Another solution would be a concerted Europe-wide effort to organise the deportation of all those found to have no asylum claim. This is easier said than done: millions of people who are currently in Europe have no legal right to be here. Some might welcome assistance to return home, having found themselves working for gangs or otherwise finding life in Europe less appealing than they had expected. Still, this would be a monumental task to undertake. But it would be better to do it than to pretend – as members of the German and Swedish governments did in recent years – to do it while having no real intention of doing so. To ‘include’ some people in a society necessarily means ‘excluding’ others. Governments found it very easy to dwell on the sympathetic language of ‘inclusion’, but their publics – including legitimate asylum seekers – need also to hear the language of exclusion.

Another policy that would assist in a sensible migration policy and help restore public confidence would be a system of temporary asylum. If during the crucial months of 2015 Chancellor Merkel had called on European countries to take in a certain number of legitimate and properly vetted refugees from Syria until such a time as Syria returned to stability, there may have been significantly more public and political support. The fact that there was not – and the reason why the public as well as governments remained so opposed to Merkel’s quota system – was because those countries knew that asylum is nearly always for good. It is hard to convince the Swedish public that Syrian migrants are going to remain in their country only until Syria stabilizes when Sweden still has tens of thousands of asylum seekers from the Balkans, which has been at peace for two decades.

The nature of temporary asylum obviously has its own problems. People’s lives continue once they migrate. Their children enter the school system and other aspects of normalisation occur which make the return of whole families to their country of origin ever harder. But that is a reason why European governments would have to be strict with such a policy. If people apply for asylum and are given it, then they must recognise that the arrangement is benevolent but not permanent. Much confidence in the asylum system and the migration issue as a whole could be reclaimed if such a policy were implemented.