How many more lives must be lost before nations everywhere, including Australia, recognise their universal duty to assist in what has become the greatest crisis of refugees and mass migration since World War II?

Many hundreds of thousands of people have crossed into Europe this year, most carrying nothing more than their children. This huge wave of migration is being powered by criminal gangs in some regions and by sheer desperation in others. Persecution and poverty, civil war and terrorism, and the hope of better conditions elsewhere are the push factors.

The several hundred thousand people who have migrated represent only a fraction of those who would, if they could: millions more endure dangerous and hopeless conditions under regimes that are catastrophically incompetent, corrupt or riven by war.

That influential neighbouring nations, and the wealthy handful of nations that sit at the UN Security Council, did not intervene earlier (or at all) to alleviate or rout those ills is deeply regrettable. But sending thousands of people back to their home countries is unlikely to stop them or others returning and seeking a better life in Europe.

England and France estimate about 340,000 refugees and potential migrants have entered Europe from northern Africa, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Albania and the Balkan states in the first six months of 2015. In July alone, another 110,000 followed: triple the number that arrived in the same month a year ago. Since then, the rate of arrivals has escalated.

Europe is only just starting to comprehend the profound, long-term ramifications of this. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel suggests the mass arrivals of refugees will “preoccupy us much, much more than the issue of Greece and the stability of the euro”.

Indeed, Germany expects 800,000 asylum seekers and potential migrants will cross its borders this year