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Europe’s migration crisis may have reached a turning point. With populist and far-right parties on the march across the Continent, mainstream European leaders are starting to listen to voters’ concerns about absorbing more than a million newcomers from the Middle East and Africa. It’s about time.

One sign came Sunday, when the German Interior Ministry called for aggressive interception of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa. “The elimination of the prospect of reaching the European coast could convince migrants to avoid embarking on the life-threatening and costly journey,” an Interior Ministry official told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

The Mediterranean crossing from Libya to Italy is one of two major routes used by migrants to reach Europe, and it is by far the more perilous. With revenues down, smugglers are stuffing more would-be migrants aboard unseaworthy boats for a crossing on choppy waters that can take several hours. One in every 44 doesn’t make it.

Even so, some 164,000 crossed through the Libya-Italy route this year. The German proposal could dramatically reduce that number by rerouting intercepted migrants back to African countries such as Egypt and Tunisia. Currently, intercepted boats are towed to the Italian coast. Once rerouted, the migrants would be allowed to apply for asylum through legal channels.

This model, which we have long championed, has the benefit of imposing order on a chaotic situation. It also reduces the incentives for the smuggler business model, since the traffickers’ clients—the migrants—will understand that they are wasting their money and risking their lives in vain.

Which brings us to the second migrant route, from Turkey to the Balkans via the Greek islands. About 170,000 have arrived via the so-called Western Balkan Corridor so far this year, and here, too, there are signs that European officials are getting serious. To wit, Austrian Defense Minister Hans Peter Doskozil over the weekend warned that a Brussels deal with Ankara to intercept migrants may not last, and that European governments must be prepared to police EU borders on their own.

BERLIN—German police detained an asylum seeker suspected of plotting an attack for Islamic State, the federal prosecutor’s office said Thursday, the latest evidence of a mounting terror threat posed by the arrival last year of hundreds of thousands of migrants into the country.

The 27-year-old man, identified by federal prosecutors as Ashraf Al-T., allegedly received approval from an ISIS operative in Syria to carry out an attack on Germans in the near future, the prosecutor’s office said.

The man was taken into custody in Berlin late Wednesday, and his apartment in the city’s Schöneberg district was searched, according to the prosecutor. By the end of the day Thursday, the suspect will go before an investigating judge with the federal supreme court, who will decide if there is sufficient evidence to keep holding the man.

The nationality of the suspect who arrived in Germany in 2015 remained unclear. Police initially identified the man as Syrian but an official familiar with the case said he might in fact be a Tunisian who used Syrian identification.

The arrest adds to escalating tension in Germany over the security risks arising from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open the country’s doors to nearly 900,000 asylum seekers in 2015 alone.

As the wave of migrants entering the county peaked late last year, authorities brushed aside suggestions that the surge could include attackers linked with ISIS. A year later, a lengthening list of arrests and a series of attacks by refugees have led officials to reassess the threat and raise alarms about security.

“It is very good [that] this man was taken off the streets,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said. “Security services had been watching him for some time.”

Officials said it was still unclear how far along plans were for an attack but authorities still felt compelled to act, said Bernd Palenda, head of the state intelligence agency in Berlin.

“As we had no overview over the risks—what might be done and when it might start—we acted fast,” said Mr. Palenda, CONTINUE AT SITE

BERLIN—A 19-year-old Syrian immigrant was charged with supporting Islamic State, Germany’s top prosecutor said Thursday, a sign that the country’s authorities are uncovering a growing body of evidence that the terrorist group used last year’s migrant influx to send fighters to Europe.

The federal prosecutor-general accused the Syrian national identified as Shaas Al-M. of joining the terror militia in his Syrian hometown by mid-2013 and having participated in fighting for the group there. After leaving in summer 2015, the prosecutor’s office said, the suspect scouted possible targets in Berlin, recruited at least one person to fight for Islamic State in Syria, and signaled he was prepared to carry out an attack himself.

The move is the first indictment by Germany’s prosecutor-general alleging that a person who was among the migrants to arrive last year was considering an attack here, according to summaries available on the prosecutor’s website. It is the latest sign that German authorities are scrambling to prevent Islamist violence by migrants, amid fears of terrorism among Germans and an anti-Islam political party on the rise. And it underscores the political risks that German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces from the terror threat here, less than one year before next fall’s general elections.

Two Islamist attacks by migrants in July, in which the attackers died and 19 others were injured, fanned those fears. Earlier this month, German police arrested another Syrian migrant who arrived last year and they found several hundred grams of explosives in an apartment in which he was staying. The man, suspected of planning a suicide bombing, later killed himself in prison.

