The actual details remained as troubling and badly arranged as ever. In September 2016, a month after I was last on Lesbos, migrants inside Moria burnt the camp down. The spark could have been almost anything. People had been left there for almost half a year as the other European nations that still insisted on the importance of the rescue missions closed their borders and left Greece to deal with the consequences of the rescue. Rumours had been flying around the camp’s occupants of an imminent repatriation to Turkey. Others said that the riots that led to the torching of the camp were due to arguments over the food queues. It could have been because of this or the inter-ethnic violence that simmered. A video taken of the camp burning down includes shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’.

The week after Moria was burnt down I was in Germany again. Everywhere the consequences of the previous year’s decision by the Chancellor were visible. The television schedules included a stand-up comedy show starring migrants who entertained a small audience of Germans for the cameras. The migrants were giving a human face to the flow and their audiences were desperately leaning in to love the experience. But TV stardom was not the reality for the overwhelming number of newcomers. In the basement of one Evangelical-Lutheran church in the suburbs of Berlin I found 14 refugees living on bunk beds. All male and in their twenties, mainly from Iran, they had come in 2015. One admitted to paying $1,200 to cross the sea to Greece and had first made his way to Norway but did not like it there. These men said they had converted to Christianity, which was why the church was giving them shelter. Although their claim might have been sincere, the Christian conversion business had also become a well-known racket by this point. To claim conversion to Christianity almost ensured an asylum claim was approved.

In the Bundestag I had an opportunity to speak with a Member of Parliament who was a major supporter of Chancellor Merkel and her stand throughout the crisis. He presented the issue as a solely bureaucratic one. The lack of housing, for instance, was ‘not a catastrophe, but a task’. How might the country ensure better integration? The migrants currently get 60 hours of courses on German values. The MP thought this perhaps should be increased to 100 hours. Most striking, as I had heard in Germany for years, was his belief that German citizens were the ones with problems. Those concerned with a change in their area, he said, ‘spend too much time on blogs and not enough time in reality’. And when asked about the criminal activities of migrants he unloaded himself of his opinion that ‘The refugees are less criminal than the average German inhabitant.’