Almost exactly 10 years have passed since 24 August 2015. On that day, the German government, headed by Merkel, suspended the so-called Dublin Protocol, which stipulates that asylum seekers must be processed in the EU country they first enter. It was a response to the waves of refugees coming into Europe, fueled by the Syrian civil war, and which were overwhelming bureaucratic systems across the bloc. Especially in light of her country’s Nazi past, Merkel felt she had no choice but to act on what she called a “humanitarian imperative”. Germany’s decision effectively made it legal for anyone to enter Germany, so long as they said they were claiming asylum.

According to the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, nearly 1.1 million people applied for asylum in Germany in 2015 alone. For context: that number was 25 times higher than in 2011. Syrians made up the single largest proportion that fateful year, at 40% of the total, but they were not the majority. Other people from the Middle East, mostly Iraqis and Afghans, but also from the Balkans and North Africa, comprised the remainder. Nearly 70% were male.

A year later, the center-left newspaper Die Zeit looked back on the night of 4 and 5 September, when Merkel decided to fully open the borders and bring asylum seekers in on trains, as “the night Germany lost control”. For one thing, the liberal journalists lamented, “the government admits that not a single refugee who arrived on that weekend or in the days that followed was screened by security officials.” Germany had no idea whether it was admitting snotty-nosed children from war-torn Aleppo — or terrorists and sex offenders. Over the next decade, Germans swiftly discovered that they had opened their gates to all of these and more.

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The first shock came on New Year’s Eve 2015, when 1,200 women were sexually assaulted in Cologne. “A throng of about a thousand young men was forming,” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle explained. “Most of them were from the North African-Arabic region.” In scenes Merkel would later describe as “abominable”, the report continued, “packs of men were hunting down women, cornering many of them. There were sexual assaults, rapes.”

The police response was somewhere between clueless and callous. One young woman told the German media later how she was trapped in the crowds and then suddenly “someone had his hands between my legs.” When she tried to report this at a police station where “there were lots of girls, all crying uncontrollably”, she was told to go elsewhere. A public police statement said the celebrations in Cologne had been “relaxed”.

In the end, it was probably this staggering denial that riled people the most. In her memoirs, Merkel dedicates just one paragraph to the incident in Cologne. There is no compassion for the victims, just a cool assessment that the delayed response “gave rise to the impression that the authorities were trying to cover something up.” Merkel’s main concern, then as now, was political. As the leader of a nominally center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she faced plenty of internal pressure for her generous refugee policy. But the public mood also tipped. The “Welcoming Culture” that dominated the news dissipated quickly. Asked in one representative poll in January 2016, 73% of respondents felt dealing with “asylum” and “refugees” was the most urgent government priority.

The same poll, from January 2025, showed that 68% of people wanted Germany to take in fewer asylum seekers. The problem was that while Merkel was chancellor, all the way up to 2021, there was no effective way for this majority to express their skepticism at the ballot box. The architect of the refugee policy hogged the center-right slot on the political spectrum. The other parties sat further to the Left. Even Christian Lindner, the leader of the small libertarian FDP, called Merkel’s decision “right and justifiable”.

Merkel understood this dynamic. In 2015, she tried to frame the influx as a temporary crisis that the country had to overcome together. “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do this!”), she famously told her compatriots. By December, however, she admitted at a party conference that “even a strong country like Germany would in the long run be unable to cope with such a large number of refugees.” In March 2016, the EU duly struck a deal with Turkey to return migrants and show domestic voters something was changing. Yet with the German political establishment reluctant to change, the intake continued. Today, there are at least 3.3 million asylum seekers in Germany: some 4% of the population.

The majority that worried about the numbers was never going to stay silent forever. With Merkel defending what was essentially a Left-wing migration policy while leading the major center-right party, a powerful vacuum emerged for a more radical alternative. It was filled by a political newcomer: the Alternative für Deutschland or AfD.

In December 2015, Alexander Gauland, a leading figure in the AfD then as now, called the migration crisis a “gift” and “very helpful” to his then two-year-old outfit. He was right: the AfD, which started on a libertarian platform but is now focused on immigration, first entered the German parliament in the election of 2017 with 13% of the vote. Today, it is the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. Recently, it has even topped some polls, with around a quarter of the electorate supporting it.

The meteoric rise of the AfD is a direct response to German immigration policy since 2015, with many here feeling their country has changed irrevocably — and without their consent. Take crime. Official police statistics say 42% of suspects are foreign nationals. Even if you discount being in the country illegally, that still leaves 35%.

Such statistics have come in for criticism. One study, released earlier this year, found that “migration and asylum have no systematic impact on criminality.” But many people feel and see unwelcome change in their immediate environment. This summer, sexual harassment and assault of women and girls in German lidos have triggered a heated debate. In June, one case made the headlines when girls aged 11-16 reported to have been groped by four Syrian men. According to figures from the Federal Criminal Police Office, there were 423 sexual crimes reported in public swimming locations last year; nearly two thirds of suspects were non-Germans.

One can attack the veracity of those statistics: but what’s certain is that Germans feel less safe. In a survey taken last year, only a little more than half of people said they felt safe in public spaces. Two years earlier, it had still been 75%. This is likely also connected to a number of high-profile, violent crimes and acts of terrorism committed by men who came to Germany as asylum seekers. This began with the Christmas market attack in Berlin in 2016 in which 12 people were killed by an unsuccessful asylum seeker from Tunisia who had entered Germany during the refugee crisis in 2015. From there, the grim reports have continued, from a mass stabbing at Solingen, in August 2024, to the shocking story, in Aschaffenburg, of an Afghan asylum seeker who stabbed a toddler to death earlier this year.

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No doubt, radicalization and psychiatric issues played a role in all these cases. But that won’t make people feel any safer. The fundamental problem remains that asylum seekers weren’t checked, with the government’s focus being on their safety and not that of the German public.

Beyond the questions of safety, meanwhile, Merkel’s experiment has transformed German life in other ways. Politicians have constantly stressed that the vast majority of asylum seekers are law-abiding and hard-working. Nonetheless, the sheer numbers admitted since 2015 make integration difficult both for them and the rest of the country. Nearly half of benefits claimants in Germany are non-nationals. Often this is due to bureaucratic hurdles as well as language and culture barriers. Regardless of the reasons, seven-in-10 Germans think the state is “overwhelmed”.

People see this in their everyday lives. On average, 30% of school children now have what Germany calls a “migration background”; in some places, notably in certain parts of larger cities, it’s 80% or more. Apart from language issues in overstretched classrooms, this has a bearing on culture too. Some schools have switched to Halal-only food in canteens. In Berlin, a gay teacher was abused by children for years. At his primary school, where 95% of students come from migrant families, he was told he would “go to hell” and that “he was a disgrace to Islam”. Some kids boycotted his lessons. His complaints to school and city authorities remained ignored until he took them to the media.

This cultural shift is visible right across Germany. After the October 7th attacks, Hamas supporters celebrated on the streets of Berlin, handing out sweets to passers by. For obvious historical reasons, the connection between antisemitism and immigration in Germany is a highly sensitive and contested field, but existing figures suggest that there is a link. In 2020, a study found that 40% percent of Muslims in Germany held antisemitic views; the same was true for just 5% of Protestants.

To quote Merkel herself, then, “there was a before and an after.” Germany has changed forever and there is no turning back the clock. But that still leaves the future. The current German government under Friedrich Merz — a long-term inner-party rival and critic of Merkel — is attempting a two-step approach to move forward. On the one hand, it is implementing stricter immigration policies. National border controls have been reinstated, and family reunification rules have been suspended for certain asylum seekers. Though there are a number of reasons behind this trend, Germany has seen a 50% decline in asylum applications in the first half of 2025. 

The second, and much more difficult, step will be the integration of recent arrivals who are likely to stay in Germany. The case of a school in Ludwigshafen in western Germany has triggered a debate on how the children of immigrants can be better supported to learn the skills needed to integrate into German society. There, nearly all students are from non-German backgrounds while a quarter of them lack the required basic skills to advance to the next grade. Education Minister Karin Prien has put the idea of an imposed “migration quota” for schools on the table to distribute children with poor language skills and those lacking other required skills, such as holding a pen, or have difficulty sitting in a chair for extended periods. But she received immense criticism for this, and the debate over integration rages on.

Policies like these are important for voters to feel that a line has been drawn under Germany’s unlimited approach to asylum. Had Merkel followed her initial instincts, when she argued that opening the gates was the only way out of a once-in-a-generation crisis, many Germans would likely have forgiven her. After all, they came out in droves to feed, house and support genuine refugees. The problem came with the abdication of control. The borders remained open, and the lines between asylum policy and general migration were blurred. Arguments around labor shortages, demographic imbalance, and cultural diversity were all introduced, as though Germany only had two choices: no immigration or uncontrolled immigration.

What is clear, anyway, is that the current German government will have a hard time tackling the problems Merkel unleashed. Yet, as the AfD rises and cultural divisions widen, the tenth anniversary of her decision may be the last chance for the German establishment to look back, take stock, and finally change course.

Until now, little has been known about how or where these agents are recruited. But UnHerd can now reveal an extraordinary security loophole — one increasingly exploited by the Iranian state. Its London embassy is routinely enabling Iranian refugees to break UK immigration rules and secretly visit their homeland. These operations are so routine, that the embassy even has a form it issues to refugees wishing to illicitly return to Iran.

But this assistance comes with a price: the embassy then blackmails the refugees into becoming intelligence service informants, with potentially dire consequences for British security.

***

Since 2010, about 1,300 Iranians have been granted full refugee status every year in Britain. In the year to March 2024, over 8,000 Iranians applied for asylum here, and since 2018 they have consistently been among the top three nationalities arriving in small boats.

It’s impossible to know how many have been encouraged by the Iranian government to visit the country they supposedly fled. But it’s nonetheless clear that the system is a well-oiled machine — as one 34-year-old discovered.

In 2018, Amir* was granted refuge in Britain, telling the authorities that he had converted from Islam to Christianity. In the government’s theocratic eyes, this meant he was an apostate, a crime punishable by death. As far as Amir knew, his conversion had been successfully concealed from the regime.

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Three years after Amir arrived in Britain, his mother fell seriously ill. Fearing she might not survive, he applied for a passport from the consular section of the Iranian embassy in Kensington. During this visit, Amir said nothing of his conversion, telling embassy officials he had invented a story about being an anti-regime activist to gain a better life in Britain. Amir was duly granted a passport.

Amir knew full well that his visit would jeopardize his refugee status in Britain: a status contingent on the claimant never returning home other than in exceptional circumstances, and then with HK government permission. He did not tell the Home Office about his trip, first flying to Turkey using the British refugee travel document issued by the UK government to people given asylum. Once in Turkey, Amir swapped it for his newly issued Iranian passport.

When he landed in Tehran, though, things took a dark turn. Amir’s passport was confiscated, and he was told to attend an interview at an office of Iran’s primary intelligence agency: the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).

Disguised as an import-export business in uptown Tehran, the office wasn’t far from MOIS’s official headquarters. A security guard checked Amir’s name and led him to a small, empty white room where he was left for hours and denied access to a lavatory.

Eventually, a man in his mid-40s entered. The official was calm and emotionless, and led Amir to a private office, where his passport was lying on a desk.

It soon became obvious the interrogator knew all about Amir’s life: his conversion, the underground churches in Tehran he had attended years earlier, and the friends he worshipped with in Britain and Iran. Then the man said: “You know, you could be executed for leaving Islam.”

After Amir insisted he had only returned home to see his dying mother, the man responded: “You may die before she does.” Then came a further threat. “As a refugee, you shouldn’t be coming back to Iran. Do the English authorities know?”

Amir spent the next two weeks in turmoil, terrified he might be arrested, tried and executed in Iran, or arrested and deported after his return to England.

And then, he was summoned again, this time to an apartment near his family’s home. There, the interrogator, a Mr Mohammadi, immediately asked: “Do you want to go back to London? Or should I refer your case to the court to review your apostasy?”

Mr Mohammadi started reeling off the names of Amir’s Iranian Christian friends, as well as activists he followed on Facebook, saying Amir he had to “get close” to them in London and supply information to his handlers. The embassy would report his trip to the Home Office if he refused, and his parents, both in Iran, would be targeted.

Left with no choice but to agree, Amir was then given a phone number and $1,000 in cash, saying it was a “token of appreciation”. Back in London, Amir was “filled with paranoia. A few days after I arrived, a message came from an Iranian phone number. It was Mohammadi, asking questions, dropping names, fishing for information. The messages came and went, sporadic but unnerving.” Amir cooperated.

It was only after the death of his parents that Amir feel safe enough to cut contact. He blocked the number, changed his handset, and vowed never to return to Iran. “But I’m still haunted,” he tells UnHerd. “I’ve never reported any of this to the UK authorities, because I’m terrified I could be removed.”

***

It would seem, according to our interviewees that the British government is aware that some Iranians clandestinely return to their homeland. It is increasingly suspicious of refugees traveling to Turkey. So visitors — and the Islamic Republic — are working to stay one step ahead.

A case in point is Mehdi*, who three years ago was allowed to stay in Britain after claiming to be an anti-regime activist. Now working in construction, Mehdi visited his homeland last summer using a different route. He traveled first to Italy, using his refugee travel document and then used a newly acquired Iranian passport to enter Armenia. From there, Mehdi crossed into Turkey, before finally reaching Iran.

Mehdi also avoided visiting the London embassy in person. Refugees fear that the building is under surveillance by the British authorities, so he used a UK-based Iranian travel agent to deliver the application form and pick up his passport. But this service is anything but secretive, advertising on Facebook in Farsi: “Leave everything related to the Iranian embassy to us. In the shortest time, the fastest service!” The travel agent also gives advice on how long refugees can stay outside Britain without losing entitlement to benefits, and promises to secure the necessary visas for travel via Turkey or Iraqi Kurdistan.

