Throughout 2015, the EU tried hard to come to grips with the crisis. And a solid legal foundation for harmonized immigration and asylum policies was sorely lacking, as member states had insisted on preserving much of their autonomy in this area. The common institutions created to support the management of Schengen-namely Frontex, which works on border control, and the European Asylum Support Office-could do little to overcome the crisis, as they were neither empowered nor sufficiently funded to play more than auxiliary roles. This imposed an equally unsustainable burden on other member states, where most of the refugees ended up, primarily Germany, but also Sweden, Austria, the Benelux countries, and Finland. Greece and Italy no longer fulfilled their obligations and allowed refugees to move on to wherever they wanted. In the face of a massive inflow of refugees, the EU’s Dublin Regulation, which assigns the responsibility for registering and processing asylum applications to the first Schengen country in which refugees arrive, proved unfair and ultimately unsustainable. Similar to the EU’s monetary union, the Schengen system of open borders turned out to be a fair-weather arrangement lacking the robustness to cope with crisis situations.
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