Moreover, Europe remains the world leader in not only allowing people to stay but in assisting them to fight the state even when they are there illegally. By 2016 Britain had still not even managed to deport a man wanted in India for two bombings in 1993. The Bolton greengrocer Tiger Hanif arrived in Britain illegally in 1996 and had managed to receive more than £200,000 in legal aid from British taxpayers to avoid repatriation.10 And nor does the continent’s madness stop there. When Belgian investigators looked at the perpetrators of the numerous terrorist plots carried out by Belgian nationals, they discovered that a great many of them had plotted their attacks whilst being supported by the state. Indeed, Salah Abdeslam, the lead surviving suspect of the November 2015 Paris attacks, had collected unemployment benefit to the tune of 19,000 Euros in the period preceding the attacks. He had collected his last benefits only weeks before, making European societies among the first in history to pay people to attack them.

Of course, such cases are only the most high-profile ones – the people who become known about because they engaged in terror. Of the hundreds of thousands of people who arrived in Italy in 2015 around half claimed asylum in the country. Around 30,000 expulsion orders were issued but not even half were attempted to be enforced. These are the ones Italy knows about. Nobody in Europe has any idea where the 50 per cent of people who did not ask for asylum in Italy in 2015 are today. Once the borders began to close, the pressure began to build at all of them. At the Italian-Austrian border people who were clearly not Italian were being kept out of Austria, against protocols but as a standard of the new Europe. Others continued to try to evade French forces and get into France. As these two routes were blocked, the option of crossing the mountains over into Switzerland re-emerged. But otherwise these bottlenecks continued, and continued to be Italy’s problem. Greece, too, became bunged up with arriving immigrants. Where once the flow had landed and gone on up unhindered, now from Bulgaria to all points north governments were trying to reverse their policy. Yet Greece and the other reception countries were the ones most stuck with the effects of those reversals. It was Greece that could not move the migrants northwards and could not send them back home.