Posing as refugees, we managed to contact this agent via a phone number she posts on social media to advertise her services. She told us that if we had no Iranian documents, such as a military service card, a relative in Iran could go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to verify our identities. If that were not possible, she said, her agency could arrange the necessary verification.

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The embassy, the agent continued, would not take issue with us being refugees. “We assist refugees with this process regularly,” she said, “and there haven’t been any problems.” She also said the only problem was that so many refugees were applying that the next available appointment would only be in mid-July — we applied in May. “Once processed, it takes about a month to receive the passport,” she added. “We send clients with refugee travel documents to the embassy daily, and to date, no one has reported any issues upon re-entering Iran.”

The agent also repeated the assurance given to Mehdi: that we need not attend in person. “We’re able to verify your identity on behalf of the embassy,” she said, “and your passport will be sent to you by mail.”

To avoid being caught with an Iranian passport upon returning to Britain, there are even courier services available from overseas. Once again, Mehdi is a good example here. Before returning to Britain, he left his Iranian documents with an agency in Armenia, which then delivered them to his home.

All the while, the Home Office remained unaware of Mehdi’s movements, a recurring theme in our investigation We spoke to Rezvan*, for example, a third refugee who returned to Iran via Iraq for a holiday this spring. When Rezvan returned to the UK border, he was ready to present the Iraqi stamps in his travel document, “but the officer didn’t even ask to see them”.

You can find similar discussions online, too. The travel agent’s Instagram feed includes semi-open discussion from refugees about the risks of being detected by the UK authorities. One man calling himself Iranian.london.2020 says he had applied for an Iranian passport three weeks earlier, but had since been contacted by the Home Office, asking awkward questions. “I have not told anyone that I took this action,” he wrote. “I swear to God I am extremely stressed. Has anyone else had such an experience?” Another user offered reassurance. “Don’t worry, the Iranian embassy won’t give any notice to England… just deny it and say that you don’t have an Iranian passport.”

In another private social media group, an Iranian who returned for a holiday offers advice on how to handle the inevitable meeting with the MOIS. “Have something unimportant ready to give them, some information,” they suggested. “It will help you.”

***

Like Amir, Mehdi was pressured to become a spy once he arrived in Iran. His passport was confiscated, and he was told to attend a meeting with MOIS officials. He too disclaimed involvement in politics, claiming he had come to Britain because a friend had told him it was a “great country” where he could do well: and that he was merely a builder. Mehdi was asked about his social circle in the UK, and if he had ever participated in anti-regime protests. He replied that he had, but only to support his asylum claim. Iranian officials also asked him to identify other protestors from photographs. Eventually, MOIS let him go, while Mehdi himself insists he never became a spy. Rezvan said that he, too, was forced to meet the MOIS, but declined to give details.

Iran clearly sees Britain’s émigré community, perhaps as large as 500,000, as one that needs monitoring — and as a source of vital intelligence. Yet if that explains the cases of Amir and Mehdi, seemingly apolitical Iranians blackmailed by the MOIS, the regime targets other refugees in a more concerted way.

In January, a London-based opposition journalist called Reza* received a call from his father in Tehran — who told him he was at a hotel with an unnamed MOIS officer. He told Reza that if he did not start collaborating, he would never see his parents again, and their pensions would be cut off. He added: “Our friends in London know how to find you.” He was given a week to consider the offer.

The call, seven days later, came from Reza’s father’s phone, and this time the MOIS officer revealed he had intimate details of his work and associates. But unlike in Amir’s case, Reza’s blackmail was more specific, with the officer offering him $70,000 if he agreed to become an informant on the channel where he worked. Reza declined, saying he would rather leave his profession entirely. “That’s not enough,” the officer responded. “You have no choice. We need your access.” Since then, his parents’ pensions have been suspended, and they have been barred from leaving Iran. Despite this pressure, Reza continues to do his job in London and says he will not give in to the MOIS.

Even so, his case is far from unique. This week, the BBC said the families of staff at its Persian service were also being targeted and harassed. In the wake of its announcement, a BBC Persian journalist told us that his family had been approached in Iran, and told to persuade him to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan for a meeting with MOIS agents. He said that many of his colleagues experienced the same threat.

***

Consider this. A hostile state is facilitating the apparently illegal travel of supposed refugees as a means of recruiting spies. Whitehall, according to our interviewees is aware. But what are they doing about it? When we asked, a Government spokesman said: “We take all allegations of abuse of the immigration system extremely seriously and will not hesitate to take appropriate action where necessary.” For its part, the Iranian embassy did not respond to a request for comment.

Last month, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper made a statement in Parliament, saying Iran “poses an unacceptable threat to our domestic security which cannot continue”, promising new powers to strengthen border security and “keep the public safe”. Yet given the agility and relentless nature of Iranian methods — and the apparent inability of Britain to staunch it — she won’t find it easy to fulfill her pledge.

*Names have been changed.

Not every Syrian who has crossed back from Lebanon has faced Bashar al-Assad’s wrath so directly — yet in her poverty and her desperation, Laila is far from alone. Around 440,000 people are estimated to have fled Lebanon to Syria since Israel escalated its military offensive in September. Like Laila, most are Syrians: some 1.5 million fled the Assad regime during their country’s bloody civil war. And, just like Laila, they now face a Catch-22: either taking their chances in Lebanon, dodging Israeli bombs, or else returning home to the same dangers that forced them to flee in the first place.

While returnees are currently coming from nearby Lebanon, meanwhile, Syrians could yet return from far further afield. In mid-October, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy urged EU leaders to explore strategies to enable the return of Syrian refugees, as they discussed hardening the bloc’s migration policy at a summit in Brussels. Ahead of the meeting, Meloni stressed the need to work with “all actors” to make this happen, including the Assad regime itself. And while the talk right now is of “voluntary” returns, some Syrians already fear that the Europeans may yet use coercion — conveniently dumping their liberal agenda and condemning many more people to disappearance or worse.

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For Syria is far from safe. That’s clear enough from the numbers, with the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) reporting at least 26 cases of returnees who have been arrested and detained by government forces. SNHR’s September report recorded 206 arbitrary detentions across the country. That included nine children and 17 women, even as almost a dozen returnees were swept up too. Government forces, for their part, were responsible for 128 of these cases — but Kurdish and Islamist factions were also involved.

Dovetail that with countless anecdotal stories of torture, expulsion and murder, and it’s little wonder that so many Syrians are reluctant to head east. But what of those who do decide to take the plunge? The journey into Syria is itself fraught with danger. Many are also obliged to travel on the backs of pickup trucks, or struggle through on foot to avoid arrest. Some returnees prefer heading through opposition-held territories to avoid being picked up by government troops, though that carries its own risks: of extortion by opposition militias and bandits.

If they chose to return via official channels, there is a cost: $100 upon re-entry. “People scrape some clothes and valuables, rush away, and are forced to walk,” says Mohammad Al-Abdullah, director of the SJAC. “Nothing in those returns is voluntary, safe or dignified. And though Damascus has often made promises of amnesty for returnees, these rules don’t apply to those thousands of Syrians who were previously detained for peaceful political protest. In any case, Al-Abdallah says that government forgiveness cannot be trusted, describing Assad’s proclamations as a PR exercise aimed at Western countries eager to dump their Syrians.

After 13 years of war, these refugees are returning to a land of shattered cities, fallow farms, and inflation hovering at 120%. They usually arrive with very limited resources: nine out of 10 refugee families in Lebanon live in extreme poverty. Even if they do have funds, meanwhile, they’re likely to find their homes in ruins, or else discover they’ve been confiscated by the state. Flour, oil and other basic food stuffs are hard to find, and the government certainly won’t help new arrivals secure them. In fact, there’s some evidence that returnees are actively discriminated against for aid and shelter, even as electricity, water and healthcare are in desperately short supply too.

All told, it’s unsurprising that Syria is in the midst of a humanitarian disaster: with 7.2 million people displaced inside their own country, some 70% of the population needs humanitarian help, while a full 90% live in poverty. Yet despite the fact that the UNHCR has warned in July that conditions in Syria are too unsafe to promote large-scale voluntary returns, several foreign governments seem keen to promote just that.

Across the Mediterranean, Meloni has led the way. In July, she reappointed an Italian ambassador to Damascus, making Italy the first EU to formally restore relations with Assad after he dragged his country into bloodshed about a decade ago. That diplomatic move came a few days after eight EU countries, including Italy, called on the bloc to “review and assess” its policy on Syria — with the apparent aim of creating conditions for “safe, voluntary, and dignified returns” of Syrian refugees.

It’s hardly surprising that European politicians such Meloni are so keen to prod Syrians back across the sea. If nothing else, anti-migration sentiment is good politics. It’s also telling that, notwithstanding their rapprochement with Assad, leaders like Meloni equally seem to accept the country isn’t really safe. How else to explain the efforts by some EU states to establish “safe zones” within Syria, whereby returning refugees would be sent to live away from their hometowns?

Al-Abdullah is unimpressed, noting, among other things, that it risks exacerbating sectarian tensions in what remains a traumatised, suspicious country. That’s even before you reflect on the huge pressure such a plan would put on basic services.

No less important, SJAC’s director points to serious consequences if normalisation with Assad’s government proceeds, especially if some EU states finally move from a voluntary scheme towards active deportation. “This is only a temporary fix,” is how Al-Abdullah puts it, warning of the suffering that would inevitably be inflicted on returning Syrians, surely breaching the human rights obligations of European states.

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Criticising the bloc for “closing its eyes” to the situation on the ground, Philippe Dam of Human Rights Watch believes Brussels is “repainting” Syria to suit its agenda. “There’s a risk,” he says, “that the Assad regime’s violations might be understated for short-term convenient goals of some EU leaders.”

In any case, the EU is already working with non-EU nations to push Syrians home, despite an obvious lack of safeguards. In May, for instance, the EU pledged a €1 billion financial assistance package to Lebanon, partly to fund the country’s border force. Not unrelated, almost 14,000 Syrian refugees were forced over the border into Syria last year. It’s a similar story in Turkey, with the EU paying Ankara to facilitate returns.

That, of course, still leaves one question: what’s the alternative? Dam suggests the EU could put political capital into improving Syria’s human rights situation. Al Abdullah, for his part, argues European governments should continue pushing for a peaceful settlement to the country’s war.

But with Syria casting off its pariah label — despite 13 years of brutal war — it’ll take actual incentives for Assad to soften. One option here is sanctions: not slapping on more, but reducing them, albeit if the regime makes genuine efforts to protect returnees. The bloc might also engage with Syria’s Arab neighbours, encouraging them to offer Assad financial support in return for good behaviour. If nothing else, this approach could prove mutually beneficial: there are around a million Syrians currently in Jordan, and anything that encouraged them to leave voluntarily would surely please the Hashemites.

Unfortunately, though, nothing so thoughtful seems likely — not from the Jordanians and certainly not from the EU. Rather, the bloc seems set to pursue its own interests above all else, and rely on liberal pieties until they’re no longer useful.

With no prospect of Palestinians and Israelis living together peaceably, anything short of absolute military victory unacceptable to both the Israeli government and its voters, but no meaningful plan for who will rule the uninhabitable ruins of post-war Gaza, the only realistic solution to the Palestinian problem, for Israel, is the total removal of the Palestinians. As Israel’s former Interior Minister has declared: “We need to take advantage of the destruction to tell the countries that each of them should take a quota, it can be 20,000 or 50,000. We need all two million to leave. That’s the solution for Gaza.”

Israeli officials have not been shy in promoting this outcome to a war, according to the President Isaac Herzog, for which “an entire nation… is responsible”. Israel’s agriculture minister Avi Dichter has asserted that “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding for emphasis that the result of the war will be “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.” Israel’s Intelligence Ministry has published a “concept paper” proposing the expulsion of Gaza’s entire population to the Sinai desert, and Israeli diplomats have been trying to win international support for this idea. According to the Israeli press, Israeli officials have sought American backing for a different plan to distribute Gaza’s population between Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Yemen, tying American aid to these countries’ willingness to accept the refugees. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, two Israeli lawmakers have instead urged Western countries — particularly Europe — to host Gaza’s population, asserting that: “The international community has a moral imperative—and an opportunity—to demonstrate compassion [and] help the people of Gaza move toward a more prosperous future.” The outcome for Gaza’s Palestinians does not appear to be in doubt: what remains to be haggled over is their final location.

The only actor that can prevent the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is the United States, and for domestic political reasons it is disinclined to do so. While the Biden administration declares it does not support “any forced relocation of Palestinians outside of the Gaza Strip”, it is not taking any action to prevent it. If the expulsion of Gaza’s 2.3 million population comes to pass, the result will be the most significant instance of ethnic cleansing in a generation, which will define Biden’s presidency for future historians. Yet outrage over such events is selective. It is not entirely true, as some Middle Eastern commentators claim, that Western complicity in the looming ethnic cleansing of Gaza highlights a lesser interest in Arab or Muslim lives: the Armenian case highlights that eastern Christians also barely flicker on the world’s moral radar. 

This week’s awarding of the right to host next year’s COP29 climate conference to Azerbaijan, just a few months after its ethnic cleansing of Karabakh, reminds us that the supposed international taboo on the practice does not, in reality, exist. When ethnic cleansing is permissible, and when it is a war crime, depends, it seems, on who is doing it, and to whom. Azerbaijan is oil-rich, useful to Europe, and able to buy favourable Western coverage; Armenia is poor, weak and friendless in the world. Similarly, the extinction of much of the Christian population of the Middle East as a result of the chaos following the Iraq War won very little international attention or sympathy: communities which survived in their ancient homelands from Late Antiquity, riding out the passage of Arab, Mamluk, Ottoman and European imperial rule, did not survive the American empire.

