Even if Europe’s demographic fall-off was as severe as Mr Ambrosi claimed, the most obvious answer was not necessarily to import people from a wholly different culture to make up the next generation. If Ambrosi and other officials were so concerned to fill any existing or future labour shortages in Germany, surely it would have been sensible, before casting a net across the globe, to look closer to home to the 25–50 per cent of young people in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece who were suffering from unemployment at exactly the same time. People as dedicated as Ambrosi to the free-marketeer argument were not even making sense of events on their own terms. More worryingly, they seemed to assume that their free marketeer arguments were the only arguments that would matter and that the young populations of southern Europe, among others, would not mind being leap-frogged over by anyone and everyone from the non-European parts of the world.

And of course, as migration into Europe reached an unheard-of historical peak there remained those willing to argue that this was all perfectly normal. The only country to have taken in the same number of migrants per head of population as Germany in 2015 alone was Sweden (1–2 per cent). The country’s 2015 arrivals alone numbered somewhere between 160,000 and 180,000 – an historically unprecedented number even for a country with a recent history of taking refugees. So whereas in 2004 Sweden had absorbed around 400 child refugees, in 2015 alone it had to absorb 35,000 child arrivals at the cost of tens of thousands of Euros per child per year. During the summer of 2015 migrants flowed into the country daily not only across the famous Øresund bridge from Denmark (between Denmark and Sweden there was no border) but also from the north. Most of those who arrived had no identity papers at all, and this was not always an accident. Residents of Malmö attested to seeing bins at the railway station filled with destroyed identity papers.

Yet even as Sweden was going through this abnormal year the authorities there continued in the pretence that this was nothing new. In October 2015 the government put on a conference in support of its migration policy entitled ‘Sweden Together’. The King and Queen of Sweden were in attendance along with most of the rest of the political establishment. Among the speakers was Ingrid Lomfors, the head of Sweden’s ‘Living History Forum’ (a Holocaust education body). In her much-praised speech Lomfors insisted upon three things: that immigration to Sweden is nothing new, that everyone is a migrant really, and that in any case there is no such thing as Swedish culture.5