One question I ask politicians whenever I get a chance is: why do they not do now the things which they will end up having to do at some point down the line? If you speak with Australian officials who dealt with a similar refugee boat-crisis in their country last decade, they will tell you that you have to keep the migrants out of your country and dissuade others from coming. The Australian example is not a perfect match with the current European one, but it is close. The Australians set up holding centres outside Australian territory, so that people could not land in the country and claim asylum once there. If European politicians were responsible they would now be doing what they will end up having to do anyway, and pay North African countries and others to have holding centres where the claims of the various migrants can at least aim to be assessed. Stop them from setting foot in Europe and you can prevent them all claiming every right which will most likely allow them to remain in Europe in perpetuity.

We must also consider what is best for the migrants in question. Even if we agree that life inside Syria is unlivable for much of the population, a sensible policy would be based on the fact — discussed by David Goodhart and Paul Collier in their recent seminal works — that it is almost always better to keep somebody in proximity to the country from which they are fleeing. If somebody is fleeing Syria it is far better that they stay in Jordan than that they are plonked down in Scandinavia. For sure there are few job prospects for such refugees in Jordan (there may be fewer still in Scandinavia) but as Collier has argued, one solution is for European countries to do more to provide employment opportunities for Syrians inside neighbouring countries rather than a continent away. It is also vital for Europeans to consider what this crisis is not. The father of the Syrian boy who drowned on the shores of Turkey had a job in Turkey, and the family had been living there for three years at the time. He now blames Canada for the death of his son because Canada did not immediately take his family in. Like many European countries, Canada (where I am sitting at the time of writing) is uncertain how much to beat itself up over this. A Holocaust survivor I sat beside at a dinner in Toronto expressed her horror at the repetition of history. But the situations are not analogous. The Syrian father’s job may not have been the best job in the world, but his family’s situation was not remotely analogous to the situation of a German Jew in the 1930s. A German Jew of that time who had managed to move to Sweden and get a job did not have transport provided to deliver him to Britain. But in the spreading-around of the German reaction to all this you can see something else working itself out. For the motivation in whole swathes of the West is a misreading of current and historical events. But this is not even the worst misunderstanding. That must be saved for the “economic” justification which has once again emerged.

It is an argument which has been heard among Germans at the train-station receptions and elsewhere. And it was expressed just last month by the EU head of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in the pages of the Wall Street Journal Europe. A more reckless argument is impossible to find. Eugenio Ambrosi argued that it was “troubling” that the continent was having “difficulty” accepting the unprecedented wave of migrants and claimed Europe “is experiencing the most widespread and intense anti-immigrant sentiment seen in decades”. But he went on to argue that migrants bring “new ideas and high motivation” and “pitch in and contribute to our economies and societies when given a fair chance. Sometimes they have a better work ethic than native Europeans.”