"Germany taking too few migrants": Austria, Slovenia consider border fences

Austria is thinking of fencing off the main border crossing migrants use to enter the country from Slovenia. Germany has implemented a plan to streamline the asylum process for those fleeing civil war, such as Syrians, to settle them more quickly, but also to more rapidly send home those whose case for asylum is weak.

SPOe Defence Minister Gerald Klug said he could imagine barriers and containers at the Spielfeld border "to be able to control the migrants in an orderly manner". Still the project is likely to run into domestic and worldwide criticism for the signal it sends to other nations struggling to cope with the migrant influx and because of associations with the razor-wire fence Hungary has built to keep migrants out — a move Austria strongly criticized.

In fact, Austria has already invoked the principle of free movement within the European Union and has been strongly opposing fencing off the borders.

Austria's announcement on Wednesday that it may build a fence on its border with Slovenia has sparked alarm in Brussels amid fears that the EU's border-free travel zone could be under threat.

At the Sunday summit, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he was "just an observer" at the meeting, saying his country had solved the problem of economic migrants flooding his country and offered to give advice to other countries on how to build fences of their own.

In the meantime, Germany has said that it expects the number of deportations of failed asylum seekers to go up.

But as the southern German province of Bavaria, which borders Austria, has complained increasingly stridently to Berlin that it is reaching the limits of its capacity to receive refugees, concern in Austria has risen that Germany could further restrict arrivals, creating a backlog.

Nearly 58,000 crossed into Austria and 14,000 more were waiting in government reception centers. German police said they had picked up more than 11,000 people at the Austrian border on Monday alone.

"The German federal government is clearly overstepping its constitutional competencies at present", Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said Wednesday on ZDF public television.

The sharper tone from Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere came as a new poll showed support for Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives slumping to a three-year low over her handling of the refugee crisis.

Thousands of refugees, a lot of them from Syria and Afghanistan, have been entering through Germany's southeastern region of Bavaria every night, putting additional pressure on local authorities.

"Unless something is done, we will see more and more fences and border controls, and then we will have a Schengen crisis, and if we have a Schengen crisis, we will have an European Union crisis", said Mortera-Martinez.

The human cost of the crisis rose on Wednesday as Greek officials found the body of a seven-year-old boy near the island of Lesbos, with six more migrants also feared drowned.

"My legs hurt, but I'm fine", Ms Uzbeki said in Farsi, speaking through a translator - her hands shaking.

Information for this article was contributed by Geir Moulson, Ali Zerdin, Jovana Gec and Dusan Stojanovic of The Associated Press and by Rainer Buergin of Bloomberg News.