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German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her decision to let tens of thousands of refugees into the country, even as she stepped up efforts to get those who don’t qualify for safe haven to leave.

“Right now we need to return to an orderly and transparent handling of the huge number of refugees,” Merkel said after discussing the crisis with leaders of Germany’s 16 states on Tuesday. While “people who need protection will receive it,” there was agreement “that those who have no perspective to remain cannot stay in our country,” she said.

Germany’s armed forces will deploy 800 service members to office duty in the next few days to help process requests for asylum that have swollen with this summer’s influx, Merkel told reporters in Berlin. Last weekend, Germany restored border controls as the refugee flood turned into a deluge.

European Union countries are bickering over how to tackle the region’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, with some joining Germany in calling for a Europe-wide sharing of the burden and others saying Merkel’s welcoming attitude is encouraging more to come. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken the toughest stance, with his government announcing plans Tuesday to extend a wire fence on the border with Serbia to part of the country’s frontier with Romania, which is a fellow EU member.

Merkel, speaking alongside her Austrian counterpart Werner Faymann earlier Tuesday, proposed an emergency summit of EU leaders next week after member countries failed to agree on binding quotas to distribute migrants. Germany had to reintroduce checks along the border with Austria to restore some order, Merkel said.

“On the one hand, this impulse was the right one, but it’s also natural to look at this and consider how we can do these things so that our security interests are served,” she said. “We haven’t closed the borders -- I don’t want that, pushing the burden to Austria either.”

Police officers stop refugees crossing the border between Hungary and Serbia on Monday. Photographer: Thomas Campean /Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Under the EU’s proposal to redistribute refugees, Germany, France and Spain would take the biggest number, with scattered eastern opposition leaving the 28-member bloc short of the target of 120,000. Battling whether the quotas are voluntary or mandatory, the ministers pledged Monday to try and find agreement at their next meeting in October.

Governance Questions

“The biggest uncertainty for sovereign ratings involves Europe’s ability

to find cooperative solutions to this continental challenge,” Standard & Poor’s wrote in a report released Tuesday. “An elusive compromise could indicate that the EU still has governance problems, which we consider a key factor when rating sovereigns.”

As the EU debate continued, Hungary closed the region’s southeastern frontier, blocking the main route for migrants who’ve come in the hundreds of thousands in recent months, many hoping to go to Germany from countries such as Syria. Authorities set up a transit point in no-man’s land between the Hungarian and Serbian border, where several hundred refugees waited Tuesday.

Merkel has been criticized by some in her governing coalition as the country struggles to keep up with the influx and by leaders in eastern Europe who say they are confused by her changing stance.

“Germany invited all registered Syrians to come, only to close the border a few days later,” Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said at at press conference on Tuesday. “We don’t understand these steps.”

In Hungary, the cabinet Tuesday declared a “state of crisis” in two border counties after police intercepted a record 9,380 people illegally crossing over a 24-hour period. After new laws took effect at midnight that made it a crime to cross without permission, police guarded the fence along the 175-kilometer-long (109-mile-long) border with Serbia.

The Austrian border is the main entry point for refugees flooding into Germany, with many of those migrants first entering the EU through Hungary.

Austria plans to start checks along its border with Hungary on Wednesday, the country’s interior ministry posted on Twitter.

Safe Status

While the Hungarian government has said its aim is to usher migrants to official crossings, they have little hope of gaining entry. That’s because Hungary’s parliament has granted Serbia“safe status,” meaning anyone coming from that country who isn’t registered will be automatically sent back, according to government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs. Serbia responded that it won’t accept the return of refugees that have already crossed into Hungary.

“I’ve got two options now -- be killed in Afghanistan or be imprisoned in Hungary,” said Hakim, a 30-year-old Afghani who declined to give his last name. “We’re going to come up with a third option.”

— With assistance by Rainer Buergin, Arne Delfs, Ian Wishart, James G Neuger, Lenka Ponikelska, Zoltan Simon, Edith Balazs, Gordana Filipovic, Andra Timu, and Andras Gergely