Migrant Crisis Takes Toll on Europe; Europe's Free Movement under Pressure; UNHCR Says Europe Has Responsibility to Help Refugees.
CURNOW: Welcome to the INTERNATIONAL DESK. I'm Robyn Curnow. Here's a check of the headlines.</s>CURNOW (voice-over): Turkey has confirmed 18 Turkish contractors were kidnapped in Baghdad. Syrian officials say the group was working in Iraq for a construction company. Right now Turkish authorities say they don't have many details on how it happen or who may have been responsible. Syrian state television is reporting at least 10 people have been killed in a car bomb attack. It happened in the government stranglehold of Latakia, which has largely been spared the violence that is ravaging other parts of the country. State media blamed the attack on, quote, "terrorists," Syrian officials' term for anti-government forces. U.S. secretary of state is about to lobby for the Iran deal in a speech in Philadelphia in the next hour. The White House just secured the final vote is needed to prevent Republicans in the U.S. Senate from scuttling the agreement. Congress votes later this month. Hungary's prime minister will meet with European Union officials Thursday to talk about the growing migrant crisis. Hundreds of migrants hoping to board trains to Germany and Austria remain stranded in Hungary's capital, Budapest. Hungary insists they need valid passports and, in some cases, visas to travel.</s>CURNOW: The migrant crisis has thrown the Schengen agreement into the spotlight. The decades-old pact allows open travel within most of Europe and it's considered one of the cornerstones of the E.U. But some European politicians want the Schengen scaled back as Isa Soares now reports.</s>ISA SOARES, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They've escaped the horrors of war and persecution on rickety boats, on crowded trains and on all fours, crawling throughout the night, all in the hope of reaching the safety of Europe. For many, Hungary is the entry point to Europe's borderless zone, the Schengen area. But as the number of migrants reaching the Union increases daily, some have questioned the very purpose of this European project.</s>ANDREJ BABIS, CZECH FINANCE MINISTER (through translator): We really need to close the Schengen area, which means we need to protect Schengen, we need to prevent the immigrants from coming here.</s>ANGELA MERKEL, CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY (through translator): I am simply saying that if we are unable to agree on a fair distribution of refugees within Europe, then some people will start to call Schengen into question. We do not want that. We want a fair --</s>MERKEL (through translator): -- distribution of refugees and then we won't need to discuss Schengen.</s>SOARES (voice-over): Implemented in 1994, the Schengen agreement eliminated internal border controls, which allowed citizens from 26 member states to travel freely around most of Europe. Twenty years on, and Schengen remains fundamental to the very idea of the European Union. And it covers 7,721 kilometers of land borders. And what it does, it allows some 400 million E.U. citizens to work, to travel and to live in any of these E.U. countries without the need for special formalities -- and by that I mean visas and paperwork, really no red tape. Trade and security between these countries also shared. And as you can imagine, they benefit greatly from it. But some argue that with the rise of ISIS and with large numbers of migrants arriving in the bloc from Africa as well as the Middle East, a borderless Europe is exacerbating the crisis.</s>RICHARD OUKLIS, DIRECTOR, THE BRUGERS GROUP: There is actually sort of growing pressure that's welling up from some parts of the population, but also amongst various politicians, that say that the ideals of the European Union, the ideals behind the Schengen agreement, are actually causing problems and will create difficulties. So in time this could be one of the issues which really does shatter elements of the European unity.</s>SOARES (voice-over): At a time when Europe is calling for more integration, physical divisions are going up from Hungary, Bulgaria, Calais to Malia (ph), fences or walls of barbed wire are being built. It's an image that takes a continent back to 1999, when the last border fell right here in Europe -- Isa Soares, CNN, London.</s>CURNOW: Well, we want to talk more about Europe's dilemma with Iain Begg, the professor at the London School of Economics. Thanks so much for joining me. We heard there Isa's package and there seems to be this very stark choice between fair distribution or breakdown of Europe's borders. Is it that stark?