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Yet while the moral revulsion such events excite is the natural and humane reaction, ethnic cleansing is less rare an event than the crusading military response to its Nineties occurrence in the Balkans may make us think. For the sociologist Michael Mann, ethnic cleansing is the natural consequence of modernity, “the dark side of democracy”. As the Northern Irish writer Bruce Clark observed in his excellent book Twice A Stranger on the euphemistically termed “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey exactly a century ago, “Whether we like it or not, those of us who live in Europe or in places influenced by European ideas remain the children of Lausanne,” the 1923 peace treaty “which decreed a massive, forced population movement between Turkey and Greece”. One and a quarter million Greek Orthodox Christians were removed from Anatolia, and nearly 400,000 Muslims from Greece, in a process overseen by the Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen leading a branch of the League of the Nations which would later — perhaps ironically — evolve into today’s UNHCR. 

It was a cruel process, wrenching peoples from ancestral homelands in which they had lived for centuries, even millennia— and by the end of it half a million people were unaccounted for, presumably dead. Yet it was viewed as a great diplomatic triumph of the age, perhaps with good reason: without meaningful minorities on each side of each others’ borders to stoke tensions, Greece and Turkey have not fought a war in a century. Indeed, as late as 1993, the Realist IR scholar John Mearsheimer could propose a “Balkan Population Exchange commission” for the former Yugoslavia explicitly modelled on the 1923 precedent, asserting that “populations would have to be moved in order to create homogeneous states” and “the international community should oversee and subsidize this population exchange”. For the younger Mearsheimer, ethnic cleansing was the only viable solution to Yugoslavia’s bloody and overlapping ethnic map: “Transfer is a fact. The only question is whether it will be organized, as envisioned by partition, or left to the murderous methods of the ethnic cleansers.” Thirty years later, however, Mearsheimer condemns Israel’s planned expulsions from Gaza outright.

There is a dark irony here: the forced expulsion of peoples is an affront to liberal European values, yet it is rarely acknowledged that our modern, hitherto peaceful and prosperous Europe is built on the foundation of ethnic cleansing. Perhaps the ramifications of such a truth are too stark to bear, yet it is nevertheless the case that the peaceable post-1945 order depended on mass expulsions for its stability. Using the 1923 exchange as their explicit model, the victorious allies oversaw the forced removal of 30 million people from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe towards newly homogeneous ethnic homelands they had never seen. At the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union settled upon the expulsion of 12 million Germans, more than 2 million Poles and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Hungarians and Finns from their ancestral homes. 

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As Churchill declared in Parliament in 1944, “expulsion is the method that, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been in the case of Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made.” Only two years later, once the Cold War had begun and the Soviet Union and its vassal Poland become a rival, did Churchill fulminate against the “enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of” by “the Russian-dominated Polish Government”. In ethnic cleansing, as in so many other things, political context is the final arbiter of morality.

But as a result, Germany has never since unsettled Europe with revanchist dreams; both Poland and Western Ukraine became, for the first time in their histories, ethnically homogenous entities. As the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny has observed, the forced separation of Poles and Ukrainians, once locked in bitter ethnic conflict against each other, has led to today’s amicable relationship: “It seems that the segregation of the two peoples was a necessary precondition for the development of a mutually beneficial relationship between them. Apparently the old adage that ‘good fences make for good neighbors’ has been proven true once more.” That we have forgotten the vast scale of the forced expulsions which established Europe’s peaceful post-war order is, in a strange way, a testament to their success. 

Yet what made the mass expulsions following the First and Second World Wars broadly successful was that those expelled at least had ethnic homelands to receive them. In Greece and Turkey, the refugees fully adopted the ethnic nationalism of their new countries, in Greece providing the bedrock of later republican sympathies, and in Turkey the core support for both secular Kemalist nationalism and occasional bouts of military rule. In the newly-homogenous Poland and Ukraine, refugees shorn of their previous local roots and at times ambiguous ethnic identities fully adopted in recompense a self-identification with their new nation-states which has helped define these countries’ modern politics. The 120,000 Karabakh refugees will likely become a political bloc in tiny Armenia, affecting the country’s future political order in ways yet hard to discern. 

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Israelis are themselves, for the most part, the product of 20th-century ethnic cleansings, in the Middle East as well as Europe: indeed the descendants of Middle Eastern Jews, like the Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, are the country’s most radical voices on the Palestinian Question. But the Palestinians, like the ethnic French narrator of Houellebecq’s Submission, have no Israel to go to. Unlike the 20th century displaced of Eastern and south-eastern Europe, there is no Palestinian state waiting to absorb them. Indeed, for Gaza’s population, the vast majority of whom descend from refugees from what is today Israel, Gaza was their place of refuge, and the 1948 Nakba the foundational event in their sense of Palestinian nationhood. For all that ethnic cleansing punctuates modern history, there is no precedent for such a process of double displacement, and the political consequences can not at this stage be determined. We may assume they will not be good, and an analogue to Europe’s post-war neighbourly relations will not be found. 

Egypt’s disinclination to host two million Gazan refugees is not merely a matter of solidarity, but also self-preservation: flows of embittered Palestinian refugees helped destabilise both Lebanon, where their presence set off the country’s bloody ethnic civil war, and Jordan, where they make up the demographic majority. It is doubtful too, given the recent tenor of its politics, that Europe will be eager to receive them, no matter how humanitarian the language with which Israeli officials couch their planned expulsion. Rendered stateless, driven from their homes and brutalised by war, Gaza’s refugees remain unwanted by the world, perhaps destined to become, as the Jews once were, a diaspora people forever at the mercy of suspicious hosts.

A terrible injustice for the Palestinians, their ethnic cleansing may yet provide Israel with a measure of security, even as it erodes the American sympathy on which the country’s existence depends. The broader question, perhaps, is whether or not the looming extinction of Palestinian life in Gaza, like the expulsion of Karabakh’s Armenians, heralds the beginning of a new era of ethnic cleansing, or merely the settling of the West’s unfinished accounts. Like the movements which bloodily reshaped Central Europe, Israel’s very existence is after all a product of the same nationalist intellectual ferment of fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1923, while acknowledging its necessity, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon called the Greco-Turkish population exchange “a thoroughly bad and vicious [idea] for which the world would pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come”. Exactly a century later, Gaza’s Palestinians look destined to become the final victims of Europe’s long and painful 20th century.

It’s well-documented that social media is playing a vital part in this conflict: Ukrainians with working smartphones are publicising the terrifying experience of having their home invaded. But in Russia, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram have all been banned, leaving all but the most determined with nothing but fake news and propaganda.

Tinder, though, continues to operate normally. Some in the West have passported to Moscow to talk with beleaguered Russians and find out what their lives are like now. But others are passporting with more explicit political aims. A Slovakian media agency has launched an initiative called Special Love Operation, which encourages Tinder users to bombard Russian singles with images from the war in Ukraine to show them what’s really going on. “The Russians do not know the truth about the war in Ukraine,” its website reads. “Putin ignores the whole world, but maybe he doesn’t ignore his own people. We found a way to bypass censorship on Tinder.”

The agency tells users to change their profile picture to a selfie with a picture of a war-torn Ukrainian city (it provides 12 images), and change their profile description to a paragraph in Cyrillic, which reads: “Please don’t turn away, don’t turn a blind eye — innocent people like you and me are dying in Ukraine. They too wanted love, [to] live and get acquainted — now they sit in basements … lose their loved ones and relatives, freeze.”

Tinder has also become a way to connect meaningfully with those on the ground in Ukraine. Many in the West are desperate to help Ukrainians — especially since the refugee schemes were announced, and then promptly descended into chaos. Tinder has become one way for those in the UK keen to sponsor a refugee through the government’s scheme to connect with someone in need of shelter, albeit a mode uncomfortably adjacent to sex.

Curious, I decided last week to revive my Tinder. I was reporting in Dubai at the time, so started by swiping past a warning that I was in a country that did not respect LGBTQ rights, into a sea of slick-haired men looking for, among other things, “nothing serious”. With a few taps, I had upgraded my Tinder account so that I could passport — not to news-bomb or refugee-seek, but to hear what people are thinking, doing and feeling in both Russia and Ukraine. After all dating apps, unlike Twitter, encourage people to share their thoughts privately.

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I swiped in Moscow for a few days, and then in Kyiv and Odessa, sending messages that were as transparent as possible: I made it clear that I was concerned and curious to hear the perspective of individuals caught up in a hyper-reported crisis. I was friendly but non-flirtatious. I set my search to both men and women but got messages — and responses — only from men. The dozen or so from each country who I communicated with seemed content to converse without any sexual or romantic overlay, though a couple of Muscovites offered to show me around their city in the hazy future when this was all over.

For some Russians, everyday life has transformed since the invasion. With the mass exodus of Western companies, many connections with the outside world have been abruptly severed, along with options for getting out physically (flights to and from 36 countries, including the EU, the US and UK have been banned). My first Russian connection, a pale young call centre worker who remotely helps people fix their cars, messaged in under a minute after I swiped: “I would love to leave Moscow, from Russia. Maybe you can help me.”

He was translating his Cyrillic into English online and asked me to do the same. I enquired about the situation and what he thought of it. “I am very glad that I do not watch the TV that we have,” he told me. “I’m against. Now the sanctions this month are just beginning to feel them. We will feel them after April 1, when there will be nothing on the shelves, and in 3 months people will go hungry. Can we call on WhatsApp? I will show you a photo … Will you help me?”

I replied that I hoped he would be ok, and we should stay in touch, but I was unsure how I could help him. Still, his profile picture, in which he smiles wanly before St Basil’s, haunts me; I have checked in daily, getting ever-terser bursts of Cyrillic in response.

Most of the men I spoke to in Russia, though, didn’t share his negative view of Putin’s actions. Nikolay, 25, a cocky banking analyst, revealed a frankly sinister perspective. His profile picture featured a man’s silhouette licking a stiletto at the end of a long leg. He said sanctions had had little impact: his work “just reviewed our project pool from Europe to more domestic and east”. He added, “flexibility is key”, with an emoji of a smiling face with a halo. The fact that McDonalds has abandoned its Russian outlets, he said, has just made room for some “cool, a bit more expensive but tasty” Russian equivalent. “The only point is Instagram perhaps.”

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As for the invasion: “Putin is the face of Russian community and basically nearly 85-90 per cent see eye to eye … Most Russians understand the reason of it and support our military and I as a former soldier but we regret that we are supposed to kill our ex bros as they were fooled by US.” I asked what he meant by that. “Do you believe US are willing to bring peace and prosperity to Ukraine and other countries they interfere in?” he responded. It’s a question that many Western liberals have posed.

But then Nikolay expanded, warning that the West, like the Roman empire, had become too decadent, and was in for a shock. “I would like my children to raise up healthy, know the history as is it, realize that boy is a boy and girl is girl and to fuck ur friend isn’t appropriate cos then ur nation will die … Western world lost when these things became normal.” And then came Hitler. “Except for the worst things Hitler did he got some good ideas concerning the concept of Europe.” Shocked, but pretending not to be, I asked what he meant. “He made Europe decide how to live, not States”.

Nikolay’s analysis was particularly wide-ranging, but his view of the West as corrupt and devious cropped up repeatedly among the men I chatted to. Alex claimed: “Ukraine bombed Donbas for 8 years, in fact, the US and London benefit from this conflict, since they always have tried to do meanness to the Russians.” “The sanctions spoiled life a little,” he admitted, “but not much.” He was one of the men who offered to show me around Moscow “when the crisis is over.”

Until I passported, the Russian perspectives I’d heard were mostly outraged, against the war, intent on protest and appalled by Putin. But Tinder revealed that a plenty of educated young people do not share that view, offering a depressing glimpse at how deep the Russian threat goes: this is not, after all, a question of one isolated ruler running amok. At the very least, it seems that Russian propaganda has been successful, where the young men I matched with — most of whom had good English and seemed middle class — were concerned. Alex told me, “we don’t really want to fight, it’s just that some countries don’t keep their promise, and so I like London, and people too.”

The Ukrainians I spoke to were less verbose, but didn’t shy away from the need to fight. Vitaly, in Kyiv, said, “the war is going on and we need to fight! It’s scary, but we’re strong and we’ll win!” Alex said some of his friends had joined the army, but that he was working on some “social projects.” I asked about mandatory universal conscription for all men of fighting age, and he clarified that it was “not really all, yet.” His project was “psychological help for Ukrainians and info project to show mental trauma civil people get while the conflict.” He was “also launching YouTube video soon.”

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Navigating a world of real disaster, peril, anxiety, and fear — all from a comfortable perch in the West — I had expected that the panic and misery communicated by the Muscovite car mechanic would be more widespread, particularly in Ukraine. But instead, the men I matched with seemed either to feel relatively safe, or keen to appear unruffled. The fact that they had time to be on the dating app, of course, suggests they weren’t in the thick of the conflict.

Except, as Russian troops have made clear, you don’t have to be on the sidelines to be on Tinder. There have been reports of Russian troops bombarding Ukrainian women with messages in towns they are about to literally bombard, giving away their classified locations as they go. Dasha, a young woman in Kharkiv, matched with a number of soldiers, including a bearded Chechen fighter calling himself Black. She ended up talking to Belgorod-born Andrei, whose picture showed him in full combat gear wielding a Kalashnikov. “I love travel to Asia, particularly Thailand,” he told Dasha. “But now it’s a difficult time … because no one likes Russia right now.”

Kyiv was also my first taste of Tinder as refugee-sorting tool. I matched with Tom, an Englishman in his 30s, whose profile said he was looking to find someone to sponsor to come and live in his house. There was not a trace of sexual innuendo on his profile. But surely the men using a dating app to find a Ukrainian refugee to house are at least partially aware that Ukrainian women are reputed to be the most beautiful and brainy in the world.

Tom’s opening message to me was all business: “Hi, are you interested in the room/visa sponsorship?” I replied with the truth, asking him how it was going. “It’s proving to be quite difficult as I don’t think the UK’s policy has been published very well,” he wrote, echoing the widespread criticism of those trying to navigate it.

