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Migrants arrived on Wednesday morning by ship at the port in Piraeus from the Greek island of Lesbos.Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

PIRAEUS, Greece — Amid the rancorous bickering this week by European leaders over a relocation plan to spread asylum seekers around the Continent, a Coast Guard officer stood on the dock here at Greece’s main port screaming a blunt command at a throng of rain-soaked new arrivals: Hurry up and relocate yourselves.

“Get out of here. Get on the bus! Go, go, go,” the officer shouted, ordering another shipload of Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis and others who had just been ferried from outlying Greek islands to keep moving to wherever it is in Europe they want to go.

The scene at Piraeus underscored the huge distance between decisions made in the conference rooms of Brussels and the often chaotic realities on the ground for a refugee crisis that keeps thwarting promises of a “European solution.”

This sprawling port southwest of Athens is where many of the various tributaries carrying desperate people fleeing war and poverty converge to form an unstoppable human river flowing northward, usually to Germany or Sweden.

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Drones Capture Migrant Influx to Greece

Drones show migrants fleeing in dinghies to the Greek island of Lesbos.

By REUTERS on Publish Date September 23, 2015. Watch in Times Video »

It is also the place where Europe’s disarray is on full display, particularly its failure to follow through on plans — no matter the pledges repeated in Brussels — to secure Europe’s outer borders and help front-line states like Greece to deal with the largest movement of refugees in Europe since World War II.

In fact, this week’s plan to distribute 120,000 asylum seekers — bitterly contested as it was by Eastern European nations, which were overruled — was just the latest faint stab at a unified European Union policy in the face of underfunded and embryonic blocwide agencies to deal with the crisis.

Earlier this year, the European Commission, the 28-nation bloc’s executive in Brussels, unveiled what it called the “European Agenda on Migration.” It detailed an ambitious program to “build up a coherent and comprehensive approach” to the crisis.

At its core were so-called hot spots — the places where thousands of migrants first arrive — and the establishment of “first reception facilities” in front-line states like Greece to register and screen them, putting their fingerprints in a European database.

The intent was to weed out purely economic migrants who are not fleeing war or persecution from legitimate asylum cases, reduce the risk of terrorists joining the flow, and ensure that European rules for asylum were followed.

So far, however, no “hot spot” program has actually started operating in Greece, the entry point to Europe for most of the migrants now clogging roads and trains in Macedonia, Serbia and other countries along the route north to Germany.

First proposed five months ago, they should be up and running in Greece and Italy by the end of November, European leaders agreed at a meeting Wednesday that stretched into the night.

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Migrants were taken by bus to the nearby train station for travel to Athens and beyond. But first, they were supposed to be registered, fingerprinted and screened as asylum seekers.Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

“The current chaos on our external borders must end,” Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, the body that called European leaders together to try to end their quarreling, said early Thursday. Warning that Europe could face millions of people seeking to enter its borders, he said “it is clear that the greatest tide of refugees and migrants is yet to come” and called for an end to “policies of open doors and windows.”

Helping in Piraeus to secure Europe’s eastern frontier is Grigorios Apostolou, a former Greek police officer, who now runs a six-person office set up by Frontex, the European border control agency.

From his office overlooking Piraeus port, he watches ferries steam in each day from Greek islands near Turkey with yet more migrants, but has no staff or mandate to check whether they have been properly registered, which is supposed to happen on Lesbos or wherever they first arrived on European soil.

That, he said, is the responsibility of local Greek officials. Frontex, he added, has sent about a dozen border guards and also patrol vessels, borrowed from different European states, to help the Hellenic Coast Guard in outlying islands.

But he noted, Frontex has no authority to tell the Greek authorities whom to let in and what to do with them.

In any case, he said, the migrants “are far more flexible than we are” and know how to outfox cumbersome bureaucracies. They are a lot faster, too, often moving within minutes of their arrival in Piraeus to head north.

Meanwhile, Europe’s newly approved relocation plan will take two years to put in place, and even if unwilling members of the European Union take in a share of refugees, there is little that will keep the refugees from moving where they want to go.

