Last night we discussed the temporary lull in the “refugee” crisis serendipitously created by striking Greek ferry workers. The strike ended, and the migrant flow to Austria and Germany has resumed, but the brief halt provided a flash of illumination that reveals how the process of migrant transport really works.

But first, the news from Slovenia. The current flood of immigrants travels through Croatia to Slovenia, passing through to the town of Šentilj on the border with Austria, where it backs up waiting for admission at the border crossing outside Spielfeld. It’s a heavy burden for a tiny country like Slovenia, which is now making headlines for constructing a fence along its border with Croatia.

We’ve been using a German map of the flow of “refugees” through Croatia and Slovenia, which shows two streams, one passing through Šentilj and Spielfeld, and a more westerly one passing through the Austrian town of Klagenfurt.

Our Slovenian correspondent Andrej Turjaški writes to correct the record: there is no flow of refugees across the border to Klagenfurt. Here’s what he sent in an email:

Since I live in Slovenia, I can share my first-hand experience.

The illegals don’t cross near Kranj or Kamnik. There are some train transports through Kranj to the Jesenice border crossing to Austria, but the main route for illegals is to Šentilj, where they wait on the Slovenian side until Austria receives them. The Austrians have a rough limit of 6,000 illegals per day.

The supposed route to Klagenfurt is non-existent; it is a flaw in the map.

The Slovenian government is a leftist one and has long claimed there will be no border closing or a fence. Even until the last day they didn’t want to use the word “fence”, but used “technical barrier” instead. Now they have finally procured rolls of barbed wire. Given that the border between Slovenia and Croatia is disputed in certain places, the Croatians are threatening to remove the fence using military force. So now we wait to see what happens. The fence is laid only partially, in the vicinity of border crossing with the highest migrant traffic.

Europe doesn’t help much. They promised 400 European police last month, but till now as far as I know the Germans have sent 23 police, the Slovaks 20 and the Hungarians 53. That’s too few if Europe is serious about defending the outside European border. Slovenia just doesn’t have the manpower to protect the border.

People are mostly against immigrants, but the mainstream media keep publishing stories about poor refugees. The government is mellow. However, the leftists, anarchists and NGO all have access to the media to tell people that not being friendly toward migrant equals hate speech.

I’ve revised the German map to remove the Klagenfurt stream of migrants:

(Click to enlarge)

[Ungarn is Hungary and Österreich is Austria. The dark blue lines show the migration routes. The light blue line is the outer border of the Schengen Area. The broken red lines show border controls at internal Schengen borders. The solid red line marks the closed border between Hungary and Croatia. The black line represents a border fence when solid, and when dotted, a planned border fence. The earlier map that includes the Klagenfurt route is here.]

What the Greek ferry strike highlighted was this: within four days at most, the column of migrants that began its journey at the port of Piraeus south of Athens had made its way to Spielfeld on the Austrian border, and then dried up. This tells us the rate at which massed groups of migrants have been traveling along their route. It shows that they covered about 740 miles as the crow flies — including heavily forested and mountainous terrain in the Balkans — in a space of just four days. If they stayed on the move for, say, sixteen hours a day, that means that they traveled at an approximate average speed of 740 ÷ (16 × 4) = 11.56 miles per hour. That’s an average, mind you, and it’s at least three times the normal walking pace of a non-athlete.

In reality, of course, the distance through the Balkans is far greater and the pace of travel correspondingly faster. Obviously the “refugees” are not walking most of the way from Piraeus to Spielfeld. They are in fact being herded onto buses and trains at their point of arrival in any given country, and then carried all the way across that country to the next one along the route. This video from Macedonia shows the process clearly on that particular leg of the trip.

I’m told that the total distance covered on foot by the average migrant between his landing in Greece and his arrival in Germany is somewhere between five and ten kilometers (three to six miles). He makes the rest of his journey using mechanized transport provided by the countries through which he passes, which is paid for by a party or parties unknown.

Yet the media use almost exclusively photos of migrants on foot, making it seem that they must have walked hundreds and hundreds of miles in a desperate attempt to get to Germany. And the news outlets also concentrate their attention on photos and videos of families with children, who form a small percentage of the migrant population, most of whom are young unaccompanied males.

Such is the “refugee” crisis: carefully orchestrated, organized, and managed by the Powers That Be in Europe and beyond, while being misrepresented as something it is not.

It is not a spontaneous bid by destitute people to reach safety.

And it is plainly neither inevitable nor unstoppable.