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 – quadruple the number that arrived last year, and a big revision from its January estimate of 300,000.

On Saturday, the Italian navy rescued more than 4400 refugees from inflatable dinghies and crowded fishing vessels in the Mediterranean. Many hundreds more have died attempting the crossing from Libya and Tunisia.

On the Greek island of Kos this northern summer, thousands of Syrian refugees have sailed from Bodrum and other ports in southern Turkey to arrive, hungry, desperate and destitute, on beaches sprinkled with bikini-clad tourists.

The island’s administrative and security forces have been overwhelmed. There is insufficient food and general care facilities, and almost no capacity to process them. More than 2500 of the refugees on Kos were locked into a football stadium on Wednesday by police, many left without water or any shelter from the scorching sun.

On Greece’s northern border, about 2000 mainly Syrian refugees were repelled by Macedonia’s security forces on Saturday, but were allowed to pass unimpeded on Sunday. And at the French port of Calais, about 3000 people are camped in squalid conditions, waiting for a chance to cross to England.

England and France describe mass migration as a structural, global challenge. They have beefed up their border control and return strategies. But the millions of refugees and migrants on the move around the world deserve humanitarian responses and justice in processing their claims for asylum.

The migration crisis in Europe is on a scale that far exceeds what went on in Australian waters in recent years, but both require swift and sustainable regional and global solutions, not unilateral measures that are predicated on locking people up for years without hope.