membership in the human race, revoked. We have entered the second Dark Ages. The first took centuries to dissipate. Our planet may not have centuries this time.

The Crisis is that since 2015 Merkel has been saying there needs to be an EU solution when clearly that has not and is not going to happen. In those three years - fences have gone up, some countries have refused to take in more migrants/refugees, and many countries have now elected far right candidates on anti-immigrant platforms (see Poland, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Slovenia to name a few). I am still baffled why Merkel thought she could make a unilateral decision about something like migration and imagined everyone else would just fall in line with what she decided. The crisis here is a crisis of leadership.

First of all, using the photo of Hungary is a bit disingenuous as we know, Hungary has pushed all those people into other countries AND has pretty much sealed off it's borders. Even if the numbers migration numbers are lower, it is still a crisis because many of those countries impacted are still struggling with the effects of accepting so many people. Germany is still struggling with issues of integration and while overall violent crime may be down - a recent study says there was an increase in violent crime undertaken by refugees "According to the criminologist Dirk Baier, who led a team that analyzed statistics in the state of Lower Saxony, the rise (in violent crime) in 2016 was almost exclusively from refugees" (see in Spiegel online "Donald Trump's Tweet: The Truth About German Crime Statistics"). Finally Reuters reports "Germany sees migration-related spending of 78 billion euros through 2022". 13 Billion Euros of that is toward learning the language and other "integrative measures". Migrants and refugees have not entered the job market as many thought they would -mainly due to language acquisition- which leaves them dependent on state resources. So, yes, I would say Europe still has a bit of a crisis on it's hands.

About the only interesting thing coming from the Right about immigration these days is that so many are happy to take what they saw on FOX or Infowars for something that they actually experienced. I mean, really: where are these "no-go zones," exactly? Because the only people who've ever hassled me In Brussels, Paris, etc. are white guys: once, plain old wannabe muggers, and once, some loopy French skinhead screamng racist slogans at passersby. Oh, well. As with the whomped-up Great Ebola Scare, mere facts and numbers just mean nothing to some. By the way, if we'd really like to help any refugee problem....maybe stop bombing homes, or aiding and abetting those who do.

Illegal immigration is cumulative and ongoing. The character of Europe's countries is being changed by an influx of third-world immigrants who do not fit with the culture and often do not assimilate. Europe is not the United States; its countries are essentially ethnic entities rather than a melting pot, and it does not have the long experience the US has with assimilation, or the sense that we do that we are a nation of immigrants and want new arrivals to find a haven as our ancestors did. If Europe wants to head off the far right and the dangers both to European culture and the EU, it will draw the line at illegal immigration which, let us be honest, is not to escape war -- the people who cross its borders have already escaped -- but to see economic advantage. Otherwise, it will turn to the right, and that right, given Europe's history, can be scary indeed.

Was this an opinion piece or an article? Read like an opinion. What it doesn't note is what happened to the migrants that already came. They're still there.

I inadvertently, just now, came across a Guardian article by the same journalist, dated March 7, 2016 "Donald Tusk's migration magic trick undermined by flawed logic" - Turkey’s compliance is not a foregone conclusion, and it is unlikely that the Balkans can be sealed off from Greece. Patrick Kingsley's argued that closing off the Balkan route would not work to step the flow of refugees from Greece. Written from a perception of the situation two years ago - interesting. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/donald-tusk-migration-magi...

"Trump claimed wrongly.." In fact Trump claimed rightly, that the European emigration problems are just beginning. Practically no one gets deported even when found that asylum claim has no merit. More and more cities become a no go zones. Europe future is bleak except countries with strong authoritarian regimes. That is a really sad assessment.

