For many years across Western Europe the issue of migration has been at the top of the list of public concerns. Opinion polls in each country consistently show the issue to be of almost overriding concern to the general public. If a concern is felt by a majority of the public for many years and nothing is done to address it, then trouble and resentment are certainly stored up. If the response is not just to ignore the concern but to argue that it is actually impossible to do anything about it, then radical alternatives begin to brew. At best such concerns will be expressed at the ballot box. At worst they will surface on the streets. It is hard to think of any other issue, let alone one so high up the list of public concerns, that would be responded to with a ‘nothing can be done’ response.

Even this final, fatalistic response to the problem is a result of a policy that was never thought through and now appears to have become – in the eyes of politicians and academics – essentially insuperable. After all, one after another the expectations about what would happen turned out to be false. And the realities of what did happen turned out either not to have been thought about or thought about erroneously. Consider the verdict of one of those who enabled the post-1997 Labour government to escalate their policy when they did. After her work for the British government Sarah Spencer was rewarded with the honour of a CBE. But by then, when some of the repercussions of her evangelism and that of others had begun to be felt, she made a more lachrymose assessment, admitting that during those years in government, when she and her colleagues had opened the floodgates, ‘There was no policy for integration. We just believed migrants would integrate.’25 All this was years before the biggest crisis that confronts us today, but all returned as foundational arguments to excuse the huge and continent-wide movement that was coming.

4. ‘Welcome to Europe’

4

‘Welcome to Europe’

The island of Lampedusa is the most southerly outpost of Italy. Closer to the coastline of North Africa than it is to that of Sicily, the main ferry from Lampedusa to Sicily takes nine hours. When you are on Lampedusa you can feel this isolation. These eight dry square miles of rock have a landscape far more like that of Tunisia or Libya than that of Italy. Over the centuries it has had the kind of history you might expect of an unprepossessing but useful post in the Mediterranean. It has changed hands repeatedly and its recorded history is one of constant depopulation and repopulation. Pirate raids were a problem throughout, notably in the sixteenth century when pirates from Turkey seized a thousand of the island’s inhabitants and took them off into slavery. An English visitor in the eighteenth century found only one inhabitant.