Europe too is divided over immigration

MARCH 22: Members of Guardia Civil hold back a crowd of people trying to cross through the Beni Enzar border point to Morocco once the gates opened again on March 22, 2014 in Melilla, Spain. Police closed the Beni Enzar border point to Morocco for two hours when tens of Syrian would-be immigrants tried to force their entry into Spain. Around 500 would-be immigrants entered the Spanish enclave of Melilla on March 17 from Morocco, forcing the Temporary Immigration Centre (CETI) to shelter around four times its capacity, which is 480 people. The army has placed temporary tents outside the Centre to make space.
Or maybe the Old Continent is just hypocritical. The billionaire George Soros of all people recently explained:

Soros: That there is an unbridgeable conflict between North and South on the political asylum issue. The countries in the North, basically the creditors, have been generous in their treatment of asylum seekers. So all the asylum seekers want to go there, particularly to Germany. But that is more than they can absorb, so they have put in place a European agreement called Dublin III, which requires asylum seekers to register in the country where they first enter the EU. That tends to be the South, namely, Italy, Spain, and Greece. All three are heavily indebted and subject to fiscal austerity. They don’t have proper facilities for asylum seekers, and they have developed xenophobic, anti-immigrant, populist political movements.

Asylum seekers are caught in a trap. If they register in the country where they arrive, they can never ask for asylum in Germany. So, many prefer to remain illegal, hoping to make their way to Germany. They are condemned to illegality for an indefinite period. The miserable conditions in which they live feed into the anti-immigrant sentiment.

New York Review of Books

The European Union has granted asylum to some 60,000-100,000 refugees from the civil war in Syria; so far, 9 million Syrians have been displaced and some 2.5 million are living in neighboring countries.