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Moises Saman shot the central path of the modern migrant crisis, a sea route to Greece and a land scramble to potential salvation in the north.

This project is in partnership with Magnum Photos

Desperate migrants used to leave Europe by the thousands, fleeing war, poverty and persecution. Many flocked to America, where editorial cartoonists drew them as animals and politicians tried to keep them out. But if Europe used to populate the world, the world is now populating Europeand a new era of exclusion is just getting started.

The numbers compare to the largest migrations of the 20th century. More than one million people pressed into Europe in 2015, a four-fold increase over the year before, which itself was a new millennium high.

Most came through the Greek islands, where there are no signs of a slowdown. By the end of February 2016, 75,000 more people had arrived, a sum 25 times greater than the figure for the same period last year, and a worrying sign ahead more favorable spring weather.

The result, especially on the Greek island of Lesbos, is a kind of Ellis Island for the 21st century. Its a crash zone for tomorrows grandmothers and grandfathers, the future subjects of elementary school family tree projects.

Instead of descending from the decks of steamships, however, they step off rubber dinghies. Instead of ducking dictators and kings, they run from terrorists and warlords.

They turn away from ISIS in Iraq, civil war in Syria, and religious violence throughout the Middle East and North Africa. What they face in exchange is a wall of public anxiety, virulent populism and the threat of closed borders for thousands of miles.

That is, if they make it at all.

More than 3,500 migrants died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in 2015. Hundreds more perished in the first weeks of this year.

This is a new problem for Europe.

After the Second World War, Winston Churchill dreamed of a kind of united states, a place whose moral conception will win the respect and gratitude of mankind and whose physical strength will be such than none dare molest her tranquil sway.

Postwar Europe would be a welcoming place, he argued, where men and women of every country will think of being European as belonging to their native land, and wherever they go in this wide domain will truly feel here I am at home.

The eventual result: the Schengen Agreement, a three-decade-old arrangement that allows a person to travel 26 countries without showing his or her passport. This ease of movement, in addition to wealth and promise, is what lures migrants to Europe.

Its also what makes many native Europeans nervous. Churchills Europe was overwhelmingly white and Christian. Terrorism was little-known, and the Muslim population was virtually zero.

Todays Europe has changed, and so has its security, fueling a climate of fear thats focused on Islam.

The Muslim population on the continent is more than 15 million, including nearly 5 million in France and Germany, 3 million in the United Kingdom, 2 million in Italy and about a million in the Netherlands.

Those figures, compiled by the Pew Research Center, dont even include the latest wave of migration dominated by Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Moroccans and people from other countries in North Africa, the majority of them Muslim. Like the Europeans who fled for America in the early and mid-20th century, these immigrants are a mix of asylum-seekers and financial-dreamers. Many (perhaps most) are running from war and conflict. Others are seeking jobs and better lives.

What they have in common is bad timing and political misfortune.

On March 11, 2004, during the morning rush hour in Madrid, 10 bombs destroyed four commuter trains, killing 200 people and wounding a thousand. It was the deadliest terror attack in Europe since Churchills beautiful vision of a borderless continent. It was also the first in a string of attacks by Muslim assailants, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants.

The next came in London in 2005. Four suicide bombers detonated rucksacks, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds more. It was the single worst terror attack on British soil.

In 2015, Paris suffered the worst one-two terror punch in its history: a massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last January, followed by a mid-November eruption of suicide bombings, spree shootings, and gory executions. More than 140 people died.

As a result, Europes tranquil sway has become a turbulent clash, pitting the biggest refugee crisis since World War II against perhaps the fiercest populism in a generation or more. Germany alone tells the story. Last year, the country counted more than a million new arrivals, including a large number from the Balkans in addition to the Mediterranean routes through Greece and Italy.

We can do it! became the mantra of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Polls showed that a majority of Germans agreed. While other countries put up fences and tightened border checks in defiance of the Schengen ideal, Germany seemed to revel in its fresh reputation for openness and acceptance.

But on New Years Eve, police described gangs of predators with a North African or Arabic appearance, groping, robbing and even raping the women of Cologne, Germany. When at least 21 of the alleged assailants were identified as asylum-seekers, a switch in Germany seemed to flip.

An anti-Islamization demonstration vandalized downtown Leipzig. Der Spiegel criticized Merkel for overseeing an era of crime and chaos. In the reconsidered opinion of most Germans, meanwhile, the country had too many migrants, according to a poll published by the German daily Bild. Back in September, the numbers were nearly reversed.

Finally, Merkel herself changed her tone. She pledged a crackdown on criminal asylum seekers.

Europe at large is even tougher. At every recent meeting of the European Union, the migrant crisis has dominated discussion, with most leaders still resisting a mandatory plan to share 160,000 refugees across the continent. Many months after the plan was announced, fewer than 500 people had been placed in new homes. Thats about 10 percent of the daily flow into Greece.

Pope Francis tried to intervene in January. He acknowledged the inevitable difficulties of absorbing new people but held out hope that Europes humanistic spirit would prevail. For now, Europes elected leaders respectfully disagree.

We have forgotten, French prime minster Manuel Valls recently told reporters, that history is fundamentally tragic.

MOISES SAMAN was born in Lima, Peru, from a mixed Spanish and Peruvian family, and he grew up in Spain. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Human Rights Watch, Newsweek, and Time, among other international publications. He has been honored with multiple awards and is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. As a photojournalist, I am interested in searching for the positive commonalities in human spirit, to expose those intimate moments among people that remind us of dignity and hope in the face of conflict. His forthcoming book, Discordia, a personal memory of the nearly four years he spent living and working as a photojournalist in the Middle East during the Arab Spring from 2011 to 2014, was published in March 2016. Saman became a full member of Magnum in 2014. He now lives in Spain.

Excerpt from:
Fleeing to Europe the migrant crisis | MSNBC