Anyone in power with a genuine desire to help migrants could enact a number of policies. They could, for instance, prioritise a policy of keeping migrants in the vicinity of the country from which they are fleeing. Migration experts including Paul Collier and David Goodhart have – even before the current crisis – explained the importance of such a policy.1 It avoids the cultural challenges that arise from encouraging people to travel to the far end of a different continent. It also allows people to return home more easily when whatever the disaster they are fleeing from comes to an end. Throughout the Syrian crisis Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan have taken in huge numbers of refugees. Britain and other nations have contributed huge sums in aid to relieve the situation in refugee camps and other places in which Syrian refugees are living. Policies like those suggested by Collier of European countries paying migrants to do work in Middle Eastern countries (where for reasons of local sentiment current labour laws often preclude refugees from entering the workforce) would be constructive. Such ideas would be predicated on the view that it is better for a Syrian to be able to work in Jordan than to be unemployed somewhere in Scandinavia.

What is more, the money that a country like Sweden now pays to house immigrants in Sweden is spendthrift even if the concerns of immigrants and potential immigrants were the only concerns of the Swedish government. The housing shortage in Sweden – which, as in the United Kingdom, is largely caused by immigration – creates huge problems for the Swedish government. Not least financial problems. In southern European countries such as Italy or Greece a temporary solution for migrants is to house them in tents. Because of Sweden’s cold climate it costs between 50 and 100 times more to house a migrant in a tent there than it does in the Middle East. As Dr Tino Sanandaji has pointed out, it costs more for 3,000 migrants to be housed in temporary accommodation tents in Sweden than it does to fund outright the largest refugee camp in Jordan (housing around 100,000 Syrian refugees).2