Then the Swedish Interior Minister, Anders Ygeman, admitted that of the roughly 163,000 people who had arrived in Sweden the year before, only around half had any legitimate claim to be in the country. Mr Ygeman talked about the number of planes that the Swedish government was going to need to charter and warned that it might take several years to remove these individuals. Of those immigrants into Sweden in 2015 who the government had determined should not be there he said, ‘We are talking about 60,000 people but the number could climb to 80,000.’ It is horrifying to think that a government can come to such a realisation only after letting so many people into their country.

The German government was eventually reduced to commissioning the private consulting firm McKinsey’s to try to analyse its own repatriation programme. Perhaps it needed fresh eyes to review the mess it had created. Even what programme there was tended to fail. When the government made an attempt to deport 300 failed Pakistani asylum seekers to their country of origin, Pakistan simply refused to take them and so Germany took them back. As of the end of May 2016, Germany had over 220,000 people under deportation orders. Just 11,300 of these were deported to other countries, including their country of first entry (such as Bulgaria). Yet when the German Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière, boasted in parliament that ‘This is much more than in past years’, he only revealed how paltry the efforts of previous years had been.

For if the Timmermans/Frontex figure was correct and the German government estimates of its 2015 intake were correct then this would mean that Germany ought to be preparing to deport around 750,000 people who arrived in 2015 alone. Nobody inside the bureaucracy of the German government was, or ever would be, prepared to carry out such an exercise. Anymore than the Swedish government was truly going to deport 80,000 fake asylum seekers from their country from the year 2015 alone. Everybody in Sweden and Europe knew that they would not even attempt this. Mass deportations from Europe were not on the agenda in 2015 or 2016 anymore than they were at any other time during the post-war period. What the European politicians could not admit is what every migrant crossing the Mediterranean knows, and what most members of the European public have wised up to, which is that once you are in Europe you are there to stay.