Whether people like Tom’s intentions are entirely innocent is hard to know; humanitarian, political and sexual goals are difficult to distinguish on the battleground of Tinder. But this conflict has highlighted that dating apps can go beyond their basic function, even if the promise and dangers of sex lurk in the background. Where other social media are mouthpieces, possibly to a vast audience, Tinder offers a more intimate view. And so long as it’s used carefully, the app could prove to be one of many powerful yet non-violent weapons in this war.

It is true that at British airports signs, in English and Ukrainian, offer information. But Britain barely figures on the refugee trail. We send weapons to Ukraine, and donors give money, but as yet, for shameful political reasons, the British people have been mostly unable to help the people of Ukraine. Germany, a state shaped by Angela Merkel, one of the few leaders of her generation who was both capable and decent, has helped hundreds of thousands. And there they were, women and children and old men and pets, in an old dim waiting room in Munich, where a Catholic charity was giving out food and coffee and tea.

Cristina comes from paradise: Odessa was paradise, she said. Truly, paradise. She worked in cosmetics and says her life was “perfect” before the war. “When the bombs started I called my friend and I said, ‘Am I crazy? I know I don’t follow the news but have we got Nazis? Where are the Nazis?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s the Russians, it’s Russian propaganda.’”

Cristina speaks six languages. A few weeks ago, when she first arrived in Munich — via Romania, Hungary and Austria — she translated between other refugees and the German authorities for 48 hours non-stop. She helped about 800 people, awed German officials told her afterwards. With her pencilled-on eyebrows, piercings and air of mighty charisma, Cristina struck me as a kind of punk angel. She is most proud of engineering a family’s escape from Mariupol as it was encircled and devastated by the Russian army.

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She is a fair distance from paradise now, sitting in the spring sun on the steps outside the old waiting room, but at least she is safe. “The Germans are strict but they are really good,” Cristian says, chain smoking. “If you can complete six stages, all the forms, you can get a house or a room or somewhere to live.”

Having settled her own family, found herself a room and completed a self-assigned mission to get a Ukrainian child with cancer in his chest, whom she met in Romania, to a specialist German hospital, Cristina returned to the station to help more refugees. The only time she came close to crying was when she described the welcome refugees receive in Romania:

“They just gave us everything. For the children they had made this room, this massive room, full of every sweet and cake and chocolate you can imagine. It was like a dream or something! And they got all the children together and they gathered them outside the doors and they just opened them and said there you are — it’s all for you. Romanians are incredible.”

The Austrian ticket inspector who combed refugee trains stuffed with fleeing women and children — all of whom had been issued special tickets by the authorities — extorting €160 per person in cash, on pain of ejection at the next station, is incredible in another way.

The worldwide refugee population was around 82 million, according to the UNHCR, before this war drove another 10 million from their homes. The average time it takes a refugee displaced by war to return to their country of origin varies by conflict and era — in cases of protracted catastrophe, it can be 21 years. Many will never return. A young woman I interviewed in Munich, a sales manager with a cat and a dog, who had left with six members of her family, said she would never go back to Ukraine. Her husband was fighting the Russians. She hopes he will live to join her in Germany.

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And then there are the children. It is not the babies, toddlers or the little ones you worry about. Their needs are basic and immediate and they travel well, on the whole. It is the plight of the slightly older children, eight or nine and upwards, which gets you.

There was a girl at passport control in Ukraine who was about ten years old. She was wearing a smart jacket and ear warmers. She was in charge of an adult’s suitcase, the wheeled kind you pack for a week away, and also a carrier bag. With her, waiting in the line for people emigrating on foot, were her mother and grandmother.

In a booth, two young female soldiers were handling two lines at once — people coming out of Ukraine, and people going back in. Most of the soldiers at that border near Siret were women, and they looked shattered. There was an uncertain atmosphere all around the border. The sky looked grey and bitter and all I could see of Ukraine was a low ridge, tall trees and rooks.

That girl was being so good. She must have been good for weeks, I thought, ever since the war began. It’s not right, is it, for a ten-year-old to feel she has to behave so well for weeks and months?

In a sports hall a few miles from the border, back in Romania, I interviewed a group of children who are all national and international standard swimmers. They and every refugee I spoke to began their stories in the same way.

“At five in the morning the bombs started.”

Until that point, no one I interviewed had believed the Russians were really going to attack.

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Most of the swimmers came from Kyiv and the surrounding region. Their coach had called all their families, a few weeks into the war, and offered to take the children to Romania, where they would be safe, and where they could swim.

They had been assembled in the sports hall to receive backpacks put together by volunteers from the Packed with Hope Campaign. The backpacks contained books in Ukrainian and English, head torches, water bottles and other useful things. There was an extraordinary stillness about the children. In the huge hall they chose to sit grouped tightly together. They regarded Gracie, and her Romanian co-organiser Gabriela Popescu, in a searching, almost unblinking way. They did not fidget or whisper, as any group of British 12 to 16-year-olds would.

When we spoke, they looked at me with a sort of steadiness: it was as though you were another thing in a long line of other things that had paraded through their vision during the course of the weird and terrifying and lonely dream it seemed their lives had become. They all held that measured, assessing, held-together look you see in paramedics and nurses and A & E doctors, the look of someone who has to be strong and calm and philosophical on some level. I had never seen that look in a child’s gaze before. I can see all their faces so clearly now.

The best English speakers were asked to talk to me — I was recording a Radio 4 programme about the road between Britain and Ukraine, the road to the war. I asked them normal things: what are you most interested in studying? What do you plan to do beyond school? They were all pale. One was interested in history, and one in mathematics, and they all said they wanted to continue their studies.

One, one of the oldest, Igor, said that in two years, when he turns 18, he will go back to Ukraine “to fight the fucking Russian pigs and help throw them out of the country”.

I was so glad he said it, and that he got to say it into a BBC microphone, though I doubt we shall be able to broadcast it. The children’s eyes seemed to change as he said it and they nodded and seemed to rouse and draw even closer together. That is something else they have learned, I realise now. They have learned hatred, and because they are still so young and still innocent, they may not even know it yet.

Igor was tremendously articulate, his English was excellent, and as we bade friendly farewells I punched him on the arm and said, “You should be a bloody politician mate!”

He laughed. It was the only time I saw any of them laugh.

Instead of Seder, I read an illustrated version of Exodus to my boys. We talked about people wandering for years in the desert, looking for a safe home. It is the central, guiding narrative of the Hebrew scriptures. Israel is home, a land flowing with milk and honey. Moses himself doesn’t make it there. Having led his people for years, he climbs Mount Nebo to see what God has promised his people, then dies. Martin Luther King riffed off Moses many centuries later: “I have been to the mountain top and I have seen the Promised Land.” King also died the next day. The person who says religion and politics don’t mix has never read the Bible. Or has only understood it through the lens of a very denuded individualistic Christian piety.

Not only is the Bible one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written, it is largely seen through the lens of the refugee. The 40 days of Lent, for example, are an echo of those 40 years the Israelites spent wandering in the desert, homeless. Jesus is forced to become a refugee after his birth, first fleeing to, then symbolically returning from Egypt. That’s why I think Justin Welby, along with various other senior Bishops, was quite right to draw upon the scriptures to say what they think about the Government’s new refugee policy: “Sub-contracting out our responsibilities, even to a country that seeks to do well like Rwanda, is the opposite of the nature of God who himself took responsibility for our failures on the cross.” Why treat Rwanda as a dumping ground for problems we do not have the political nous to sort out ourselves? Let’s leave Rwanda out of it.

The British colonial office did the something similar back in 1903; they offered Jewish refugees fleeing Russian pogroms 15,500 acres of modern-day Kenya as a place of settlement. This, too, was eventually, and angrily, rejected, despite being intended as only a temporary stop-gap. It felt like a similarly cheap fix. The extreme vulnerability of collective homelessness is not something to be exploited to soothe domestic nervousness — though, as the generous response of the British people to the Ukrainian crisis today has revealed, the nervousness may not be as keenly felt as politicans sometimes assume.

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That, at least, is my view. I understand that others may take a different line, even Christians. And I do think that those who criticise the Rwandan plan – though that may be too grand a word – have a responsibility to propose other solutions to the refugee crisis; those attacking the CofE for easy moralising do have a point. But what is just plain daft is the idea that Christianity should stay out of politics. “I think we separated the Church from the state a long time ago,” said Conservative MP Ben Bradly. Really? When was that? For a Conservative MP to have so poor an understanding of the British constitution is both laughable and depressing.

Yet again and again, when Bishops make a point others regard as “political”, the press leap on it as easy content, ripe for debate. But there really isn’t an argument here, except between people who know something about Christianity and those who don’t. Must we rip out “blessed are the poor” from our Bibles, or the idea that all of creation is from the Lord? Sure some wiseacre might shoot back that old favourite “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s”, in an attempt to demonstrate that the two should be discrete – but this is not an admission that there is a realm of human activity in which God shows no interest. A religion that begins with God’s creation of the universe is hardly going to carve out some unique territory where God has relinquished his authority. No, this clever phrase from Matthew’s Gospel is Jesus responding to those who would trip him up, who would get him in trouble with the state, by subtly pointing out that, to a good Jew, all things come from God, and so the set of things that are God’s contains everything. Render unto Caesar is a kind of linguistic joke. That set of things which are Caesar’s and not God’s is an empty set.

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Protestantism, however, with its emphasis on interiority, the religion of the heart, made a disastrous retreat into the first person singular. This allowed secularism to claim that religion is a private matter, something to be practised outside the public square, a bit like sex. Do what you like in private, but don’t “ram it down my throat”. But as sexuality is now something we are all encouraged to express outwardly, secularists want to force religion into the closet. Keep your God to yourself.

Part of the problem is that politics has narrowed into little more than a boo-hurrah between Left and Right. Christianity certainly doesn’t want to get sucked into that game, not because it should stay out of politics, but precisely because politics is a far bigger business than that practised by our current crop of politicians. If anything, the job of the Church is to demonstrate that politics should have a much wider lens than just the electoral cycle. Welby does sometimes give the impression that he is fiddling about in the details of policy, of using politics as management. But in this, I think he is not being political enough. He is not showing how the political has a properly cosmic dimension.

That said, Christianity is an incarnational religion, and the most materialistic of the world’s religious traditions. While these lumpy parcels of meat that we inhabit require physical care — hence the need for small ‘p’ politics — we are also beings who often set our lives in the context of something far greater than that afforded by the sell-by date of our physicality. There is a kind of politics that pertains here too – of the sort of beings we understand ourselves to be, of our greater moral and spiritual aspirations. So, to say that all human beings are made in the “image and likeness of God” is to make a big ‘P’ political claim. This is, among other things, a no borders kind of claim. Everyone, whatever their documentation, is stamped with God’s likeness, and as such, should illicit in us a reverence and certain solidarity. Yes, bishops should tread wearily in making too many small ‘p’ political claims. But big picture politics is their natural territory — and long may they inhabit it.

A few days earlier, my wife and I had met her Ukrainian family at 4am, 24 hours after they fled their home in Kyiv. We had flown out to meet her mother, two brothers (aged 8 and 15), and female cousin (16). Just like thousands of other refugees, we were crammed into a small, rented flat on the border of the old town.

We had little idea how the UK government would handle their visa applications, but I feared the process would be like everything else involving the Home Office: slow, inflexible, and infused with suspicion. My wife and I experienced this first-hand when applying for her own visa. Compared to the digitised registry office in Kyiv where we had married two years ago, the Home Office proved incapable of executing its most basic functions, hamstrung by a combination of bureaucracy and xenophobia.

Back then, none of her family could have imagined that they would be forced to flee their homes amid artillery strikes and rumours that Putin’s mercenaries were roaming the streets. But after enduring a day of bombings, they had little choice. Their initial plan was to drive to the city of Lutsk near the Polish border, where they had family. But Lutsk had also been bombed, the roads heading West were blocked, and there were reports that Belarusian forces were poised to sweep in from the North.

So they drove south, leaving behind everything they couldn’t carry. Trying to avoid the main roads, they travelled for 16 hours, stopping finally at Khmelnytskyi. The following morning, as the situation became clearer — and as the scale of Ukraine’s heroic military resistance became obvious — they eventually decided to risk heading to Lutsk. After much agonising, the family collected a cousin, said goodbye to their father (who, like all men aged between 18 and 60, had to remain behind and be ready to be called up to fight).

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Back at the visa centre, Home Office staff — some of whom had been flown in overnight — rushed from one group to the next, trying to explain what little information they knew to those who spoke little or no English. They were dealing with a WiFi network that kept crashing, laptops that had no chargers, and IT systems that stubbornly refused to accept their login details. At one point, someone copied my family’s passport numbers onto a piece of paper and handed it to someone else, who immediately copied the numbers onto another piece of paper, which was passed to a third person — who promptly put the slip of paper in the bin.

It took about a week for their visas to be issued, even though it was clear that many at the Home Office and visa centres were working throughout the night. The government has now announced a 48-hour target for processing applications, but it remains to be seen whether this is anything other than wishful thinking: I suspect my family won’t be the last to flee Ukraine with little more than the clothes on their back, only to shell out for a hotel while they wait for the wheels of Britain’s Rolls-Royce bureaucracy to turn.

The government insists that detailed security checks are vital to stop spies and people traffickers, while ignoring the lumbering clunkiness that defines its system as a whole. First, the Home Office in London sets the rules, and applications are conducted on the GOV.UK website. Then, an outsourced company called TLS Connect collects documents and biometrics at visa centres across the world (the one in Warsaw uses temporary offices inside a hotel). Applications are then sent back to Home Office centres across the UK. Here, staff reportedly use three completely different and incompatible systems, some of which are 20 years old, to check documents and run background checks. The applications, if successful, are then sent back to TLS Connect to distribute the visas and stamped passports. Once in the UK, this paper visa is then used to collect an ID permit.

