Thousands of migrants arrive in Austria

But they have little choice after Hungary sealed off its southern border with Serbia on Tuesday and began arresting anyone caught trying to enter the country illegally.

Bakondi said another 1,000-1,200 more migrants could come before the end of the day. But at Tovarnik, migrants simply walked through fields. “It was crowded, there was no food, no transport and nowhere to go”, said one of them, Ibrahim Yusuf, 25, a construction worker from Baghdad, eating chocolate wafers in the shade of a walnut tree.

As Amy Corcoran observes, while the Calais camp is becoming a quasi-society, with its own healthcare institutions and markets, the disturbing sense of alienation is starting to calcify: “Are we admitting that this is to be a permanent situation-a never-ending stream of people desperately escaping war and poverty forced to live on France’s northern shores in a forgotten and isolated ghetto, so close to the life they desire but just out of reach?” Croatia has closed its border with Serbia after being deluged with refugees since Hungary closed its doors.

Asylum-seekers who fled westward after being beaten back by tear gas and water cannon on the Hungarian-Serbian border just days earlier found themselves being returned to Serbia, where their ordeal began, after Croatia declared it could not handle the influx. “If all else fails, we should seriously consider applying the instrument of the majority decision”. “You are welcome in Croatia and you can pass through Croatia. When we go to buy groceries, we dodge the snipers”. They accuse Berlin of exacerbating the problem and encouraging the overland surge by suspending European Union rules to announce in August it would take in Syrian refugees wherever they enter the EU. “We won’t block entries, but we also won’t block exits”.

Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, called the Croatian prime minister’s handing of the migrant crisis “pathetic”.

Slovenian riot police have pepper sprayed about 500 migrants on a bridge along the Croatian border.

After suddenly finding itself in the path of Europe’s biggest tide of migrants for decades, Croatia said on Friday it could no longer offer them refuge and would wave them on, challenging the European Union to find a policy to receive them.

18 said Croatia won’t become a “collection center” for refugees and migrants in Europe.

“We are so exhausted”, said Hikmat, a bare-footed 32-year-old Syrian woman from Damascus, who said she had been traveling for two months with her son.

Most migrants don’t want to stay in Croatia.

While traumatized families remain stranded at the edges of the continent, ministers in Brussels are gridlocked over an agreement to relocate just 120,000 migrants, without any long-term plan for resettlement or coordinated EU-wide immigration reform. They are often dismissed as mere “economic migrants”-supposedly coming for work, not asylum“.

Migrants queue up for busses after they arrived at the border…

Czech authorities, meanwhile, said they were planning a military drill along the borders to test preparedness for a rush of migrants.

The roads leading to Beli Manastir were strewn with the remnants of the migrants’ overnight stay. In the town, migrants were lining up at banks, apparently looking to exchange money and possibly to pay their way to Slovenia.