The Guardian view on the refugee crisis: little time left to find a solution

Europe is approaching the point where the only way to control desperate migrants could soon be the regular use of physical force. Scenes of violence this week on the Greek-Macedonian border, where refugeesbreached a border fence with a homemade battering ram, and in Calais, where police fired teargas at people protesting against the demolition of their shelters, suggest we are close to a line that we absolutely must not cross.

Europe is already guilty of causing the deaths of many migrants by giving them, in effect, no alternative except to risk their lives at sea or on the tracks leading into the Channel tunnel. That is bad enough, and a stain on the record, but to actually battle with migrants in this way is worse. Who can doubt that, if it continues, there will be deaths and injuries? Another kind of violence, in the shape of attacks on those who have reached a supposedly safe haven and are inhostels and centres in Germany and elsewhere, compounds the offence.

Nothing has changed about Europe’s migration crisis, including the continued failure to find an answer to it, except that it is getting worse. The United Nations high commissioner for refugees reported on Tuesday that about 130,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean in the first two months of this year, more than the total in the first half of 2015. Winter and high seas have not stopped them, and when the weather gets better there are almost certainly going to be even more on the move.

The numbers involved are huge and the resistance in Europe to taking so many is serious and becoming more entrenched. The answer, on paper, is to share the burden fairly between European countries, on the one hand, and between Europeand the region from which most refugees come, on the other. The first difficulty is that the more generous countries, which also happen to be those that are the preferred migrant destinations, soon felt overwhelmed. They began to impose some controls.

Other countries had been ready to manage migrants when they were merely passing through, but, as soon as they grasped that the flow might stop, leaving them with large numbers to care for, collective panic set in. The increasingly large proportion of migrants who were not Syrians, but from Afghanistan, Iran and African countries, complicated the problem. Border closures followed, and now Europe is backed up like a railway after a bridge has gone down.