and what is life like for ordinary syrian civilians? the world is focusing on this because these refugees are showing up in europe. you just gave 400,000 as the people who have kraffed the mediterranean to europe every year. that s a lot of people, but it s less than one-tenth of one percent. it s a number of europeans can handle. lebanon today, between 20 and 25% of the population is composed of syrian refugees. so the countries of the region have been accepting a much larger burden. but you wouldn t know that from europe where all this belly-aching is taking place. and we saw richard reporting on the hungary/serbian border and the fence that s been put up by the hungarian government. they want to curb the flow of people coming through their country. i ve got to say, nobody wants
those migrants. we re joint now on the phone by nbc s richard engel who s on the serbian side of the hungary/serbian border right now. give us a sense of what you are experiencing and most importantly what the migrants there are up against as they try to move toward europe. reporter: this came somewhat unexpectedly. we thought that hungary would close its border in about six hours from now. but just a short while ago, perhaps one hour ago, hungarian police stood in rows. they moved up to the border. they fanned out. and they physically blocked the main crossing. it is the now-famous image that train tracks from serbia where people have been flowing daily by the thousands into hungary. now that train tracks is blocked off by riot police. they are telling migrants who are still arriving to go to
ha hungarian/serbian border. they re waiting to get on buses bound for austria. that s where richard engel is standing by for us. richard? reporter: alex, things here are still quite tense along the serbian/hungarian border. police forces are corralling people so they can be loaded on to buses. a lot of these people do not want to get on these buses. they don t want to be fingerprinted, they don t want to be kept in these lines and they don t want to be separated from their families, because that is also happening as people get on one bus, sometimes children are taken from their parents. they are separated. so a lot of these people are incredibly nervous. and that is why we see so many cops here. because there have been riots. there have been attempts by people to escape. and all of this could get a lot worse in the coming days, because hungary has promised to dramatically increase the security presence in this border area, sending police, sending more soldiers.
the hungarian/serbian border. we heard of one woman whose husband had a heart attack five days ago. he was taken to the hospital and shep doesn t know if he s alive or dead. there s a vast situation here at the border. and one of the problems is the hungarian authorities don t want to ask for assistance to treat the people properly. they have no interpretors or doctors. nothing to treat the people in the humane way. the migrants are trying to make it to hungary before this fence is finished along the hungarian border. they hope to have the barbed wire fence done by october. it is 4 meters high. it is shaping up to be the most controversial crisis.
the source. hungary also warned as of next week people entering the country illegally will be arrested. nbc s chief foreign correspondent richard engel is along the hungarian serbian border and with a welcome to you, what s the scene like there today? well, a lot of work is going on to finish this border fence. the hungarian government is calling for billions of dollars to help it secure its border but the primary effort right now is to finish the last parts of this hundred-mile-long 12-foot-high razor wire-reinforced fence and the government expects that by next week some time the fence should be complete or more or less complete and that it will begin a new stage of dealing with the migrants where migrants who cross illegally into hungary are going to be treated more like criminals not refugees. right now there is a scene of