The great walk north…

On Monday, French President Francois Hollande announced his country will accept 24,000 migrants over the next two years.

Outside the European Union, British Prime Minister David Cameron said the United Kingdom will resettle up to 20,000 Syrians from camps in Turkey, Jordan and Syria over the next five years.

More than 15,000 refugees and migrants are stranded on Lesbos, awaiting screening before they can board a ferry to the Greek mainland – from where they head north through Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary to seek asylum in more prosperous European countries.

But dramatic images from last week, especially a photograph of a Syrian toddler drowned on a Turkish beach, have created new political pressure to open doors, even in countries that argued previously that taking in too many migrants could make the problem worse by encouraging others to make risky voyages.

There was no sign the crisis was easing, with a deep well of millions of refugees fueling a almost endless supply of people making the risky voyage to Europe.

But Merkel repeated her government’s position that migrants who don’t meet the criteria for asylum need to be returned to their home countries.

The migrants who arrive in Germany will be distributed among the country’s 16 states based on a quota system that takes into account their population and tax revenues. “If somebody has some money or a passport for a visa, it’s better”, said Hassan Halabi from Aleppo in Syria, who hopes to go to Konstanz on the Swiss border.

“We represent the position of what the Americans call ‘first things first, ‘” Orban told Hungarian ambassadors meeting in Budapest.

The organized, open-armed approach taken by Austria and Germany stands in stark contract with the way migrants have been treated by authorities in Hungary, as aid workers are providing refugees with food, water, travel arrangements, and lodging. We can’t do this without European solidarity, ‘ Merkel said.

Hungarian police said Tuesday that they have detained more than 169,000 people for “crossing the border illegally” this year, including 2,706 on Monday.

“We should not pretend that this is a small task”, Gabriel said.

“There is no society that could cope with something like this”, CSU leader and Bavarian premier Horst Seehofer said.

There were new details on Monday about an emerging European Union plan to accommodate more refugees, but they appeared to fall far short of the need.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is due to unveil new proposals on Wednesday on how to distribute refugees among member states.

“It’s not possible to think any longer about registering people at all“, Hillenbrand said. They will then be sent to towns around France where mayors have said they are willing to take in refugees.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has clashed with Austria and Germany over the handling of Europe’s immigrant crisis, pledged to seal the country’s borders, threatening illegal entrants with expulsion or arrest. He said that Europe’s “Christian roots” were at threat of being overrun by the crowds of mostly Muslim asylum-seekers. That appeal, if honored, would offer shelter to tens of thousands. “It has nothing to do with security”, Orban told a conference of ambassadors in Budapest, according to Reuters.

Hungary’s inability to control the flow of people across its southern border with Serbia was on graphic display Monday.

Hungary will open another migrant camp in the south, as migrants continue entering the country, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said Sunday. Hundreds of people, including small children, had to sleep outdoors overnight with temperatures dipping into the low 50s.

The Swedish Migration Agency says about 700 asylum-seekers have arrived in Malmo in the past week, a lot of them Syrians.