During 2015 the European Union experienced what many media commentators and European politicians called a crisis with close to one million migrants, mostly asylum seekers, arriving through the southern islands and port cities of Italy and Greece. The majority of the migrants were Syrians who had fled the civil war and had come to Europe after spending considerable time in the overcrowded refugee camps that were running short of basic supplies such as food and water. The “crisis” from the perspective of the dominant European debate is a crisis of the arrival of these irregular migrants in such large numbers. Yet at its heart this is a crisis of political will. Though there are many voices in the European debates, a strong thread of continuity voiced early by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel and later by others has been one of shared responsibility and finding a just solution rather than closing borders.