Of course, my Ukrainian family are grateful for the sanctuary they can find in the UK: their visas grant them rights to work, study, and claim state support. The alternative — remaining in Kyiv — doesn’t bear thinking about.

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But the uncomfortable truth is that no visa can solve the more serious problems they face. While Kyiv is neither Mariupol nor Kharkiv, it is hard to predict what, if anything, my family will have to return to. The small restaurant they own lies in a village on the city’s outskirts that has seen some of the fiercest fighting in the area. Tales from their employees of looting Russian soldiers using the business as a base provide some warning of what to expect, but the revelations at Bucha still leave us numb. Yet still they remain certain they want to go back.

What will they do in the meantime? Well, it all depends on whether they manage to escape the complex web of Britain’s bureaucratic state. For instance, everyone in the UK knows the reams of paperwork involved in registering for a GP. Yet even I couldn’t help but laugh when my eight-year-old brother-in-law was told to fill out three forms about his alcohol consumption. Meanwhile, in an effort to register them for under-16 Oyster cards, I have become trapped between several different Transport for London systems, none of which will read their passports to verify their ages. At one point, I was invited to go to a TfL office which had been closed for several years.

Contrast this with the response of friends, neighbours and strangers, and it’s hard not to feel anything but exasperation. Since returning, we have been overwhelmed by spontaneous acts of generosity: donations of clothes, toys, and electronics; invitations to join sports clubs and visit museums; offers of after-school lessons from teachers who are happy to put in a word to get the kids registered at schools. One neighbour, out of the blue, announced he had tickets for a Spurs game, collected the elder brother, and handed him a white replica shirt (the boy, at least until now, preferred Manchester City, home of the Ukrainian defender Oleksandr Zinchenko — but we don’t tell our neighbour).

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And this spirit is being channelled across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for the government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme. There is a widespread, almost populist, demand that Britain do more to help. Yet at every turn, the Home Office seems intent on making the system for registering for the scheme impossible to negotiate.

It is hard to imagine those fleeing the Blitz being found homes in the countryside under today’s conditions. Only yesterday, for example, it was reported that councils have denied applications from volunteers whose houses have plug sockets “that endangered children because they were placed too low in the walls”. Elsewhere, hosts have been rejected “because ponds in gardens needed to be drained before child refugees could move in”.

This, then, is my overwhelming impression of these strange few weeks: the enormous, perhaps unexpected, generosity of the British people, contrasted with the suffocating bureaucracy of the British state. It is only through the fresh eyes of my family that I realise how resigned to this shameful state we have become. We, not to mention those fleeing war, deserve better.

Today marks three weeks since Putin launched his invasion and already thousands have been killed — perhaps significantly more, if the latest estimates from Mariupol are to be believed. There are mass graves, bodies strewn in the streets, desperate attempts to survive by melting snow for drinking water.

We have all marvelled at the Ukrainians’ bravery as they fight to defend their country and people. But the price of their heroism has been terrible suffering. Right now, the United States and its Nato allies are focused on targeting the Russian economy with sanctions, as well as sending weapons and other forms of military aid into Ukraine. Both efforts must continue. But there is also a dire need to help civilians no longer in the country — those who have decided to flee the daily barrage of missiles, bombs and bullets.

This week, the UN estimated that more than 2.8 million people have now escaped. With Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 60 required to remain and help with the war effort, most leaving are women, children, and the frail, running from the relentless shelling of their cities and villages. More are expected to leave in the coming weeks: the UN’s High Commission for Refugees has estimated that 12 million people still inside Ukraine will need help.

European countries have already taken moderate steps to accept refugees. The Schengen zone has dropped visa requirements, requiring only a biometric passport to enter. The EU has granted the right to stay and work in the EU for up to three years. But more needs to be done.

First, the West can prove its continued support of Ukraine by conducting a large-scale humanitarian airlift to save those trapped in encircled cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv, or captured ones such as Kherson. Getting them out and to a safe country should be the top priority. We attempted this in Afghanistan last year; there’s no reason we shouldn’t do the same now.

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Once these people have left, we need to ensure they can reach host countries across Europe, especially the wealthier northern European countries. For years, the European Union has constantly spoken of the importance of “burden sharing”. Now is the time for it to demonstrate it knows what the term means. As things stand, the burden on Poland — there are 1.8 million refugees there — is too great. This is a crisis for all Europe, and should be treated as such.

In 1992, after fleeing a forced marriage in Somalia, I spent 11 months living in an asylum-seeker centre in Lunteren, the Netherlands, with individuals from around the world. One group in particular stood out: those from the former Yugoslavia. Given the proximity of the conflict to the European Union, those running from the Balkan states were bussed into the centre from the border. I cannot recall another refugee group being treated this way, but it sets a clear precedent that asylum seekers escaping a European conflict should be provided with transport to reach safety.

Once there, Ukrainians deserve protection and accommodation. Those who fled in the first weeks of the conflict often had friends in foreign countries who provided them with housing. But as the scale of evacuees continue to rise, that is no longer the case. People today are desperate: a family may have a suitcase between them, but no plan for what comes next. This is where European governments need to step in.

And so far, they are failing. This week, the British government announced its Homes for Ukraine scheme, which will pay volunteers £350 a month tax-free for opening their homes to those fleeing the conflict. The response was undeniably heartening: more than 100,000 people signed up in the first day. But even with the best of intentions, such enthusiasm can’t hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than a gimmick, designed to fill headlines rather than remedy the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

Ukrainians don’t need shelter, safety and accommodation next week, or the week after. They need it today. Every European country should be expediting this process. With the recent passage of the European Commission’s “Cohesion Action for Refugees in Europe” proposal, which allocates €10 billion humanitarian aid for Ukrainians, there is no reason we can’t immediately guarantee accommodation for those fleeing.

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If we don’t, in the coming weeks they could be forced to substitute one type of inhumane barbarity for another. Already there are reports of trafficking gangs waiting near the border for young women and children. One man has been detained in Poland, suspected of raping a 19-year-old refugee he had ensnared with an offer of shelter. Another was heard attempting to lure in a 16-year-old girl before authorities intervened. In the UK, meanwhile, the National Crime Agency estimates that there are at least 6,000 modern slavery offenders in the country. “We can be certain that some of this number will be seeing the Homes for Ukraine scheme as an opportunity to turn a profit,” one expert has warned.

This must not be allowed to happen. Young Ukrainian women must not end up in red-light districts across Europe because they fled their homes and fell into the wrong hands. Nato and the EU may not deem it appropriate to support the Ukrainians with a no-fly zone — but surely we can protect them from being further dehumanised by opportunistic criminal syndicates. It is the least we owe them.

And then there is the need for a long-term plan. It is all very well offering citizens a wad of cash to take in refugees, but what comes next? For those entering Europe, the sooner we reintroduce them to a normal life the better. Asylum-seeker centres are often like human holding pens — they provide food, shelter and basic healthcare. But, as I discovered in the Netherlands, life as a refugee is a waiting game. Typically, refugees spend their days waiting for paperwork to be approved, waiting to be allowed to go to school, or waiting to be allowed to work.

It is cruel and dispiriting to keep any human in this condition of uncertainty — and especially so with the people fleeing Putin’s bombs. Once the Ukrainians arrive, we need to rush them into language and skill-building classes immediately. We need to help them find jobs and put their children in schools. This is the only way they will be able cope with the mental and emotional trauma that is the aftermath of the war.

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But we must also start planning for their repatriation, closely tied to the swift rebuilding of Ukraine. After all, most of the refugees will want to return to their homes, if they can, as soon as possible. With the mass destruction of cities and towns, significant investments — nothing less than a new Marshall Plan — will be needed to rebuild the country.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has failed Ukraine time and again. They were persuaded, in 1994, to give up their nuclear weapons in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. They’ve been strung along for years with the promise of joining Nato and the EU. And they were left to fend for themselves when Putin started to amass tanks on their doorstep.

The only moral course for the West now is to stop making hollow promises — and to start supporting the refugees. Perhaps it is too late to save their country, but it is not too late to save them. Every day the invasion continues, Ukraine shows the West the cost of freedom and the courage needed to take on tyrants. It’s now our turn to step up and start bearing some of that cost.

Pornhub has a new category: “Ukrainian girls and war rape videos”; it is dominated by Russian soldiers documenting disgustingly brutal crimes. Domestic violence and street harassment have already spiked. Female refugees are falling victim to pimps and traffickers; official channels — the police, hospitals, legal systems — won’t help them.

Where women are concerned, “the foreign coverage of the war is concentrated mostly on women fleeing with children”, Maria Dmytrieva tells me. The Ukrainian feminist activist — a key member of the Global Network of Women Peacekeepers — believes this coverage misrepresents the reality of war for women, and the ways in which women specifically become targets for attack.

We speak via Zoom, and as night falls, she sits in darkness, so as not to be spotted by saboteurs. Although the Russians had not yet arrived in her small town, a few miles outside Kyiv, like everybody else in Ukraine she is in a perilous position.

Maria has been involved in the campaign to end male violence in Ukraine for more than two decades. I have visited her in Ukraine on several occasions and have seen her make powerful men in senior government positions quake when she rails against injustices towards women and girls.

One study from 2019 found that 75% of women in Ukraine reported experiencing some form of violence since the age of 15, and one in three reported experiencing physical or sexual violence. According to a recent statement by the United Nations, crisis and displacement has recently put women in Ukraine at increased risk of sexual and physical violence and abuse. There are no figures as of yet to show the levels of violence experienced by women and girls since the Russian invasion, but plenty of evidence is being amassed by women’s NGOs.

In many ways, the experiences of women in Ukraine echo the plight of women in wars throughout history: we face reduced protections from violence and often an increase of domestic abuse. The situation is exacerbated, though, by the fact that Ukraine is being invaded by a country which effectively decriminalised domestic violence in 2017. It is well-documented that, post-conflict, when traumatised men return home, levels of violence against women increase. But if Russia wins, the right of Ukrainian men to beat their wives will be enshrined in the law of the land.

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“So far we have felt as a nation, united around this common threat”, Dmytrieva told me. “But we are pretty much bound to have the growth of cases of domestic violence, of male violence against women, both during and after the war is over”.

Domestic violence is not the only threat to women in war. There is a “new wave of sexual violence”, with 11 reports from different women that they were raped by Russian soldiers in Kershon, confirmed by a local gynaecologist. Of those 11, only five survived. Other reports of sexual violation by troops are being picked up by the UK media, but, according to Dmytrieva, little is being done to help.

Rape victims will suffer consequences long after the conflict has ended — especially those whose violation is circulated on the internet. The existence of this sick revenge porn ensures that the women brutalised in it will never be able to return to a normal life. Even if they escape the conflict, it then ends, and they make it home, they are likely to be shunned by their families.

The videos are perfect ammunition for pimps and traffickers to use to control women and force them into prostitution. Displaced women and girls are often without any food, shelter or income, with many caring for children. Traffickers seize the opportunity to coerce women into selling sex, and soon they are trapped and held captive. “It is really terrifying how capitalism and imperialism are going hand in hand to exploit those who cannot defend themselves right now”, Dmytrieva tells me. “And it is truly terrifying to see that amongst all this surge in humanity in caring for other people, there are those who want to exploit this weakness and make money out of it. It is very disheartening”.

“Organised gangs [are] trying to abduct young women on the Ukrainian Polish border and we already have several cases in Germany where the girls have been abducted by pimps in the refugee camps”, Dmytrieva explains. Punters in Germany are delighted; feminist colleagues have seen screenshots of them “talking online with each other about how happy they are to have young fresh Ukrainian women crossing the German border”. With no home, no money, no job, no resources, and a very limited legal framework protecting them, these displaced women are among the most vulnerable in the world.

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Women are vulnerable to pimps within Ukraine as well. In the East, even before tensions with Russia escalated into a full-scale invasion, the local economy was on its knees. Previously high-tech industries had been stripped; machines and other valuable assets were carted, wholesale, back to Russia. Few options for employment were left. As a result, the number of women in prostitution in Ukraine before the war was around 80,000. That figure does not include children.

For now, the police have their hands too full “going around looking for saboteurs” to investigate or prosecute crimes against women. Dmytrieva understands the urgency. Terrorists are “placing bombs, explosive devices and shells in the basements … they are turning our country into a minefield”. But she is hopeful that the Russian invasion will be repelled, making space for better policy to protect women.

While authorities are too busy to consider the impacts of the conflict on women, those who do an international trade in children are taking full advantage of the situation. “Ukrainian surrogacy clinics are now advertising women through Facebook, even during the occupation”, Dmytrieva told me. The press in Ireland and elsewhere have reported on babies “rescued” from war-torn Ukraine by their surrogate parents, and on surrogate parents “in limbo”, because “their” children are stuck in the now inaccessible country. No word of the plight of the women who carried those children, postpartum and vulnerable in a war-torn country, sometimes literally “holding the baby” that they had made no plans to care for, as the Russians invade.

Ukrainian women are under siege, with profound threats on every front, whether they flee or stay. Of course, men are in danger too. Ukraine does not allow men between 18 and 60 to leave the country. This rule is, Dmytrieva told me, “reasonable”. But the women suffer a different and ongoing kind of violence.

Nevertheless, it is not only the ways in which women are victimised that is newsworthy. “There are a lot of women who have stayed, who picked up arms, who secure the logistics for our army. There have hundreds and thousands of women doing this work that makes it possible for the army to fully function”.

Nearly 17% of the Ukrainian army is female, one of the highest percentages in Europe. Dmytrieva is a pacifist, but I could hear the admiration in her voice talking about the women who have taken up arms. In the face of a foreign invasion, she is aware that “we cannot afford a weak army, because that is what brought us into this situation … with having Russia for a neighbour, we need a very strong army.”

