As more than a million migrants and refugees arrived since the start of 2015, Europe began to block itself off.

STANDOFF: African immigrants attempting to cross into Spanish territory sit atop a border fence in Melilla, as Spanish Civil Guard officers stand beneath them in August 2014.

BRUSSELS – In early March, Europe’s migration chief Dimitris Avramopoulos squelched through a muddy refugee camp on Greece’s border with Macedonia and peered through the barbed-wire topped fence that stands between tens of thousands of migrants in Greece and richer countries that lie to the north.

“By building fences, by deploying barbed wire,” he said, “it is not a solution.”