Long before the height of the migration crisis officials had already given up on the idea of deportation even for most failed asylum seekers. So it was not surprising that, once the crisis was underway, even those in Europe without any legitimate asylum claim would expect to stay. As the implications of the crisis began to overwhelm them, in 2016 the governments of Germany and Sweden began to pretend that they had a system in place that would be able to process arrivals and applicants and work out who should stay and who should leave. Never mind that they had no working system for working out who had arrived, they did not even have success in dealing with those whose claims had been rejected. Mohammad Daleel, who carried out Germany’s first suicide bombing outside the wine bar in Ansbach in July 2016, had registered as a refugee in Bulgaria and had been ordered to be returned there by the German authorities in 2014 and once again in 2016. As in Sweden where left-wing groups attempted to disrupt the removal of any failed asylum seekers, a politician from the left-wing Die Linke party admitted afterwards that he had intervened on Daleel’s side to prevent his removal from Germany back to Bulgaria.

In August 2016 two Belgian policewomen in Charleroi were attacked in the street by a machete-wielding Algerian shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. The attacker turned out to have ties to Isis. In the wake of the assault the Belgian Secretary of State for Asylum, Migration and Administrative Simplification, Theo Francken, revealed that the attacker had been in Belgium since 2012. He had been issued deportation orders twice, but no repatriation understanding exists between Belgium and Algeria and no spaces existed in Belgium’s secure detention facilities.

Such stories – of people known to be involved in terrorist attacks – are easy ones to identify. But the stories of the ordinary migrants who simply stayed and got forgotten about in the hundreds of thousands is the real story behind these headlines. In January 2016 two politicians revealed the true scale of this disaster. In an interview on Dutch television Frans Timmermans, Vice President of the European Commission, admitted that the majority of people who had come to Europe in the previous year had not been asylum seekers but economic migrants. Citing figures from the EU’s Frontex border agency, Timmermans admitted that at least 60 per cent of those who arrived in 2015 were in fact economic migrants, with no more right to be in Europe than anyone else in the world. As for those from North African states such as Morocco and Tunisia, such individuals, Timmermans said, ‘are people that you can assume have no reason to apply for refugee status’.