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She is furious with the British feminists who campaigned to stop Johnson sending weapons to Ukraine to avoid “escalating” the conflict. “Maybe they are not aware that if Russia takes us over, there will be no women’s rights whatsoever”. She does understand these women’s desire for peace but thinks that it is “heavily misplaced”. When I asked her what feminists in Britain can do to support Ukraine, she replied, without missing a beat, “send aircrafts, lots of them!”

I can’t send Dmytrieva the fighter jets that Ukraine so desperately needs, to repel Russian air raids and artillery. But she speaks for me when she says: “As a feminist, I cannot turn a blind eye to the peril that women are facing in Ukraine, both on the front lines of armed conflict and when they come back home”. Local, national and international women’s organisations must confront the horrors faced by Ukrainian women; only then can they work out how best to respond to the Russian invasion.

In the meantime, Dmytrieva points out, there are no women at the negotiation table. Maybe because compromise is not what is being sought. “There is not much space for negotiation. We want them gone and they want us dead”.

Soft-power tools are honourable and often pragmatic methods of conflict prevention and, at times, resolution. Just look at America’s Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, or the foreign aid provided today by the wealthy West to smaller and poorer nations.

However, as we are now seeing, it is deluded to conclude that evil men can be stopped by soft power alone. In the days since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been reminded of the necessity of having a well-funded and well-trained military. It has also become clear that we need to abandon our irrational energy policy, which imagines meeting Europe’s energy needs exclusively from ‘renewable’ sources.

Nevertheless, a key battlefield in the conflict playing out in Ukraine continues to be overlooked — and that is immigration policy. This is, of course, nothing new: just as soft power has been divorced from hard power, so immigration policy has been divorced from national security, even though it has been a destabilising factor in Europe for at least a decade.

Both sides of the immigration equation — the push and pull factors — dramatically affect Europe’s national security. The unyielding flow of immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia remains a source of civil unease. Social cohesion and national identity have become incendiary issues in polling stations across Europe. Intolerance towards immigrants is high and extremist parties remain popular. At the same time, radical Islamist extremism and the constant threat of terrorism still linger.

Add to this the burden on local resources — on housing, healthcare, education and policing — and it’s hardly surprising that the status quo exacerbates resentment towards immigrants, while undermining trust in the political class. It is no accident that Putin and other adversaries have been using misinformation and disinformation to support anti-immigrant parties and other groups on the far-Right.

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What is less well-known, however, is how immigrants have become a tool of war — one that is increasingly deployed by cruel, inhumane autocrats such as Putin.

Since the start of this conflict, at least half a million Ukrainians have crossed into neighbouring countries; according to the EU’s latest warnings, that figure could rise to seven million. To put that in perspective, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, roughly 1.5 million Ukrainians were displaced. But even then, there was no exodus to the EU; the refugees simply relocated to other regions within the country.

This time, however, it’s unclear if Putin will leave any Ukrainian territory for them to flee to. And make no mistake: this is all part his plan. Indeed, Putin has become the world’s leading advocate of hybrid warfare. In 2016, US General Philip Breedlove, Head of Nato forces in Europe, recognised this, warning that “Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponising migration from Syria”.

Yet in recent years, it’s been in Libya that Putin has pursued his most fierce — and secret — weaponisation of migrants. There, Russia exploits its increased presence by collaborating with militias to foster and facilitate crippling migrant flows into Europe. By deploying Russia’s ‘private’ military companies in the region, Putin all but controls the most significant routes for mass migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe — and therefore has the power to cripple economies and sow societal division.

Take Khalifa Hafar, the commander of the Libyan National Army — a nominal national force that is really an amalgamation of local militias. Hafar is currently trying to rebrand himself as Libya’s next President, but in reality is nothing more than a Russian-speaking warlord who benefits from the support of at least 1,500 Russian mercenaries associated with the Wagner Group.

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What would drive Putin to dirty his hands in the chaotic, tribal world of North African politics? As Mark Grey, Adjunct Professor at the U.S. Army War College, has observed: “Large tribes control vast territories in the region, operate beyond the control of nation states and ignore borders. Just as Italy pays militias to curtail migration from western Libya, Russia can pay tribes and militias to just as easily encourage and facilitate migration as control it.”

The impact this has on the West must not be ignored; and neither must the failure of our leaders to recognise it. Europe needs immigrants and immigrants need Europe. Years ago, as this mutual need became apparent, European leaders could have developed a rational system to manage the issue. Instead, they found themselves unable to escape an ideological impasse: one moment, they issued virtue-signalling declarations of solidarity and compassion for immigrants; the next, they made panic-stricken concessions to populist parties. How else should we characterise Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 wild reception of Syrian refugees, followed just a year later by her €6 billion EU deal with the President of Turkey after he threatened to open the floodgates?

For too long, Europe has maintained a contradictory stance towards mass migration from poor countries, lurching from compassionate rhetoric about asylum seekers to the development of an elaborate and ineffective system of migration management. But as the recent days — indeed, the recent years — have shown, with the advent of hybrid warfare and the abuse of migrant flows as a weapon to blackmail Europe, it is time not only to review minor features of the existing system but to overhaul the entire framework.

What needs to happen is not easy, but it is clear. Some of the measures we should take have dominated discussion for years, but are yet to garner widespread political support. For instance, for all the outcry they inspire in Western countries, border walls and fences do have their uses. When used appropriately, they not only deter crime syndicates and people traffickers, but also aggressive autocrats such as Putin. If EU countries had a functioning immigration system, the Kremlin’s use of hybrid warfare would be rendered ineffective.

More crucially, we need to simplify the international and European treaties that govern migration flows and those seeking asylum. And as the current crisis demonstrates, this requires the West to integrate immigration policy into the broader national security agenda. It should be an issue for the defence departments, rather than interior and justice civil servants. Whether we like it or not, mass immigration is now a military weapon. And it should be treated as such.

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Obviously, this won’t be remedied overnight. But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has created a unique opportunity to question all the sacred cows of European policy. Four short months ago, it was unthinkable to have a serious conversation in Germany about the retention of nuclear energy. Now, faced with the stark reality that energy is inseparable from national security and the foolishness of having to depend on Putin, we are witnessing a welcome change in attitude.

The same must happen with immigration policy. Yes, there must always be a place for compassion — and it’s encouraging to see the EU and UK welcome Ukrainian refugees where they can. But if we really want to incapacitate Putin, that won’t be enough.

Immigration is now one of his most effective weapons. It may once have been unthinkable to overhaul international and European treaties to address this. But a new and harsh reality dictates otherwise.

Life in Calais is an endless cycle of displacement, followed by disappointment. I arrived here in July 2016. I didn’t have much choice: back in Afghanistan, the insurgent Taliban had put out a warrant for my capture, incensed that I had supported the US military. So I left my family and friends. I fled.

Shortly before I arrived, the notorious ‘Jungle’ had been evacuated following clashes with riot police: thousands of displaced migrants were displaced once again. They have been trying to find shelter in several places in and around the city ever since.

Often they seek refuge in abandoned barracks or wooded areas, finding shelter in makeshift tents covered with tarpaulins. There isn’t much point in building anything sturdier, since the police launch eviction raids every 48 hours. The camps aren’t hard to find: they constantly smell of burning wood, mixed with the odour of waste that the local authorities refuse to collect. When the evictions take place, people do not always have time to collect their personal belongings, leaving the ground littered with blankets, wet clothes, and children’s toys.

Following several large-scale evictions in the past year, the authorities have destroyed the bushes and forests where the displaced were sheltering. Huddled people have been replaced by fences, concrete walls, and surveillance cameras that carry a simple message: you must not return. Much of Calais is like a war zone, with people surviving under the fear of the police, the evictions, and the violence that can arise between the different communities. It is difficult to access food, water, and medical services. And then winter sets in; every day, rain and wind flood and destroy makeshift shelters and lives.

Most of the people waiting here have fled countries scarred by war. Among the 1,500 people here are Afghans, Sudanese, Iranians, Eritreans, and Kuwaitis. Most of them are single men, but there are also families with children and single women. All of them see at the 30km expanse that separates Calais from England as a source of hope.

They all have different reasons for wanting to get across. Some have family waiting over there; some are left with little choice by the Dublin Regulation system, which could send them back the way they came. Given that the UK is no longer bound by the regulation, the beaches of Kent seem an enticing prospect.

For those wary of crossing in the winter months, there are some accommodation options in Calais — the Centres d’Accueil et d’Examen des Situations (CAES) are partly financed by the British authorities. But they are not particularly suitable for those people who only intend to pass through. They are in towns far from Calais without public transport — not ideal if you want to try a boat-crossing and need to be available immediately if the weather is good.

When I arrived in Calais, I didn’t know where I wanted to go: perhaps to the UK, or even Germany. The decision was made for me. Within a few months, I met an Afghan friend in exile who invited me to stay with him in his flat in Toulouse, while a friend of a friend helped me negotiate the asylum process and secure accommodation in Paris. Within two years, I had refugee status, and frequently returned to Calais to document the migrant crisis with my camera.

Every visit is more difficult; every story is more haunting. Since September last year, the prefecture has issued more than a dozen decrees to prevent organisations not mandated by the state from distributing water and food in the Calais town centre. When, last October, a hundred volunteers tried to prevent an eviction from a camp in Calais in a peaceful manner, the police responded with tear gas.

But it’s not just the police who have created this tragedy. The main funder of the aid providers in Calais, Choose Love, has actually hindered their work in recent months. In May, it forbade the NGOs it funds from distributing leaflets that provide basic “safety at sea” lifesaving information. Organisations were told they had to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” promising not to “carry out activities which risk breaching [UK immigration] law” — or risk having their funding pulled. Last month, Choose Love announced its withdrawal from Northern France, presumably under pressure from the Home Office.

Choose love, they say, as long as you’re not in Calais.

The tragedy continues to unfurl in Calais. Without support from the French Government or British NGOs, the situation has become increasingly desperate. Although the Franco-British border has always been deadly — at least 336 deaths since 1999 — the last few months have been particularly grim. On 24 November, 27 displaced people, including children, drowned while trying to cross the Channel.

The week before, I had met several shipwrecked victims in Grande-Synthe, a town about 20km from Calais. Kazhall Ahmad was from Iraqi Kurdistan and was alone with her three children. She was exhausted; the police had evicted their camp that morning without allowing them to collect their belongings, and she had spent the past month desperately searching for water for her children. Despite their grim situation, the children were hopeful for their lives in England, dreaming of becoming barbers or art teachers. Whether they get there is a different question.

The shocking drowning in November of so many — the worst the Channel has seen since records began in 2014 — turned the spotlight back on Calais. It was the first time I had seen so many journalists in the area. The displaced people I spoke to took heart from this, hopeful that the media attention and the shock it has caused among politicians could make things better.

But if the past years have taught me anything, it’s that when it comes to meaningful action, don’t hold your breath. Over the past month, both French and British politicians have talked up the existence of legal routes and opportunities for visas. But this is nothing more than a distraction. Freedom of movement is a right for Western white people, not for those who are displaced like me.

On both sides of the Channel, governments accuse smugglers of being entirely to blame for the deaths of innocent people. In truth, it’s mostly the lack of legal and safe access routes to the United Kingdom that contributes to the development of these smuggling networks. The smugglers are a key part of the problem: they use people’s distress to make money; they put people in danger by overloading the boats; they lie to people about the crossing being safe; and when migrants refuse to take the boat, they are threatened and abused.

Such facts are inconvenient, though. It’s far easier for the French government to invest thousands upon thousands of euros strengthening border control systems and deploying a Frontex aircraft over the Channel. This militarisation of the border serves no purpose. It will not deter people from trying to cross. They have no other choice; they will continue to pass, but in a more dangerous and clandestine way.

And the smugglers will win, those who are displaced will lose, and the political class will look the other way.

That, presumably, is why it houses eight consulates from European countries which function as de facto embassies to the Palestinian Authority, whose administrative headquarters are actually in Ramallah, about 15 kilometres north of Jerusalem. It also is the centre of social and political life for a host of NGOs, consulate staff and activist organisations, and a hub for journalists who tend to be pretty friendly to the Palestinian cause. Indeed, if the revolving door of “humanitarian” NGOs and activist journalists has an axis, then it spins somewhere between the villas and hotel breakfast buffets of Sheikh Jarrah.

It is fitting, then, that the place has captured the attention of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian partisans: a decades-long property dispute over whether Arab families should be evicted from property claimed by Jewish owners has suddenly became a proxy for the entire Jewish-Arab conflict over Jerusalem. Almost overnight, a wave of violent protests exploded in Jerusalem, as surging nationalist and religious tensions erupted across the country.

“Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim ownership of land they vacated in 1948, but denies Palestinians the right to reclaim the properties they fled from in the same war,” is how the New York Times described it. This was all too typical of the radically distorted narrative that has taken hold in the West. The conflict might be here in the Middle East, but the conversation about the conflict in Western capitals and campuses seems to have become a screen on to which irrelevant historical demons come to get projected.

But the facts of the case don’t quite fit so neatly on to these fashionable narratives and categories; the Arabs and Jews are in conflict because of their own histories and interests, and not because they are play-acting parts in a drama of guilt expiation.

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The disputed homes cluster in what was once the small Jewish neighbourhood of Shimon Ha-Tzadik, which was founded in the late nineteenth century on land close to a revered tomb. It lay adjacent to Sheikh Jarrah, which has since grown to surround it. Flare-ups of violence occasionally forced Jewish residents to flee, most notably during an Arab attack on the neighbourhood in 1936. Later, following the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, the entire area came under Jordanian control, together with Jerusalem’s Old City and the rest of what came to be known as East Jerusalem.

As in so many wars fought in lands vacated by imperial powers, masses of people fled the fighting, usually to places that were under the control of their side of the conflict. Displacement was, naturally, much higher on the losing side — Jews fleeing Sheikh Jarrah and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City in 1948 were vastly outnumbered by Arabs fleeing parts of West Jerusalem. Compounding the humanitarian tragedy, displaced persons also left behind immovable property, often (but not always) on the other side of a new and hostile international boundary.

