By then there were numerous possible routes. From Greece migrants would travel through Macedonia and then north on up through Serbia. From Serbia they could either keep going straight up through Hungary and then Austria until finally arriving in Germany, or make it to the same destination by going through Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria. Those hoping to travel from Italy to Germany or the northern European states had the choice of either heading out of Italy by moving north and then west, past Genoa and through Ventimiglia and other routes along the coast to France. Or they could go to the other side of Italy and cross the Italian-Austrian border.

By early September 2015 the Hungarian authorities among others announced that they were overwhelmed by the numbers being encouraged to come and declared the situation in their country to be out of control. The Hungarian government tried to prevent the influx by stopping trains from leaving Hungary for Germany. Around 14,000 people were arriving in Munich each day. Over the course of a single weekend 40,000 new arrivals were expected. The German Chancellor had her deputy spokesman announce that Germany would not turn refugees away. And so the migrants headed off on foot along the motorways and train tracks of Hungary. The world watched as huge columns of mainly male migrants surged up through Europe. It was then, during the autumn of 2015, that the European dream of a borderless continent began to end. Having spent decades bringing the borders of Europe down for Europeans, the influx of this unknown number of non-Europeans meant that the borders of Europe began to go back up again.

Hungary, among other states, was singled out for criticism by the German Chancellor and the heads of the EU for appearing to revert back to national boundaries. But the country had been under a considerable strain not of its own making. In 2013 it had registered around 20,000 asylum seekers. In 2014 that number doubled to 40,000. During the first three months of 2015 Hungary had more people arrive in the country than in the whole of the previous year. By the end of the year the police had registered around 400,000 people. These migrants, almost all heading to Germany or Scandinavia, were entering Hungary from Serbia or Croatia at the rate of up to 10,000 a day. Most of them were people who had come through Greece and who should have been registered there. Hungarian authorities believed that perhaps one in ten of the total number of people moving into their territory had been registered in the correct way in Greece. As the Hungarians saw it, the Greeks had simply failed to comply with the Schengen Agreement and EU law.