Well it's pretty obvious what's going on here, right? Same thing Trump is doing. Fascists have the easiest time cementing their grip on power by rallying ignorant people through racism. Trump doesn't care about Irish illegal immigrants, he cares about Latin American illegal immigrants, because their skin is darker and racists can be counted on to hate them. The kind of ignorant people who support fascists are generally racist, because they're uneducated, inexperienced with other cultures, and so on. So the same pattern the Nazis followed is being used again. Fascists in Europe, and Trump, are using racism in order to eliminate democracy and maintain their own power and wealth. And people are falling for it, because humans are, on average, ignorant, hate-filled, and awful. I don't see any good way out of this. But I hope the next world war isn't a nuclear one, or humanity is done for good. And if the next world war is again the fascists versus democracy, I hope that democracy wins, and this time we exterminate all who chose fascism. Sorry but there should be no second chance after what's coming.

Southern Europe is still experiencing a 'Camp of the Saints' moment. To insist that Europe is all good with its immigration is a joke. It may be a mere trickle right now but a future deluge of unfettered entrants will engulf all of Europe in the future. BTW, Europe is not traditionally like the US, Canada or Australia in regards to immigration, where there is much more empty land mass and expanding cities. They can not absorb these masses of poor humanity from Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

AS per usual for Conservatives throughout the world, using fear of "others" to consolidate their base, is what is happening in Europe and USA today. And sadly with ignorance at peak levels today, it is easy to accomplish. And why is ignorance at peak levels? I would say technology has lead us there. Self-absorption has become pandemic with I-phones and social media. It is time to disconnect and be in the space you are actually in. It also wouldn't hurt to get rid of that TV trash called "Reality", which if properly labeled would be "Humiliation" TV.

I have a question: why isn't Merkel looking at what's happening in her own borders. There have been countless acts of neo-nazism and there are underlying concerns that past relations/actions are surfacing in her country. Why isn't she focusing on the problems within Germany? There has been an increase in criminalization within Germany. The other thing to thing to think about is how the EU can act when immigration and refugees are coming in at a slower, more moderate rate. What are we doing to keep those seeking asylum safe?

Mass human migration tends to happen in surges. If everything was fine, why would you go anywhere? This is the fundamental human thought process dating back to the origins of humankind. If you go back 200,000 years, the anatomically modern human wasn't crossing to the far reaches of the globe for no reason. Even the children's story about following the herds across an ancient land bridge supports this idea. People were following animals. You don't walk thousands of miles across ice for no reason. If you look at human migration today, you'll see the exact same pattern. Migration spikes when a displacement event occurs but things eventually return to normal. Modern humans are inherently sedentary despite becoming serially nomadic. Unfortunately, humans have another tendency that's hard to avoid. We tend to react to the past more than the present or future. The reason nationalist arguments work is because everyone is remembering the fear of the event that wasn't prevented rather than the reality that no event is occurring or will occur. 9/11 is a good example here. Even if every terrorist attack after 9/11 had been successful, you still wouldn't reach anything on the scale of 9/11. However, nationalist politicians like Trump are still stumping on the threat of terrorism in order achieve a political agenda. These individuals are manipulative harlots and yet individuals, even intelligent individuals, still find themselves manipulated. That's Germany's problem.

I was in Budapest when these people arrived. They were fleeing their homeland which was consumed by war due to convenient oversights of the west. Many of the Hungarian people brought them food and water. The last Hungarian election data indicates that the urban people are educated, tolerant and knowledgable while the rural people are less so. Sound familiar?

The crisis is still there, because the fundamental reason for mass migration, even local wars, continues to exist. The fertility rate in West Africa and several sub Saharan countries is 6 children per woman and there does not appear to be any initiative, on the part of local governments or foreign governments that give aid to try to bring this unsustainable population growth down. Taken together with global warming, this is just disaster on a massive scale waiting to happen.

The intent of the western world to agree to admitting refugees fleeing war was based on 2 tenets - 1) they were indeed refugees looking for safe haven until they could go back, and 2) they would be cared for temporarily by volunteers, donations, and the host nation to meet their critical needs (food, water, and housing). This crisis was never about refugees. If it had been, they wouldn't have crossed multiple countries to get to Germany, Sweden, or the UK where freebies abound. Sound familiar? The NYTimes wants us to believe that their is no crisis and those opposed to illegal/massive immigration are 'over-reacting.' But what the NYTimes and progressives want are open borders - which only fuels the far left and far right, and moderates towards the right.

