Even here we are far beyond the current acceptable political discussion, yet barely scratching the surface of the problem. But the questions have to be asked. What system does Europe have in place to discern who is a legitimate refugee and who is an economic migrant? Is it fit for purpose? In Italy I asked every aid worker I could find if they knew of anybody being sent back home after arriving in European waters. Nobody could think of such a case. The truth is that once someone is here they stay because Europe cannot work out who is who (most people having deliberately come without papers) and even if they are clearly economic migrants they are never sent home. Europe had no workable system to do this when the movement was at a low-point. Now that it is at a historic high Europe has less than no system.

And then there is the question of the composition of the migrants. If this movement is indeed a movement of the genuinely dispossessed then why are almost all of them young men? In recent weeks the media has zoomed its cameras in on the occasional woman or child. But they are the rarities. On Lampedusa I saw only young men from sub-Saharan Africa. I saw no women. One of the first things that many of the arrivals did on getting to the island was to buy a SIM card and call home to tell their families that they had made it: families they will end up sending money to if they make any (largely in the underground economy) and whom they will often aim to bring over to join them.

And of course there is the question of integration. Does anybody, anywhere in Europe still think integration has happened to date? Almost every government, currently opening its borders to further migrants, has in fact accepted that it has not. Chancellor Merkel said as much in a speech five years ago, as David Cameron did four years ago. So why would integration happen when immigration is at the current historic highs, if it didn’t happen when immigration was at — remarkably — a comparative low? Some politicians want to blame the public for a lack of enthusiasm about importing millions more people into Europe. If they are looking for someone to blame for that attitude they could do worse than looking to the citizens of Dewsbury, Gennevilliers, Malmö and many other places in Europe anyone can name.

All of this, again, barely touches the beginning of the debate which our continent is so far away from having. But perhaps it brings me to the most crucial question of all. Assuming that the majority of the arrivals are economic migrants and that we are going to do little or nothing to prevent them coming, ought not Europeans to try to start thinking their way through the first-principles questions? Such as: “Is it the job of Europeans to give a better standard of living in our continent to anybody in the world who wants it?’

If public opinion polls are anything to go by it would seem that the publics of Europe already have an answer to a question their political representatives still dare not ask. In Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and other countries, politicians are trying to respond to public sentiment. But everywhere else the strain of sustaining the current disconnect is beginning to show. The Swedish government recently announced that it is going to take a further 80,000 refugees this year (around 1 per cent of its current population). It is a continuation of a more-than generous asylum policy which has seen Sweden boast of becoming a “humanitarian superpower”. But these things have consequences. One recent poll showed the only anti-immigration party in the country — the Sweden Democrats — for the first time leading the opinion polls. This party, often described as far-right, was until recently never polling above low single digits.