The British government has release new migration figures which show that net migration into Britain rose to 333,000 last year - 20,000 more than in 2014. About 308,000 of these immigrated to Britain for work, an increase of 30,000 from 2014. Just under 60 percent had a specific job waiting for them, but 42 percent arrived looking for work, which, the government notes, is a statistically significant increase from 104,000 the previous year. The information released by the Office for National Statistics is politically significant now, as Britain is a month away from a referendum on whether to remain in or leave the EU.

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip increasingly fear that the ongoing construction of Hamas tunnels in residential areas means that their lives will be in danger if a future war breaks out between the terrorist group and Israel. While Israel destroyed 32 terror tunnels during the 2014 war, Israeli officials have been warning for some time that Hamas has rebuilt much of its underground infrastructure.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, has said that for the EU to offer visa-free access to the EU zone to millions of Turks would be like “storing gasoline next to the fire.” He said that the impact of mass migration is “eating away at the willingness of EU states to act together.” He added that this is making the EU “impotent in the face of the most serious social and humanitarian problem” it has had to face. He also said that the failure by the “present configuration of twenty-eight vastly differing national interests” to meet the challenge of migration may well be an indication that the EU has outlived its historical role.

Conflict and violence internally displaced 27.8 million people in 2015. The number of people internally displaced by disasters in 2015 was 19.2 million in 113 countries. Additionally, at least a million people were forcibly displaced by criminal violence in Mexico and Central America, and tens of millions more by development projects such as dams and urban renewal projects.

Germany and Italy on Thursday expressed strong objections to what the leaders of the two countries described as the “unjustified” proposal from Austria to erect a fence at Austria’s alpine border with Italy to stem the flow of migrants into the country. Austrian presidential candidate compared the leaders of Germany and Italy to migrant smugglers bringing people over the Mediterranean in shoddy, overcrowded boats.

Critics of the plan to give Turkish citizen visa-free access to the EU zone say the measure could allow these travelers to disappear because the European Union does not have a system to detect visitors who overstay their visas. The critics say that the problem is compounded by plans to grant vis-free travel to the fifty-two million people from Ukraine, Kosovo, and Georgia. In normal times, visa overstays account for the majority of illegal migrants in Europe.

More than 500 million people live in the Middle East and North Africa — a region which is very hot in summer and where climate change is already evident. The temperature during summer in the already very hot Middle East and North Africa will increase more than two times faster compared to the average global warming. This means that during hot days temperatures south of the Mediterranean will reach around 46 degrees Celsius (approximately 114 degrees Fahrenheit) by mid-century. As a result, the number of climate refugees could increase dramatically in future.

Smugglers of drugs and illegal migrants using tunnels along the U.S.-Mexico border may want to keep an eye on Israel. The U.S. government is cosponsoring the tunnel-detection technology now being developed by Israeli engineers. This latest innovation hit world headlines upon the announcement that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) uncovered a two-kilometer-long, concrete-lined tunnel on its Gaza border.

From 1986 to 2010, the United States spent $35 billion on border enforcement, but the net rate of undocumented population growth doubled. The rapid escalation of border enforcement over the past three decades has backfired as a strategy to control undocumented immigration between Mexico and the United States, according to new research that suggests further militarization of the border is a waste of money.