Incredibly sad that the New York Times would use these unrepresentative photos (which effectively almost staged) to “prove” its politically-motivated point. The reporters, if they were honestly seeking the truth about how recent migration has changed Europe, should have used past/present photos of Tuileries Garden, supposedly the crown jewel of French gardens opposite the Louvre. A 1990 photo would show a beautiful garden vista with the people in it consisting of groups of tourists and locals passing quietly through the beautiful gardens. A 2018 photo would show a crowded scene where every few meters on the main passageways there are rows of migrant beggars and trinket-hawkers. All the “beautiful” ancient tourist spots in France/Italy look the same now in this regard. European seaside resorts would provide an interesting short video for the New York Times video service to show the change. If you want to relax on a quiet beach in Italy or France, be prepared to have a migrant trinket seller offer you his wares approximately every 2 minutes, all day long. So many media outlets have sacrificed honesty in reporting on migration into Europe, in order to score "politically correct" points. These now/then photos make one think of photos from a cheap advertisement for a diet cream that does not work. Smart people will not buy it.

Yes, it's still a crisis -- waiting to happen if EU countries do another Merkel and open their borders again. NYTimes refuses to recognize cause and effect. The reason the migration is down is that word has gotten back: Don't try, the EU is closed. Relax that, and watch it surge back.

Just as here, it cannot go down enough!

It may not be a crisis anymore, but if they back down it will be again.

The corresponding article, "Rescue Ship Docks as 8 Nations Agree to Take its Migrants" fails to mention that the migrants that will be accepted are those who qualify for Refugee Status. According to a statement made by the PM of Italy Giuseppe Conte as published by CBC news on June 26 -"The obligation of rescue cannot become an obligation to process all the requests on behalf of everyone," the proposal reads, asserting that only seven per cent of migrants arriving in Europe qualify as refugees.

This is akin to turning on a faucet full blast and flooding a room. Just because you turn off the water, doesn't make the problem go away. The immigration/refugee policies of Angela Merkel and others in the EU were disastrously naive, and the consequences of them will be felt for generations. What the New York Times author fails to appreciate is that this "crisis" is not only a matter of border security - though that is an important piece of the issue - but now it is a matter of cultural integration, sustainable employment and housing, etc. Just because the water has stopped from flowing from the spigot doesn't mean that the crisis is over. Now someone has to figure out how best to clean up the mess.

It's astonishing to watch people read an article with real numbers and facts, then cheerfully go right back to whomping themselves into a frenzy that looks, well, racist. Giant camps of tattered black men surrounding the Gare du Nord in Paris? Threatening eveybody at every moment? News to me, and I was there this last January. Millions of enslaved Muslims, unable to "throw off the chains," of their oppressive religion? Really? If you want to see chains, try a Kirk Cameron movie, watch TBS, listen to, say, Ralph Reed or Jay Sekulow. I don't necessarily mind a little bigotry, but this sort of aggressive stupidity...well, the last time I saw numbers inflated like this, it was Trump ranting about his inauguration.

Mr. Kingsley writes that there is a paradox in Europe, that immigration fears are high even though the number of arriving migrants is down from its peak in 2015. That's one way to frame it, but the paradox is easily resolved when you realize that migration fears are not high despite the numbers; rather, migration fears are high simply because in 2015 Europe learned that in any given summer, as a response to terrible hardships elsewhere, migration can surge beyond Europe's ability to handle it. That’s as true now as it was in 2015, and given the forces driving migration, it will be true for years to come.

