If multiculturalism was not working with around 50,000 people claiming asylum in Germany each year, how was it expected to work with thirty times that number coming in each year? If not enough was being done in 2010, how was it the case that five years later the German government’s integration network was so much – indeed thirty times – better? And if Germany had been fooling itself in the 1960s about the return of the guest-workers, how much more was it kidding itself that those applying for asylum in 2015 would return to their homes? If multiculturalism had not been working well in 2010 it was working even less well by 2015. The same goes for Britain. If multiculturalism in Britain had failed when Prime Minister David Cameron said it had, in 2011, why was it any less failed in 2015 when the British government oversaw a new record high of net migration into the country?2 Was the relationship between France and its immigrant populations better by 2015 than it had been a few years before? Or Sweden’s or Denmark’s? All across Europe the migration surge of 2015 piled further numbers of people into a model that all the existing political leaders had already admitted to be a failure. Nothing noticeable had occurred in the years between to have made the model any more successful than it had been in the past.

At one stage in the crisis Chancellor Merkel telephoned the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. It is said that she asked for advice. Israel is the only country in the world to have successfully integrated a comparable number of arrivals in an even slightly comparable timescale, namely Russian Jews entering Israel after 1990 – not to mention other large-scale influxes in the decades since the founding of the state. How had Israel managed to absorb so many people and yet held together a remarkably united country, indeed perhaps an increasingly united one? There are various reasons she could have been given – not least the bond formed in Israel through the common experience of compulsory service in the Israeli Army and government sponsored absorption programs. What diplomatic discretion may have prevented Prime Minister Netanyahu from pointing out, but which might have been apt, was that Israel had an advantage in that nearly all of the arrivals into the country for decades had a common link in their Jewish heritage – whereas in the months and years to come Angela Merkel and her nation would have to recognise that few of the people they let in during 2015 were German Lutherans.