</s>IAIN BEGG, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS: No, I don't think it is. What we're really seeing here is an extremely unprecedented flow of migrants coming principally from three countries, Eritrea, Syria and Afghanistan, trying to arrive in Europe as asylum seekers or refugees. And that's been compounded by a number of economic migrants coming from a number of African countries. The sheer volume is more than the entry points -- Hungary, Greece and Italy -- can cope with. And that's why they're asking the other parts of the European Union to share the burden. Now Schengen may be a complicating factor in this. But those migrants will be arriving regardless of whether Schengen was in place or not. And that's an illusion that's being fostered, that somehow Schengen is to blame for this. It just means that people can more rather more freely from one country to another than they would if strong borders exist, let's say, between Italy and France or between Hungary and Austria.</s>CURNOW: You talked about the burden, particularly being faced by Greece, Italy and Hungary. Hungary's being very vocal. They've been on this program, the spokesman saying they're doing what is expected of them under E.U. rules and regulations; however, many people have expressed disgust at the way Hungary is treating these migrants. What's your view on all of this?</s>BEGG: My view on it is that it's correct to say that Hungary's doing what it should do, which is to try to process asylum seekers in the country in which they first enter the E.U. That's a convention that's been in place for a good 20 years inside the E.U., known as the Dublin convention. Hungary is implementing it. Because of the numbers in Coventry (ph) Station in Budapest, they're having to do this in a rather harsh manner. And that's where some of the objections are coming in. They're also policing their border with Serbia, which is the point of entry, much more strictly than many other countries do; that, too, is consistent with E.U. rules, which is that you should have a strong external border and no borders inside, a bit like the U.S. has with the Rio Grande as the border between Mexico and the United States. You don't blame Texas for this. It's a policy of the states as a whole.</s>CURNOW: So there's been a lot of talk about a unified strategy. But Germany does seem to be taking the role, a leadership role, in the face of what seems to be inertia or, at least, confusion in Brussels. What do you expect is going to come out of that might in the next two weeks? And do you think anything concrete is going to be decided?</s>BEGG: I think there will be a huge amount of pressure coming from Berlin for other countries to share in absorbing the number of migrants that's coming in and specifically the asylum seekers. We must distinguish here between asylum seekers and the economic migrants, which is never an easy boundary --</s>BEGG: -- to cross. And there, I think, the Germans are saying we are taking large numbers and we're welcoming Syrians. You other countries -- and here they're talking about Slovakia. They're talking about the United Kingdom -- you're not taking your share of this. And unless you do so, we will have ways of persuading you that you won't like in other circumstances -- for example, David Cameron is trying to renegotiate Britain's position vis-a-vis the E.U. Without German support, he's not going to get very far on that.</s>CURNOW: So there's been -- and trying to put this into perspective, into historical perspective, people have said this is the greatest human migration within Europe since World War II. Does this -- does what we're seeing now have the potential to shatter the E.U.?</s>BEGG: No, I don't think so, because it's not a problem caused by the E.U. nor by the free movement inside the E.U.; it's one which has landed on the E.U.'s doorstep because of failures of foreign policy. The medium- to long-term solution is to deal with the difficulties in Syria and Eritrea, two of the countries which are the main sources of the migrants. And that cannot be done overnight because of -- it's such an intractable problem. But that's one solution to it. A second one is better security. Better security leads to precisely the sorts of pictures we see in Hungary and Greece of difficulties in absorbing the migrants and being harsh with them when they arrive. So there is a tension here about how to deal with it. The third angle to it is going to be dealing with it, once the migrants arrive, and that's where the German approach of burden sharing has to be the basis for a true answer.</s>CURNOW: OK. Iain Begg, thank you so much for giving us your perspective from London. Thank you very much.</s>BEGG: Thank you.</s>CURNOW (voice-over): Well, you're watching CNN and we're keeping an eye on Philadelphia. There you can see U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is waiting to take the podium. He is going to address the American people. He's going to try and lobby again for the Iran deal. He spoke to our Christiane Amanpour just a few moments ago, saying that in the speech he would deal with a number of myths out there about the Iran deal. We're going to go now to break. But we will take you to that speech as soon as he takes that podium. Thanks so much for watching.