So why it is still a crisis ? Economics 101: Experience shows that the immigrants can not be integrated into national economies. Consider the case of Germany, a country with an unemployment 3.4% . Of the more than a million immigrants arriving 2015-2016 only 26% have found jobs. A staggering 74% remain unemployed. Neither Germany's vaunted apprenticeship system succeed nor an extensive and costly efforts by the Government to educate the newly arrived to the level required to function in a modern industrial society

European democracies have already had to tone down democracy to accommodate the "cultural" expectations of immigrants. Free speech no longer is free, least it could offend immigrant minorities. A largely agnostic society now has to abandon atheist or agnostic discourses and be sensitive to religious immigrants, in the name of "tolerance". And once the immigration and their descendants reach critical mass, count on politicians to make further concessions.

Immigration along the eastern Mediterranean route is down because of an EU agreement with Turkey. In the central Mediterranean, Libyan militias are playing the same role. And the photo comparison of the lovely Keleti train station in Budapest mostly reflects the fact that the Hungarians built a wall along their border with Serbia. An important message of the European migrant crisis of 2015 is that would-be migrants are quite smart. They recognize opportunity and respond to signals. Where there is no border security and a country whose only response to a wave of immigrants is to accept them and say, “We can do this.”, would-be immigrants would be crazy not to attempt to get there. If asylum-seekers are accepted, economic migrants simply request asylum and pretend to be from another country. The push now is to secure the borders and send the necessary signals to prevent a repeat of 2015. If measures are not put into place and Erdogan and the Libyan militias decide not to hold back the flow, 2018 and beyond will be a repeat of 2015. The EU must remember, “If you don’t win the battle in the tens of thousands, you will lose the battle in the millions.” Or perhaps, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

What is happening to our world when we find it refreshing to read true journalism supported by factual information? Thank you, NYT.

These pictures are horrible. I would not want to live there. No wonder Hungary cleaned this mess up and won't let anymore come in.

Looking at the "before" picture of central Budapest, it becomes immediately apparent why Europeans have voted for "far right" and "populist" parties.

What a deliberate strawman argument. The invaders are already there. The problem is already. What will make this "not a problem" is for them to commit the mortal sin of throwing off chains of Islam and embracing western liberalism. That isn't going to happen. Remember, Islam is fundamentally too right wing for even the American right wing to tolerate. Western democracy won't die in a sudden upheaval, it will die from a thousand deliberate cuts.

The use of the photograph in this article shows just how biased the NYT is when it comes to discussing the migrant crisis or immigration in general. Keleti station, along with the Hungarian border, was virtually shut down after the influx of migrants shown in the picture. My friend lived there at the time and said it was terrifiying to go out or use public transit. To compare Hungary, which shut the border to the rest of Europe is disingenuous. Try a photo of Milan or Rome train station, where one is confronted by gangs of young African men, begging and shoving trinkets in your face. Or take a look at the camps around Le Gare Nord in Paris. There are literally hundreds of thousands of young African men, who will never be integrated, who will likely never have jobs and who will grow more and more bitter. And then this: "Public anxiety has risen in countries like Germany after high-profile assaults involving migrants, including the killing of a 19-year-old German student and the terrorist attack on a Christmas market that killed 12 people." The author fails to mention many other terrorist attacks carries out by migrants including Paris, which killed more than 130 deaths and the hundreds of women attacked on New Years Eve in Cologne. Even quiet little Denmark, pays migrants more than $19,000 to leave, so they don't face the problems of their neighbors. You cannot walk through parts of Brussels and forget most large cities near train stations after dark. Go there NYT.

Lets ignore for a moment that these are mostly young men coming to Europe as economic migrants. Some of these are real refugees with horror stories. whether this is a crisis is not, will eventually be the answers to these questions when posed to the 'refugees' 1. Do you agree that women are equal to men? 2. Do you agree that Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism is equal to Islam? 3. Do you agree LGBT folks have the same rights and even deserve protection? 4. Do you agree that women have the right to wear whatever they want and should expect to be treated well and with respect?