Will Middle Eastern migrants upset Europe's cultural balance?

Migrants streaming into southern and eastern Europe are fleeing clear danger and destitution back home, but Europe can hardly cope. The sheer numbers of migrants are defeating current strategies for accepting them. And now some are calling European countries “intolerant” or “not Christian” for refusing the mainly Muslim refugees—or for resisting the European Commission’s demand for a quota to be settled or “redistributed” in each of the European Union’s 28 constituent countries.

“Never before in history have so many people fled their homes to escape war, violence, and persecution,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. “And given the large number of unresolved conflicts in our neighborhood, the stream of refugees seeking protection in Europe will not abate in the foreseeable future.”

Such was the consensus last week at the Western Balkans Summit, convened in Austria to grapple with Europe’s most pressing question. But the “unresolved conflicts” Steinmeier mentioned are not actually in his “neighborhood” but in distant Middle Eastern and African Muslim regimes.

Last week, Hungary saw a record 3,200 newcomers in a single day at one border post, as people crawled under a razor wire fence in the town of Roszke—the eastern outpost of a 28-nation zone with no internal border checks. The new arrivals crossed at least three or four countries just to get to Hungary. Today, migrants clashed with riot police in Budapest’s main international train station as they tried to board trains bound for Germany. Hungarian officials have blocked the trains for two days.

Human smugglers are taking advantage of migrants’ desperation, packing them into cars and trucks in an attempt to sneak them across borders. A refrigerated truck found last week filled with decomposing bodies on a highway near Vienna underscored the risks migrants are willing to take to resettle in Europe. And though the majority of migrants arrive under their own steam, most deaths occur among those who rely on traffickers and their tactics.

Combatting traffickers is one of the few policies Europeans have agreed on so far.

Syrian Nour Kady, 30, said Friday he paid Turkish smugglers $2,200 for a two-hour boat crossing to the Greek island of Lesbos. His wife and their 1-year-old son were included in the fare. The “harrowing” trip meant leaving at 2 a.m., crammed with 60 other people into 29-foot vessel that faced huge waves.

Europeans are debating which of their countries should be first in line to resettle migrants, but they also question why Muslim countries aren’t opening their borders. Fewer migrants are seeking sanctuary in neighboring Muslim nations since they, too, are unstable or unwelcoming. But the Muslim Central Asian republics are closer than Europe for Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans. Of the Islamic nations, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt are hosting refugees, albeit reluctantly. Of the 17 nations participating voluntarily in resettling Syrian refugees—including the United States—none are majority-Muslim countries.

Tiny Moldova is one of the 17, but its citizens have their doubts about Muslim newcomers merging with European culture.

“Our first concern is that the only way one can leave the Islamic faith is through death,” professor Peter Pruteanu, at the Orthodox Theological Academy in Chisinau, told Radio Free Europe. “This is not official, but in practice those who abandon the Islamic faith are killed.”

Mindful of maintaining social balance, Slovakia announced it only wants to take in Christian migrants.

“We strongly reject any quotas,” said Slovakian Premier Robert Fico. “If a mechanism for automatic redistribution of migrants is adopted, then we will wake up one day and have 100,000 people from the Arab world, and that is a problem I would not like Slovakia to have.”

The UN branded Slovakia’s caution intolerance. But Slovakia fears the destabilizing effects of hosting large migrant enclaves, as is the case for France, Britain, and Germany. All have sizable Muslim minorities whose demands for parallel Islamic legal systems and exclusivity clash with European tolerance and equality. A large Muslim influx into smaller European countries like Slovakia or Hungary could cause a social earthquake, regardless of proposed quotas for capping the number of migrants. All countries taking in migrants must look beyond the entryway to ongoing needs the newcomers will have: jobs, housing, schools, and help to integrate and overcome language and social barriers.

Instead of haggling over quotas, Hungary has erected a fence along its entire southern border with Serbia, in addition to preventing migrants from boarding trains in the capital city. Authorities hope to keep migrants from coming to Hungary at all, whether they intend to remain or go north to a wealthier part of Europe.

And the influx shows no sign of slowing.

“There are 20 million refugees waiting at the doorstep of Europe,” said EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn. However high Europe’s tide of migrants rises, many in the historically Christian nations are reexamining what it means to take care of the most vulnerable and the sojourner.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.