Continue reading the main story Graphic Seeking a Fair Distribution of Migrants in Europe German and European Union leaders have called for European countries to share the burden of absorbing the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have poured into the continent this summer.

OPEN Graphic

As such, the migrants have already proved more effective in relocating themselves, with a little help at the start from the Greek authorities.

Saddled with an economic crisis and a dysfunctional state apparatus, the Greek authorities are so eager to move the migrants on that they now arrange special ferries for them from outlying islands and provide buses to take them from Piraeus port to the nearest railway station.

“I am going to Germany where I can find work,” Saied Abdirisak, an Iranian computer technician, said after disembarking from a ferry from Lesbos, which he had reached by dinghy from Turkey, a short trip that cost him 1,300 euros (about $1,450).

In his hand he held a piece of paper issued by Greek officials at a reception center in Lesbos: It set a deadline of 30 days to “depart toward a country of his choice.” The only condition: He must get out of Greece. Syrians get six months to leave.

By midmorning, Mr. Abdirisak was already on the train from Piraeus to Athens with a group of fellow Iranians and planned to get the first train from there north toward Macedonia, which more than 4,000 migrants now reach each day.

Left behind in the rush were a heap of European rules and regulations that require all new arrivals to make an application for asylum in the country where they first land and to stay put until their request has been processed.

“There is no real system. We don’t know who all these people are,” said Rocco Gianluca, Western Balkans coordinator for the International Organization for Migration.

“This is a humanitarian issue and it also has security implications,” he added, noting that people with a good case for refugee status, such as those fleeing Syria, risk getting overlooked.

Such lax controls at the exterior border of Europe spurred a call on Wednesday from the European bloc’s top executive for measures to ensure the “common security of our external border.” They have also increasingly rankled member states that are having to deal with the exodus as it moves north from Greece.

“I think if the Greeks are not able to defend their own borders, we should ask kindly, because Greece is a sovereign country: To let the other countries of the European Union defend the Greek border,” Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, told reporters as he arrived Wednesday at a European Union summit meeting on the crisis in Brussels.

One way Europe has tried to manage the flow is through registration and fingerprinting of all those who arrive claiming asylum. But this system, too, has broken down.

The official Greek document issued to Mr. Abdirisak in Lesbos bore a stamp saying he had been fingerprinted. But he said he was not too worried because his prints had been taken on paper, not electronically.

That almost certainly means that his fingerprints have not been entered in the shared database, Eurodac, which is designed to keep track of migrants and make it possible to enforce European rules that restrict the initial movement of asylum seekers.

Part of the problem is that Greece is sorely short of the expensive equipment needed to enter migrants’ fingerprints and other data into Eurodac.

Graphic The Scale of the Migrant Crisis, From 160 to Millions The latest E.U. proposal addresses just a fraction of a human crisis numbering in the millions. OPEN Graphic

“They have some machines but not enough,” Mr. Apostolou, the local Frontex chief, said. None of the dozens of migrants interviewed in Piraeus said their prints had been taken electronically.

Another problem is that, after six years of wrenching economic crisis and constant demands for budget cuts by the European Union, Greece simply wants the migrants to move on.

In August, Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister, appealed to the European Union for help, saying, “The immigrant flow to Greece is beyond what our state infrastructure can handle.”

At the Brussels meeting, leaders agreed to send emergency aid to countries hardest hit by the crisis, as well as more than $1 billion to international agencies that are helping refugees.

More than 350,000 migrants have passed through Greece this year, according to the International Organization for Migration, but, in the first six months, only 5,475 of them had asylum applications registered here.

That compared with more than 154,000 people who registered for asylum in Germany over the same period, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency.

The gap is a measure of just how much what was supposed to be a well-ordered European system of registering asylum seekers has buckled under the weight of numbers and official inaction or obstruction.

“The paralysis is alarming,” said Claude Moraes, a member of the European Parliament and chairman of its lead committee dealing with refugee issues.

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