Slovenia is planning to employ private security firms to help the tiny mountainous country of 2 million manage the flow of tens of thousands of refugees entering the country on their way to countries in northern Europe. The interior ministry said 50-60 private security guards would help the country’s small police force where and when necessary. EU members have committed themselves to sending 400 police officers from different EU countries to Slovenia to help the country deal with the flow of refugees.

The EU has called for an urgent mini summit with leaders of several Balkan countries on the refugee crisis. The call came in response to Slovenia’s decision the other to block the entry of refugees into Slovenia, and leave them in a make-shift tent camps on the border between Slovenia and Croatia, where the refugees are exposed to the increasingly cold and wet late-fall weather. Croatia began to direct refugees to Slovenia after Hungary closed its own borders to refugees. Since Saturday, when Hungary sealed off its border with Croatia, more than 24,450 refugees have arrived in Slovenia, a tiny mountainous country of two million people.

A new report finds that British Muslims are least likely to hold professional or managerial jobs of any religious group in Britain — at only half the average level (16 to 30 percent) — and that more likely to be unemployed or living in poverty. The report calls for urgent action from government, employers, universities, and within the Muslim community to encourage economic participation and prevent conscious or unconscious discrimination.

From 2003 to 2013, the number of scientists and engineers residing in the United States rose from 21.6 million to 29 million. An important factor in that increase: over the same time period, the number of immigrant scientists and engineers went from 3.4 million to 5.2 million. Immigrants went from making up 16 percent of the science and engineering workforce to 18 percent, according to a new report.

Once again Mark Borkowski has testified before Congress in recent months, detailing the status of the Arizona Technology Plan, or what he calls the “Plan.” According to Borkowski’s testimony, new border wall surveillance infrastructure and technology are already failing to meet management deadlines; he also acknowledges a highly critical GAO report on the status of his newest border security plan. The Plan is the lynchpin of the Southern Border and Approaches Campaign – previously called the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet). SBInet never worked and fell hopelessly behind schedule, and in 2011 DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano pulled the plug on it. SBInet was preceded by other costly border-security technology failure – for example, the Intelligent Computer-Aided Detection system (ICAD11 and ICAD 111), the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System (ISIS), the American Shield Initiative (ASI),the Secure Border Initiative Tactical Initiative (SBI TI), and Project 28. Despite these failures, the CBP has not constructed a reasonable way in which to measure the success or failure of its new $1 billion dollar Plan. How many times does CBP’s Borkowski get to fail?

Australian immigration minister, Peter Dutton, has confirmed that Australian officials are conducting health and security checks on 200 Syrian refugees who are slated for resettlement in Australia. In early September, the then-prime minister, Tony Abbott, said Australia would make 12,000 additional permanent humanitarian visa places available for Syrians and Iraqis fleeing their countries. Dutton stressed that Australia was not going to be “slack” when it came to security and background checks.

Two very different responses to the crisis are emerging on each side of Europe. The West might be failing to handle the crisis well but the east is simply rejecting any role in it. Resentment is building on both sides and is threatening European unity. Racism of course exists in Western Europe, but the strength of feeling in eastern and central Europe, among politicians as well as the general public, has caused alarm. Western Europeans are disgusted by how refugees are being treated in the east, which is even beginning to cause diplomatic tension. This crisis has raised a lot of questions about what it means to be European, nowhere more so than in the east of the continent. Fissures are appearing under the strain and if common cultural ground can’t be found soon, this could signal an end to the union.

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday that the United States will accept an extra 30,000 refugees from around the world over the next two years. Kerry said the total number of refugees taken by the United States yearly would rise from 70,000 to 85,000 next year and to 100,000 in 2017. Earlier this month, the White House said it would take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year, and raising the cap on the total number of refugees would allow this move. U.S. officials noted that the names of the Syrian refugees accepted by the United States over the next year would be drawn from a list of about 18,000 that the United Nations prepared before the current influx of migrants in Europe.

During the immediate postwar years, Germany – then divided into West Germany and East Germany – absorbed between 12 and 14 million people of German descent who were forcibly expelled from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Soviet Union. At least 500,000 had died as a result of hunger or disease. Substantial though today’s exodus from the Middle East may be, it pales in comparison to the situation Germany faced and surmounted after the war. The arrival of up to a million newcomers in 2015 presents real challenges, but a prosperous European Union with a population in excess of 500 million has the means to overcome them. The fact that nearly three-quarters of the refugees are healthy working-age men, in contrast to the expelled population of seventy years ago, will further reduce the economic burden of absorption. The problem is different: Long before the limits of Europe’s demographic or economic absorptive capacities are reached, voters are likely to rebel against open-ended commitments to find homes for the victims of collapsing states and civil wars in the Middle East. If the continent’s leaders are not to bring about fundamental political and cultural changes – changes which are acceptable to an increasingly anxious population – then it seems clear that they will have to demonstrate their ability to address the problem of forced migration at its source.