Ceuta, Lesbos, Lampedusa: Brutal Realities

This has been the reality on the EU's external borders for years now: people want to enter illegally, and governments want to stop them. The borders are harsh places. That is not only true of Ceuta, but also of the Spanish autonomous city of Melilla on the northwest coast of Africa and of the sea border between Turkey and Greece, where Greek officials simply abandon migrants and refugees who run into difficulties on the sea, instead of giving them a chance to claim asylum. It is also true of the waters around Libya, where migrant boats on the way to Europe are stopped by the coastguard, who have little concern for human rights.

Libya, Ceuta, Lesbos – these places seem far away. But hundreds of migrants arrive in Germany every day from Poland. With Belarus encouraging migrants to use it as a path to cross into the EU, Minister President of the German state of Saxony Michael Kretschmer (CDU) has called for "fences" and "probably also walls" to be built on the Polish–Belarusian border.

The alternative is a world without borders.

That kind of suggestion, which has gained support from German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, naturally causes a stir in Germany, where harsh border controls are scoffed at (take Trump's wall, for example), a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Green Party leader Robert Habeck has called for the migrants to be fairly distributed among EU countries, saying that "humanitarian standards must be met," although he's not specified which ones.

Let's be honest: border enforcement is tough, and it's tough to watch. The alternative would be a world without borders, and that is nothing more than a pretty utopia.