And so it was in what had once been Mandatory Palestine, the majority of which fell under Israeli rule and about a fifth under Jordanian rule. Both Jordan and Israel established Custodians for Absentee Property, roughly modelled on the British Custodian of Enemy Property, which took control of German and Italian property in Mandatory Palestine after 1939.

The amount of property held by the Israeli Custodian was much greater, and the handling of it remains controversial. The question of absentee property has long figured in debates about Arab-Jewish relations in Israel or peace talks with the Palestinians. But the issue of absentee property lurks in the background of contemporary political rows that seem superficially to have little to do with the conflict: for example, disagreements over the discrimination against Mizrahi immigrants (from Arab lands), the privatisation of kibbutzim, fees for national parks and even Sabbath laws.

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On the Jordanian side of the Green Line there was much less absentee property to deal with, largely because the Jordanians were on the losing side of the war. They did conquer roughly one fifth of Mandatory Palestine, but that one fifth had very little Jewish property before the outbreak of hostilities. There were, after all, very few Arab military victories in that war in any part of Palestine that was inhabited by Jews.

The exceptions, of course, were in and around Jerusalem. Following 1948, several small agricultural communities around the city fell to the Jordanians and their inhabitants fled. And the eastern half of Jerusalem, including the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, was also conquered by Jordan and its remaining Jews were expelled under the terms of their surrender.

Both Jordanian and Israeli authorities were keen to divest themselves of absentee property as quickly as possible. Both also faced a tidal wave of refugees in urgent need of resettlement. In Jerusalem, displaced families on both sides were often housed in abandoned properties left by displaced families from the other side of the conflict.

In 1967 another war was fought in Jerusalem, this time with Israel prevailing over the Jordanians in the entire city, including Sheikh Jarrah. After the war, Israel annexed the formerly Jordanian part of Jerusalem (as well as other lands surrounding it) in a move that has not been internationally recognised. (Jordan relinquished its claim to East Jerusalem and the entire West Bank in 1988, but retains a special status over holy sites in the Old City in accordance with its 1994 peace treaty with Israel.)

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The annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war created two odd legal challenges in the context of Israel’s 1950 Absentee Property Law; both of which cut to the heart of the dispute in Sheikh Jarrah. The law relates to property in Israel, and the determination that someone is an “absentee” based on, among other things, residing in an enemy state or territory during the period 1948-1950.

But now that East Jerusalem was part of Israel (according to Israeli law at least), and all its property owners — including those now in Sheikh Jarrah — were in Jordanian territory in 1948-50, their return could conceivably be described as a mass seizure of private property throughout East Jerusalem.

The Kafkaesque nature of the situation was further emphasised by an additional, more minor problem. Some of the abandoned property administered by the Jordanian Custodian had not been fully transferred to its new Arab owners. This meant that Israel was now administering small tracts of “enemy property” in East Jerusalem where the “enemies” with property deeds were Israeli Jews who had been forced to flee their homes 19 years earlier.

The law was updated in 1970 with the aim of addressing both problems. It determined that Arab residents of East Jerusalem could not be classified as “absentees”, and that absentee properties in East Jerusalem that were still held in guardianship could be claimed by the Jewish owners they were confiscated from.

This is how the claim on the Shimon Ha-Tzadik properties landed in the Israeli courts back in 1972. The Arab residents claimed that the Jordanian Custodian transferred ownership to them; but the court determined that what they had was a leasehold, and that therefore they were “protected tenants”, not owners. Crucially, a protected tenant cannot be asked to leave under any circumstance, except one: non-payment of rent. Which is exactly the situation here, with the residents of the properties in question refusing to pay rent for property which they believe they own.

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After being bounced across the judicial system for decades, a final verdict was due to be issued this week. For now, amid a shower of bombs, it has been postponed.

But the dispute has taken on a totemic value for East Jerusalem Palestinians, and for supporters of the Palestinian cause worldwide. For a certain lazy kind of commentary, viewing the Jewish state as the bearer of accumulated sin — as white settlers stealing indigenous land — is too tempting a narrative; facts be damned.

At some point, however, despite the ongoing violence, the Israelis and the Arabs might very well enter into a negotiation for a comprehensive settlement of claims. There were, after all, properties abandoned in this conflict not just by Arabs and Jews in Mandatory Palestine, but by Jews who fled Arab countries throughout the Middle East in the most heated years of the conflict. Such a comprehensive settlement would have to not only account for vast amounts of abandoned property, but it would probably have to also make some kind of reckoning with origins and course of the conflict.

That will certainly be a difficult task. But whatever happens, it would surely be better now for Israeli authorities to defuse the situation and find a creative solution to a tiny legal loophole that should never have become a symbol for anything.

The high street boasts every Korean business you could dream of: from the Kang Nam barbecue takeaway and Hanatour travel agent, to a fully-fledged hypermarket, with its own section for K-pop merchandise. (In BBC drama Killing Eve, Eve Polastri —played by Sandra Oh, who has Korean parents — quits MI6 to lie low making dim sum in the local Han karaoke restaurant.)

But there is another notable community in this corner of the capital, one whose presence is undetectable from the shop fronts or grocery aisles – what is thought to be the world’s largest population of North Korean refugees outside Asia.

Having escaped one of the most repressive regimes in the world — a country it is illegal to leave without permission — some 700 North Koreans have sought sanctuary in “Little Pyongyang”.

Next month, they may mark a milestone in their assimilation. Ji-Hyun Park, who runs education programmes for defectors in New Malden, is standing to be a Conservative councillor in her home seat of Moorside in Bury, Manchester. If successful, she would be the first person from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to be elected as a politician in the UK.

“When I arrived, many people welcomed us and they gave to us a lot of opportunities and happiness,” the 52-year-old tells UnHerd. “I wanted to pay back to them. I also know that in the UK, there live many voiceless people and also many immigrant women, who have hard times in society. I want to listen to their voice and solve their problems.”

Why Tory? “My life was lived in a socialist dictatorship country,” explains Park, who had to escape twice. She first fled aged 29, by crossing the border into China, while under gunfire from North Korean guards. She was sold for marriage to a Chinese farmer but, after being reported to the police, was separated from her six-year-old son and deported back home.

There, Park worked barefoot in a labour camp, before being released to die after seriously injuring her leg. Within six months, however, she had escaped the country again and was reunited with her child. They arrived in the UK in 2008 as asylum seekers after a Korean-American pastor in Beijing put them in touch with the UN.

“What is really important to me is family, freedom and justice,” she says. “These values are Conservative values. That’s why I follow this party.”

New Malden’s transformation into an East Asian hub is thought to have originated with the location of the South Korean ambassador’s residence in the area. Seoul-based electronics firm Samsung also set up its UK HQ here in 1980.

North Koreans followed, seeking jobs in South Korean shops and eateries. But do not mistake a common language for a familial bond. “South Koreans and North Koreans cannot be friends,” says Yejin Lee, who escaped to the UK in 2008, aged 15.

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“Somehow there is this wall between us. Although it was the same country [before being divided up into Soviet-backed North and US-backed South in 1948], what they think is totally different. South Koreans think like free-minded people.” She adds that the stereotype they have of her compatriots, even in Britain, is disparaging: brainwashed, uneducated and poor.

Lee, who was born in 1994 in Chongjin, North Korea’s third largest city, considered herself an orphan after her father died when she was eight and her mother fled to China when she was ten.

A couple of years later, her mum made contact to say she had paid a “broker” to smuggle Lee and her younger brother out. But, says Lee, in her first press interview: “He left my brother there because he wanted more money.” She has not been able to make contact with him since.

Lee spent 15 days in China, before moving to Myanmar and, a month later, South Korea. She had grown up being told that North Korea was the best in the world and that leader Kim Jong-il was akin to a god. At school, when she was not forever studying the central subject – the intricate history of founding father Kim Il-sung and his family – she was taught that South Koreans were starving because of the evil Americans. “And that’s what I imagined – a lot of beggars,” she says in her New Malden kitchen, laughing at the thought.

The scales fell from her eyes within moments of making it into Chinese territory. “When I was crossing, North Korea was completely in blackout, no lights at all. And then just after that river, everywhere was lit up, it was so colourful. I was like, ‘Wow! This is a new world.’ That’s when I realised, maybe not everybody in the world was living like me.” After five months in Seoul, Lee and her mother made their way to England.

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Many North Koreans choose the UK over South Korea (where they are, in most cases, automatically eligible for citizenship and generous state support) because they do not want to be the victims of discrimination by their southern neighbours.

As one defector in New Malden told Jiyoung Song, senior lecturer in Korean studies at the University of Melbourne: “I couldn’t bear the second-class citizen treatment by South Koreans, but here in the UK, it’s OK because there are many second-class, third-class citizens like Indian, Pakistani Muslims or other black people. I’m just one of them.”

But that doesn’t always make life any easier. Here, they are destined to work in menial jobs for South Korean bosses. “I don’t even think they are angry,” says Lee. “They just accept it as it is because they have no choice.”

Korean expats from North and South are also divided by their accents and vocabulary. North Koreans, who grew up in a country impervious to foreign influences, cannot understand certain words that make up the “Konglish” spoken by those from the South.

Even their meals are different. “Generally, South Korean food is so sweet and has so much stuff in it, sometimes it’s hard to taste the original ingredients,” says Lee. North Koreans — not catered for by the manifold South Korean shops and restaurants of New Malden – are left to make their cuisine at home (a dish enjoyed by both nations, such as sundae, pig’s intestines stuffed with pig’s blood and rice, still tastes different in each).

Of course, this is paradise compared with home, where half of the population of 25 million is undernourished, according to a UN report. Just last week, dictator Kim Jong-un warned that the nation needed to embark on another “arduous march” against a faltering economy — appearing to draw parallels with the famine in the 1990s that killed up to three million of his countrymen.

It was the grim sight of starvation that led Joong-wha Choi — three of whose brothers had died of hunger — to flee across the Tumen River into China with his wife and baby son in 2004, before he settled in New Malden, where he works in the warehouse of Europe’s leading importer of South Korean food.

“I gave ten years of service to the country in the military and ended up seeing these dead bodies piled up in the street,” says Choi, now 56, via an interpreter. “I would rather be blind than see the dead bodies.” He chose Britain in part because of his memories of history lessons, in which the country — and its Industrial Revolution — were spoken of in glowing terms.

Lee, now a 26-year-old mother of two and working as a director for the charity Connect: North Korea, recalls: “Generally finding food was a problem for every family. Just getting rice wasn’t easy.”

Her family had a fridge and a TV, but most of the time there was no electricity — spelling disaster for her father’s income as an electrician. “The fridge, we would store shoes in it,” she says. “All sorts of different stuff, but not food.”

One rare exception is the Day of the Sun, which takes place today, the celebration of the birth of Kim Il-sung, founder and Eternal President of the republic. As well as the missile-laden parades — at which soldiers chant “We will die for you!” at their leader — it is the only day, apart from Kim Jong-il’s birthday, when the state hands out meat to families and sweets to children. “It’s a sad fact,” says Choi. “Because normal days for us are very hungry and we wouldn’t get enough food to eat.”

And yet many North Koreans in London are too intimidated to speak publicly, fearing the long arm of the DPRK authorities. Lee says she would not be prepared to have her photo taken for this interview, and that despite her fluent English and joy at living in a democracy: “I still find it difficult to say what I want to say, to express myself freely.”

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Park, who was most shocked by the sight of newspapers when she arrived in Britain, says she is still surveilled: “We make a lot of events in the UK. Sometimes the embassy come and say you cannot do that, and send angry emails to us.”

Meanwhile Choi, a former chairman of the North Korean Residents’s Society, believes some of his fellow refugees have been recruited as informers under threat of their families being imprisoned back home.

He is unperturbed. He twice thanks me for interviewing him, and laments how there “once was a period where people simply didn’t have any interest in North Koreans”.

“The problem that spies are doing is they divide the community,” he says. “I am the only one I know who didn’t actually have any threats from them, so I am very lucky.”

However serious the threat, the truth is that many of the goings-on at the North Korean embassy — located on a street in Ealing, west London, once home to actor Sid James — often sound more like those of a Carry On film. In 2014, diplomats were reported to be so short of funds that staff were seen buying office equipment at car boot sales, and were unable to pay for their shopping at a New Malden supermarket.

But they should not be underestimated. In 2012, a North Korean was jailed in South Korea for trying to assassinate a fellow escapee with a poison-tipped needle. “Eliminating a defector is apparently the best way of warning its people against fleeing from the country,” said a South Korean official. After he was arrested, the agent said the regime had threatened to kill his family if he did not carry out the assassination.

North Korean diplomats are even forced to spy on each other. Thae Yong-ho, who was deputy ambassador to Britain, defected to the South in 2016. He spoke in February of the constant fear of being spirited to a prison camp: “From time to time some of your colleagues just disappear without explanation.”

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And yet many North Koreans in London alter their accents and dress not to avoid undercover agents, but to appear to hail from their richer and more advanced neighbour.

“Even though they try, they cannot be because the way they speak and the way they behave – definitely North Koreans,” insists Lee.

“I actually go out to people and say that I am North Korean, proudly,” she adds, and she tells her children of the culture and history of her birthplace. “Not Kim’s family,” she clarifies, “but the country itself”.

“The landscape is beautiful, though all the trees are cut off because we don’t have electricity and to cook, you need a fire. Every season is distinctive. Spring is very warm and summer is very hot. We would go to the seaside and swim. And autumn is the most beautiful, yeah – all the trees, they have different colours.”

“I think we should be proud,” Lee says with a hopeful smile. “North Korea is going to open soon and it has a lot of potential. It could develop like South Korea. We could go back and do a lot of good things there.”

Choi, too, sees a time when he will be able to return. “But I also have this fear inside me. Getting out of that country is a life and death matter and I worry, would that be the same going back? There might be hatred for people who fled the country. I will definitely go back, even though it’s going to be hard.”

