European countries face an acute refugee crisis. According to the BBC, more than 100,000 people from the Middle East and North Africa reached the European Union’s borders in July alone. More than half a million are expected to arrive by the end of 2015. Yet, even after months of paralysis and several thousand dead refugees (more than 70 of them in the back of a truck in Austria on Aug. 27), Europe still lacks a coherent response to the plight of people fleeing war, famine and deprivation.

Last week, Denmark’s Liberal Party government offered to pay Turkey to halt Syrian refugees who want to come to Europe. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere had a more humane suggestion: build camps in Italy, Greece and Turkey — the first stops for refugees whose ultimate destination is western and northern Europe — “to sort through migrants seeking asylum.” The German minister said Syrian refugees could go to EU countries from the Turkish camps based on the quotas that the European Commission assigned to individual member states.

Yet, many EU countries are still hostile to the idea of accepting more refugees. In the Netherlands, the government of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, under threat from ultra-right-wing politician Geert Wilders, declared it would cut off food and shelter for people who fail to qualify as refugees. Those people would then be either deported or sent away from refugee shelters “to fend for themselves." Britain’s ever Euro-skeptic Conservative government opposes the European Commission’s refugee quotas. The Danes hope to run “information campaigns” to deter potential refugees from Syria and North Africa, while Hungary just built a 110-mile barbed wire fence along its border with Serbia.

In one respect, EU countries’ xenophobic reactions are not surprising. For years, Turks in Germany, Moroccans in the Netherlands and Algerians in France served as shorthand for Europe’s failure to integrate immigrants. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees on top of the millions of native-born foreigners, some of whom have lived in Europe for nearly a half-century, is bad news for European governments.