Serbian border

But they say it was love at first sight.

One day last March, 20-year-old Noora Arkavazi and her family -- her parents, her younger brother and sister -- reached the Serbian border. They had left their home in Diyala, Iraq, months earlier, heading to Europe to flee the fighting between ISIS militants and the Iraqi coalition. "We were traveling, like any refugees," she explains.

Bobi Dodevski was the only officer on shift who spoke English that day.

 Then they jostled to formally enter the country so they could quickly leave it, heading toward more prosperous European Union nations on a desperate quest to escape war and poverty.

In Roszke, a Hungarian border town, migrants mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan requesting asylum were being processed by authorities. Police used tear gas to break up a brief scuffle involving about 200 migrants, saying the migrants were growing impatient with delays in the registration process caused by the growing number of arrivals.

According to police data, 2,093 migrants were detained Monday, the highest figure so far this year. Over the past week, the daily average was of 1,493 migrants.

The surge comes after nearly 10,000 people, including many women with babies and small children mostly from Syria, rushed across the Macedonian border into Serbia over the weekend.

Another 1,000 arrived in Serbia Tuesday morning and their next stop is most likely to be EU-member Hungary.

Peter Szijjarto said that the 4-meter (13-foot) high fence would "defend Hungary and the European Union from the startling scale of illegal immigration pressure." Szijjarto said that police had detained more than 68,000 people who according to the government entered Hungary illegally this year, nearly all arriving from Serbia.

"The work will start at eight to 10 locations at the same time ... in the areas most exposed to the immigration pressure," Szijjarto said on state television. "This means the areas most used by human traffickers."