Because of the coronavirus crisis, foreign seasonal farmworkers cannot enter Germany right now. Could refugees and asylum seekers replace them? This is being debated among German politicians. According to the interior ministry, there are over 150,000 refugees looking for work.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said his country will in no way turn into a "parking lot" for tens or hundreds of thousands of migrants, following Turkey's decision to open its borders toward Greece to refugees on its soil.
Hundreds of migrants staged a demonstration on Saturday in which scuffles broke out with the Bosnian police. The migrants were protesting conditions at camps and their treatment by border authorities.
About 200 migrants gathered at Serbia’s border with Hungary on Thursday. Their demand: To be let into the European Union. But on Friday, they were bused to asylum centers further inside Serbia.
Germany desperately needs medical professionals, and many in the Western Balkans are just as keen on a way out of their home countries. Highly skilled migrants are rushing westwards in a seemingly unstoppable wave.
The Slovenian government has presented a draft law to limit the activities of self-styled "village guards" created to control the border, many of whom do so as part of an anti-migrant trend.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) have warned that the conditions of migrants stuck on the border in Bosnia are worsening by the day. The organization says migrants there are forced to live in inhumane conditions and that they are reportedly subjected to violence by Croatian police when they try to cross the border.
After being overwhelmed with migrants, authorities in the Bosnian city of Bihac moved hundreds of them to an old garbage dump. DW looks into key elements of what has become an escalating crisis.
In EU member state Slovenia, paramilitaries say they are facing down a migrant 'threat' on the border with Croatia. Their patrols includes trying to catch migrants climbing over the border fence and signalling their presence to the police. The founder and group commander this year served time in jail for forming the vigilante group and urging the overthrow of state institutions.
The Bosnian government claims none of the local communities in the country agreed to the construction of new migrant centers in their territories.
A group of NGOs in Italy and the Balkans have denounced that migrants along the Balkan migrant route continue to be illegally expelled from one state to the next. The Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe meanwhile has warned of a "humanitarian emergency" due to squalid conditions at the Vucjak migrant camp in Bosnia.
Around 1500 migrants were rounded up in northwestern Bosnia and moved to a camp in the country on Wednesday. The town of Bihac cannot provide adequate shelter for these people in the winter weather, authorities said.