Now consider what that means proportionally. The United States has close to four times the population of Germany and is almost 28 times bigger territorially. In fact, Germany is much closer in size to California than it is to the United States—a bit smaller in terms of land, but about twice as populous, with a larger economy. In terms of GDP per capita, California was ahead of Germany as of 2014.

So imagine civil wars breaking out in Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Imagine between two and three times as many undocumented immigrants as enter the United States each year all heading into California, asking for asylum.

In such a scenario, California would probably benefit from a federally coordinated approach to the Central American implosion, as well as an effort to disperse the migrants across U.S. states. And that’s in a way what Germany is hoping for now in calling for a common European response to the refugee crisis. There’s more than one reason Merkel thinks the refugee issue “will decide the future of Europe.” Either the European Union will establish a unified system for sharing this burden, or it won’t, in which case efforts to build a more federalist Europe will be dealt another severe blow, on the heels of the euro zone crisis. Although the European Parliament voted 432 to 142 on Thursday in favor of relocating 120,000 asylum-seekers in Greece, Hungary, and Italy across the EU, the vote was non-binding, and the quota plan remains very much hypothetical.

All this isn’t to say that Germany is an unqualified martyr. Any discussion of the number of refugees taken in by developed countries should probably note that developing countries host the vast majority of the world’s refugees. (The United States may be a leader on resettlement, but it was Turkey that was hosting the largest number of refugees at the end of 2014, according to the UN’s refugee agency.) Additionally, as German politicians themselves have emphasized, proportionally there’s perhaps an even larger immediate strain being placed on first-port-of-entry countries like Italy and Greece—part of the reason for the gradual and quiet abandonment of an EU policy requiring asylum-seekers to apply for protection in the first EU country in which they arrive.

Germany also has a comparative advantage in absorbing asylum-seekers. “Germany has a dynamic economy and an aging population,” said Newland. “They have a relatively low proportion of women in the labor force compared to other industrialized countries, so they need labor. It’s not clear that this is exactly the labor they need, but in the long term people will be able to adapt if the facilities are available to them for education and training.” Between these demographic factors and the strength of German unions, Newland observed, conflict over incoming migrants in Germany generally isn’t about jobs, as opposed to the situation in the United States.