Even before the migration crisis of recent years the greatest challenge was always over genuine refugees. Like their publics, political leaders held consistently conflicted views on those refugees – conflicted views expressed not just one to another, but within themselves. Nobody could allow a child to drown in the Mediterranean but nor could it be viable to allow the world in if the world was on our shores. In the summer of 2016 I got talking with two Bangladeshi men in Greece. One of them, a 26-year-old, had come through India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey to get to Lesbos. On his journey, he said, ‘I saw dead bodies everywhere.’ He spent 15,000 Euros on this journey and said that he had to leave Bangladesh because he was involved with the political opposition. ‘My father is a bank manager,’ he said. ‘It is not about money. It is about life. Everyone loves their mother country’, but ‘nine out of ten people are here because they want to live’. The evidence suggests otherwise, namely that the economic attractions are the main lure. Yet even if everyone coming to Europe was coming in the face of imminent death back home, there is no practical way that Europe could take in those untold millions. So even a refinement of the errors of European migration is itself based on an error.

Some people say that the crisis is primarily not Europe’s but the world’s – that even talking about this represents a Eurocentric way of looking at things. But there is no reason why Europeans should not be, or feel, Eurocentric. Europe is the home of the European peoples, and we are entitled to be home-centric as much as the Americans, Indians, Pakistanis, Japanese and all other peoples are. The follow-on claim that we should therefore focus our energies on ‘solving’ the problems of the world is a diversion. It is not in Europe’s power to ‘solve’ the situation in Syria. Much less is it within our gift to simultaneously raise living standards in sub-Saharan Africa, solve all world conflicts, protect liberal rights universally and rectify all problems of political corruption across the world. Those who present these as problems that can be solved by Europe should start by explaining their detailed plan for solving the problem of Eritrea. Or finding it on a map.