Refugee Crisis in the European Union

This chapter outlines the myriad push and pull factors that led to the refugee crisis, describes the scale of the migration, and discusses how the European Union (EU) nations and the EU as a whole responded to the crisis. Four push factors are described: the change in migration policy in Macedonia that opened up the Balkan route to the EU, the war in Syria, political and economic instability in sub-Saharan Africa, and climate change. The primary pull factors are economic opportunities and political and religious freedoms. The discussion of the scale of the migration and how each nation responded provides in-depth discussion of how individual EU nations responded to the refugee crisis.