"Good fences make good neighbors"

Robert Frost wrote this in “Mending Fences,” and he also remarked that “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. . . elves, maybe.”

The Weekend FT had an interesting article, “Hungary erects a border fence to plug migrant flow.” So far this year, 80,000 illegal immigrants have entered this country by crossing the border with Serbia, which is quite a lot for a small country about the same size as Indiana and with a population of less than 10 million, and declining fast. (Hungary’s population has been declining since the 1980 census; the net reproduction rate has dropped to 0.6 while the net death rate has remained stubbornly fixed at 1.0/capita.)

The Hungarians are a little paranoid. The country, which is 98% ethnic Hungarian, has not been a melting pot since the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 when it lost 64% of its territory and 30% of its ethnic Hungarian population, according to the article.

So the Hungarians are doing two things: 1. They are building a 175 km steel fence to seal the entire border with Serbia; the fence should be finished by November. 2. They are pushing as many of the migrants north into Austria and Slovakia as fast as possible.(Church groups are giving them sandwiches and water at the train stations.) (Final destination: Germany)

The Schengen Area with no border controls means that Austria and Slovenia have no way to stop the migration. (26 countries are members of the area, including all the main EU states, except Ireland and the UK, which have opted out. (Iceland has joined, but the North Atlantic provides an alternative border control.) Since the Schengen Area as designed can be no stronger than its weakest link with an external border, it seems reasonable to expect that Schengen’s days are numbered.

Migration is pulling the EU apart. It is making the idea of the EU unpopular with the populations of its member countries.

Here is a European poll taken at the end of last year:




http://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdf/eurobarometre/2015/major_change/eb_historical_deskresearch_en.pdf

This is a very serious matter that no amount of bombing can easily solve. (Mr. Cameron seems to think differently as I read this morning he has just asked the UK parliament for permission to bomb Syria.)