As for taking in one million people in a year: it was, the MP said, ‘not a big deal’. Imagine, he said at one point, that there were 81 people sitting in this room and there was a knock on the door. It turns out to be someone telling us that if he remains in the corridor he will be killed. What do we do? Of course we let him in. And what do you do, I wondered, if after letting an 82nd person into the room there comes a knock at the door once again. Must the 83rd person also be let in? Certainly, the MP says. There seems to be no point at which the door cannot continue to be opened. So we change tack. In 2015 Germany gave priority to the asylum claims of Syrians. Why, I asked, putting the point that the Afghans on Lesbos had put to me, should the Syrians be given priority? Why should Germany not also make a priority of bringing Afghans into Germany. And what of the others? There was no doubt that the situation in Eritrea and many other countries in Africa was bad. What about the people I had met from the Far East, from Burma and Bangladesh and elsewhere? Why should Germany not be making a priority of bringing these people in too?

The MP was getting exasperated with what he clearly thought to be a theoretical point. This situation, he insisted, was not a real one and so required no response. Besides, people were not coming to Germany in these numbers any more, so it was not necessary to consider such scenarios. This was – I must admit – a lightning-bolt moment throughout all my travels. For this German MP speaking in late 2016 must have known what anybody reading a newspaper must know, which is that the flow of migrants has not slowed because the need had slowed. It had slowed because the governments of Europe – and the government of Germany in particular – had changed the facts on the ground. If there was a reason why in 2016 the numbers had fallen by several hundred thousand from the year before it was because of two things. Firstly because of the deal that the EU (led by the German government) did with the Turkish government earlier in the year, paying the Turks to keep migrants inside their country and preventing boats from setting off for Greece. And secondly because, quietly in some cases but more noisily in others, the borders of Europe had gone back up. And not all of these decisions had been discouraged by the Germans. The enforcement of the Macedonian border was particularly helpful for the German government, creating a bottleneck of migrants who had arrived in Greece, but ensuring that they did not have the opportunity to flow up in such numbers as the year before to Germany or beyond.