In June, police arrested three suspected Islamic State members form Syria on suspicion of preparing an attack on the city of Düsseldorf. In September, police detained another three Syrians who had traveled to Germany last November in what officials said might be the first arrest of a so-called sleeper cell sent to Germany to commit attacks. None of the suspects have been indicted yet.

PARIS—Local police and aid workers in France on Monday began clearing a sprawling camp along the English Channel that has become a symbol of Europe’s failure to manage the flow of migrants across its borders.

As police stood by, scores of migrants carrying their possessions in bundles lined up to board buses parked outside the camp, known as the Jungle.

A three-day operation is planned to clear the sprawling shantytown. philippe huguen/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The current ‘Jungle’ dates from April 2015. It housed more than 10,000 migrants at its peak. philippe huguen/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Migrants, carrying their belongings, walk to an official meeting point set up by the French authorities as part of the camp’s evacuation. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Migrants queue outside a hangar where they will be sorted into groups and put on buses that will take them to shelters across France. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Police officers control a queue as migrants line up to register at a processing center in the makeshift camp. Associated Press
Migrants wait to board a bus for their evacuation. European Pressphoto Agency
Migrants queue at the start of their evacuation from the camp in Calais and transfer to reception centers across France. pascal rossignol/Reuters

The migrants are each given a choice of two French regions they can go to—for example, Brittany or Nouvelle Aquitaine. Based on that choice, migrants are given a color-coded bracelet that assigns them to a bus headed to that region, authorities said.

BUDAPEST—Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban criticized what he sees as a new oppressing force, the European Union, as he commemorated the 60th anniversary of the 1956 revolution against Soviet rule on Sunday.

Mr. Orban said Hungary must keep combating EU plans to welcome and assist refugees by fortifying its borders and regaining national control over migration policies.

“The task today of Europe’s liberty-loving nations is to save Brussels from becoming like the Soviets—that they want to decide instead of us who and how we want to co-exist with,” Mr. Orban said in a speech in front of parliament as he celebrated the spirit of the 1956 uprising, which was eventually crushed by Russian tanks. “We don’t want an alliance of free European nations to be replaced by a United States of Europe.”

Hungary is spearheading an informal coalition of former Soviet satellites, which joined the EU a little over a decade ago but has become increasingly vocal in calling for a looser union. The group, which includes Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, says it has grown tired of Brussels’ “diktats.”

“These two countries [Hungary and Poland], which are built on Christian foundations and independent within the EU, won’t by any means let our traditions and freedom be taken away from us,” Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said in a speech during the commemorations in Budapest.

Mr. Orban says the hundreds of thousands of migrants coming mainly from Muslim countries and who have crossed into the EU in recent months threaten Hungary’s Christian religious and cultural uniformity. CONTINUE AT SITE

ALLEX, France—President François Hollande’s plan to resolve the Calais migrant crisis is sowing social unrest across the country as dozens of towns brace for the arrival of refugees by the busloads.

By the end of the year—and as early as this month—Mr. Hollande plans to transfer thousands of migrants from the blighted port to shelters in far-flung corners of France.

The goal is to dismantle the Jungle, a sprawling migrant camp skirting the port that has become a symbol of Europe’s failure to manage the flow of migrants across its borders from conflict zones in Syria, Afghanistan and beyond. Waves of migrants seeking passage to the U.K. have become bottled up in the port on the French side of the English Channel, living in sordid conditions and hurting the local economy.

For people living in towns and villages such as Allex, a close-knit hilltop community of 2,500 people in Provence, the relocation plan threatens to spread the crisis in Calais to corners of France untouched by the migrant flow.

“We won’t let our town become another Calais,” said a 45-year-old mason and father of three. The man joined a hundred other townspeople who recently marched through Allex to protest the arrival of 50 migrants at a local château the government has converted into a shelter.

The anti-immigrant National Front party and other right-wing politicians are seizing on the public anger to build support ahead of presidential elections in May, organizing referendums and petitioning mayors to stop the spread of “mini-Calais.”

At times, the opposition has turned violent. In September, a shelter located in a bedroom community outside Paris was flooded and set on fire. Earlier this month, police found bullet holes in buildings slated to host migrants in two different towns.

So far, the government isn’t backing down, insisting the political firestorm won’t affect its plans. “We keep local officials informed of our plans, but we’re not asking for their opinion,” Housing Minister Emmanuelle Cosse said. The government hasn’t disclosed the complete list of towns and cities set to receive migrants for fear of new acts of violence, officials say. CONTINUE AT SITE