By Sarah Kaufman
A bottleneck ballooned in the Balkans on Sunday as migrants and refugees were barred from reaching Western Europe by a domino of restrictive government policies.
First, Hungary closed its border to migrants and refugees on Saturday due to security concerns. Then, Slovenia said it would only allow 2,500 people to pass per day. Slovenia justified its decision by saying that because neighboring Austria only allows 1,500 people to cross daily it needs to stem the flow of migrants crossing its own border.
But the blockages aren't stopping migrants and refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere from trying to take the Balkan route that goes from Turkey through Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia to western European countries like Germany and Sweden.
Here are the numbers you need to know behind the latest bottleneck in the migrant and refugee crisis:
4,000 cold and tired peopleAlmost 4,000 migrants and refugees waited on Sunday for hours in Croatia, while thousands more in Serbia waited to cross into Croatia.
4 hours on a bus"We are waiting here 4 hours on the bus," Muhammad Samin from Afghanistan told the Associated Press. "The weather is too cold. We wear lots of shirts. The children are also in the cold. No food." Samin is one of thousands waiting in Serbia to get to Croatia.
1/4 accepted into AustriaWhile the UN Refugee Agency said 4,000 migrants and refugees crossed into Slovenia on Saturday, before the new restriction, Austria had only accepted 1,000 of them by Sunday, the BBC reported. That means three-fourths of them were still in Slovenia.
Approximately 80,000That's how many Syrians applied for asylum in Hungary before it closed off its borders to migrants, according to the UNHCR. There are over 100,000 asylum applications in Serbia from Syrian migrants and refugees, and 108,897 in Germany.
12 more dead at sea, including 4 childrenThe perilous journey that many migrants and refugees have made from the Middle East to the Greek island of Lesbos, by sea, caused yet more tragic deaths this weekend.
Twice as many by sea this year710,000 migrants and refugees reached Europe by boat in 2015 so far -- twice as many as in 2014, the E.U. border control agency reported. Another 3,000 never completed the journey, and died at sea.
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