But the prospect of a homecoming still seems as remote as ever. If anything, North Korea has been pulling up the drawbridge, with the number of defections dwindling and the borders closed during the pandemic, as international sanctions continue to bite. Talk to defectors, however, and you will find a relentless optimism that one day soon the regime will fall.

In the meantime, at least they have found a little piece of Pyongyang in this pocket of London suburbia.

Yes, more than 4,000 people have crossed the English Channel this year on makeshift boats and inflatable dinghies. However, it is not armed units washing up on the beaches but rather men and women who are in many instances fleeing from armed conflict.

Farage, though, eager to reverse his flagging relevance, wants to be seen heroically manning the barricades while an indifferent and ‘soft touch’ political elite looks the other way.

And in some quarters, Farage’s influence still looms large: the Government appears to see the utility in marshalling public opinion against new arrivals. Last week, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, told Tory MPs that the asylum system was “broken” and promised new laws that will “send the Left into meltdown”.

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This attempt to whip the country into a hysterical fervour over these ramshackle new arrivals appears to be making headway. According to a recent YouGov poll, 49% of Britons said they have little (22%) to no sympathy (27%) for migrants attempting to cross the channel from France to England.

Parallel to this, a counternarrative is developing on the Left where it is argued that Britain ought automatically to give sanctuary to people seeking asylum on the basis that this country has played a “major role” in precipitating the migration crisis, as Daniel Trilling puts it for The Guardian. Trilling writes that many recent refugees have arrived in Britain from “Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Palestine, Sudan and Yemen. Of these countries, two were invaded in recent history by a coalition that included the UK; one has been pushed into famine by a Saudi-led bombardment using British weapons and military expertise; one is in a prolonged conflict with Israel, which like Saudi Arabia is a UK ally”.

In other words, it is our fault that fresh waves of people are coming to European shores.

Trilling might have gone further and pointed to the destabilisation of Libya by Nato — once described rather unpleasantly as “the cork in the bottle” of sub-Saharan Africa under its deposed dictator Colonel Gaddafi — as one of the major reasons for increased waves of people seeking sanctuary in Europe. Many Libyans are making their way to Britain against a grim backdrop of civil war and strife. A total of 1,126 grants of humanitarian protection were given to Libyan nationals in 2019 — an increase of 31% on the previous year and more than half of the total number granted.

Yet there is a risk of reducing a complex situation to an argument about western intervention. This has become something of a reflex on the Left in recent years: a sort of inverted imperialism by which Britain remains at the centre of every important event in the world. ‘It’s our fault,’ goes the self-flagellating cry — beneath which lurks a familiar imperial solipsism.

In the year ending in March, the top four countries for asylum claims were Iran, Albania, Iraq and Pakistan. We needn’t re-tread the embittered old ground of the Iraq war here — though I would urge readers to watch the BBC’s Once Upon a Time in Iraq if they still harbour illusions about that particular episode of military adventurism. But Iraq notwithstanding, most who wind up seeking asylum in Europe are fleeing from countries beset by corruption, ethnic and religious persecution, as well as plain old bad governance.

Even in war-torn countries such as Libya and Syria — nations from which significant numbers of migrants have travelled west in recent years — it is a stretch to cite ‘western meddling’ as the main reason many have chosen to leave. Had things panned out differently in Libya in 2011, a fresh wave of migrants would surely have fled a revengeful and bloodthirsty Colonel Gaddafi. Indeed, 5.6 million people have fled Syria — whose war we decided to effectively wash our hands of in 2013 — since that conflict began nine years ago. Some of this is arguably down to contagion from the intervention in Iraq but much of it isn’t. Dictatorships are perfectly capable of creating refugees without external assistance.

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And yet, attacking the Left — or in Patel’s case trying to send it into ‘meltdown’ — risks parochialising the issue. It is the Conservative Party in government and myths around asylum are mainly propagated by Right-leaning newspapers.

One such myth is the ubiquitous claim that ‘soft touch’ Britain is overwhelmed with refugees compared to the rest of Europe. Au contraire: Germany and France receive double the number of asylum applications per year as the UK. It is also untrue to say that EU law requires that refugees coming to Europe must apply for asylum in the first safe country he or she arrives in — a common trope in recent weeks. A UK judge ruled in 1999 that “some element of choice is indeed open to refugees as to where they may properly claim asylum”. Additionally, the judge said that “any merely short-term stopover en route” does not invalidate an asylum claim elsewhere.

It is perhaps worth looking at the real reasons people try to come to the UK, rather than whipping oneself into a frenzy over fictitious ones. Shared language appears to play a big part motivating people to come to Britain. More than half (58.6%) of those interviewed at the notorious ‘jungle’ refugee camp in Calais in 2016 described their spoken English as ‘very good’ or ‘good’. This compared to just 3.8% who said they spoke ‘very good’ or ‘good’ French.

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Life in Britain also retains a penumbra of grandeur in some parts of the world, even if this is largely driven by nostalgia (one of ways Britain markets itself these days, both at home and abroad). Travelling in Latin America 10 years ago, many of the local people I met viewed Britain — along with the United States — as a notch above various other ‘First World’ countries. Indeed, one of the reasons Britain still “punches above its weight” is the lingering cultural pull of the English-speaking world.

That many of these new arrivals are washing up in Dover by boat is mainly to do with the pandemic and the lockdown’s shuttering of haulage and other vehicle crossings — one of the traditional routes by which asylum seekers are smuggled to the UK.

So what can be done about the situation?

Despite Patel’s rhetoric, Britain is unlikely to withdraw from the Refugee Convention. Nor can the Royal Navy turn a significant number of vessels away without risking a tragedy on the high seas that would generate bigger headlines than a few inflatables washing up in Kent. Moreover, unless a new agreement between the EU and Britain is put into place at the end of the Brexit transition to replace the existing Dublin regulations, the UK will no longer be able to return any failed asylum seekers to northern France.

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One solution — which would also undermine the criminal people traffickers — would be to make it easier to process asylum claims outside of Britain. At present it is nearly impossible to make a legal journey to these shores to claim asylum. Those who wish to do so must invariably travel here illegally — there is simply no other way to put in a claim. The Government could reinforce the credibility of such a scheme by coming to a new agreement with Europe so that Britain processes more asylum applications in mainland Europe while agreeing that returnees will be accepted by France.

This, though, requires a constructive dialogue on the part of the British government with its European partners. So far, we have seen little of that. Instead, the Government has given the impression that asylum diplomacy is being formulated with eyes fixed firmly on the potential for melodramatic headlines — the home secretary is currently ramping up a pointless verbal spat with France, a country whose cooperation this country needs if it is to stem the tide of boats.

To suggest that Britain’s borders are under siege on the basis of a few telegenic landings off the Kent coast — or to call it a “national humiliation” as Farage has done — is to lose all sense of proportion. We live in a prosperous country in a tumultuous world — refugees are a part of that equation whether we like it or not.

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But rallying public opinion against them can be a cheap political win. It is after all what both of our political parties have frequently done in times of crisis. Under Labour, the then Home Secretary David Blunkett claimed that the country was being “swamped” by refugees and tried to ban the children of asylum seekers from attending state schools. And that was during the relatively prosperous early 2000s.

Given the present home secretary’s statements about France that will likely make it harder to stem the flow of people — as well as her summoning of ‘new laws’ that will invariably fail to materialise — one must assume the present home secretary is pursuing a similar course.

As millions of Britons face the prospect of a moribund jobs market — and as awkward questions abound about its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic — the Government has noticed a potential way out of the expected deluge of negative media coverage. A few lurid headlines about asylum seekers can go a long way. History tells us that the surest way for any politician to appear ‘tough’ is, paradoxically, to lash out at those most desperately in need of our compassion.

For centuries people have moved from the place where they were born to escape war or famine. And yes, sometimes economic disaster. But after the industrial revolution particularly, large numbers of people began to move in search of employment, with employers taking full advantage of what we now call a flexible labour market – that is, a market of people willing to leave home and work for low wages in whatever place that the industrialist wants to cite his factory.

With that weasel euphemism “flexible”, capitalism describes the unpicking of our historic patterns of mutual care embedded in the extended family and its long-term rootedness in a specific place.

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Most migrants don’t, in fact, want to leave home. This is where migrants differ fundamentally from that epiphenomenon of global capitalism, the “citizen of nowhere”.

In contrast to this gilded globe-trotting elite, most migrants have been forced to leave their home. They don’t travel for pleasure or entertainment or to ‘see the world’. They travel because they have to, they have been forced from their home.

Morally, I think we get our attitude to migration entirely the wrong way round. Too many count as common sense that we want an immigration system that prioritises those workers that our economy might benefit from – doctors, engineers, crop pickers etc. To my mind, these are the people who may not need a welcome on our shores. Those who are the brightest and the best should stay with their home community and be of service there.

Taking doctors and engineers from poorer parts of the world is a form of asset stripping. If we need people to do these jobs we ought to be training up our young people, not importing cheaper labour from elsewhere. The free movement of labour is an extension of the flexible labour market beloved of big business, one that’s purpose is to keep wages low. It also allows the business class easy access to the international playground. Little wonder big business loves the EU.

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But those who are escaping war, persecution and famine, they are in a whole different category. They absolutely need our help. First, because of straightforward fellow-feeling and compassion. And second, because often we have had a hand in the violence that has forced people from their homes.

When it comes to this group, we must be as generous and accommodating as we can be, and then some more. I have no truck with the disingenuous idea that migrants stop being vulnerable and in need the moment they first set foot in a county where they are no longer persecuted. To those who say that the migrants crossing the channel are hardly escaping oppression – having come from France – I would refer you to the horrendous and insanitary conditions of the French camps like the Calais Jungle. I saw better organised refugee camps in Iraq.

And why should those immediately adjacent to places of conflict have to shoulder the burden of refugees from that conflict? Jordan and Turkey take millions. By dint of geography, countries surrounding conflict zones are taking more than their fair share.

The heroic Mrs. Merkel – God bless her – welcomed millions, with occasions when 10,000 people a day were regularly coming across the border. Germany was a Noah’s Ark to people in distress. The USA does not deserve the Statue of Liberty with its “bring me your huddled masses” inscription. That statue should be taken down from New York and re-erected in Berlin.

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It is very much to our deep discredit as a nation that we baulk at a few hundred migrants trying to cross the channel. We are shamed by our pathetic moral panic. Many of these people are trying to link up with family members already here. And no, Mr. Home Secretary, you have no right to assert by fiat that people claiming asylum here are illegal – we have a legal process to decide that matter, it’s not down to you to decide.

I agree absolutely that we must stop people traffickers from exploiting the venerable and ferrying them across the channel. And it may well be that the best way to stop this dangerous trade is to return those who attempt the journey back to France. But we should nonetheless be welcoming many more people here, albeit through proper mechanisms. We must act out of our better natures, and not out of some manufactured fear.

I’m afraid I don’t have some big moral argument as to why we should help refugees. I don’t think there is one – an argument I mean. And there isn’t an argument because helping other people in conditions of extreme vulnerability is so properly basic in moral terms that there is no stronger moral position from which you can argue to that conclusion.

There is no convincing answer to ‘Why should I help someone else in distress?’ because responding to the vulnerability of the other with care is almost the very definition of being good. Morally, the story of the Good Samaritan, for example, is illustrative of something foundational. For instance, if you need an argument to convince you that it is right to save a drowning child then the very idea of morality is lost on you. All you can do is hold out a photo a dead child on a beach or a family home destroyed by bombing and say: ‘Can you not see?’

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Brexit will rightly give us control over our laws and borders. I welcome that wholeheartedly. But Brexit does not say what we have to do with that control. One thing most agree on is that we should level up the rights of EU and non-EU immigrants. It is quite wrong that mostly white EU citizens get a free pass whereas many darker skinned immigrants from non-EU countries are given such a difficult time trying to gain leave to remain. The current system is subtly racist and must change.

But we should go substantially further than this, and seek to gain a reputation for being welcoming and generous. From March, it will be our decision who to welcome. The EU will not be foisting the free movement of people upon us. And once we have confidence in this new system we should be prepared to use it to offer sanctuary to those who are fleeing disaster. Wouldn’t it be one in the eye for all those who have accused us Brexiteers of being racist if we could transform Brexit Britain into a beacon of welcome and generosity?

“Just one,” says a woman in a loosely tied headscarf. “They only let one family in”.

Like others, she immediately starts to queue to buy another ticket. Like others, she will take the same train back to the Polish border at 8.18am tomorrow, hoping this time she and her family will be the lucky ones.

The scene in Brest, a city of around 300,000 people situated on the Eastern border of the European Union, has been repeating for almost two years. The only thing that changes is the number of people who board the train. Less than a year ago there were 400-500 of them every morning – at its peak, as many as 3,000 refugees were waiting in Brest to cross the Polish border by train, the vast majority of them Chechens, with some Tajiks, Uzbeks and Armenians as well.

Among them, according to organisations such as Amnesty International and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, are victims of torture, persecution and other forms of violence. A humanitarian crisis is looming over this quiet border city that itself has a complex history of changing national affiliations.

Today the numbers of people trying to cross are much lower. Around 200-300 asylum seekers now wait in Brest, explains Maksim Kavaleu, a lawyer from the Belarusian human rights organisation Human Constanta, and each day 60-80 take the train to the Polish border town of Terespol. But the numbers constantly change. Kavaleu tells me that the record for the most attempts made by a refugee to cross the border is 65.

Among those trying to cross is Madina, tall and erect in her long dark dress, and with a steely look of determination.[1. The names of the protagonists have been changed.] With her two sons, aged 11 and 12, she travelled to Brest by taxi from her small village in Chechnya (there is no border control between the Russian Federation and Belarus).

Madina has been in Brest for only a week but she has already tried to cross the border five times. Every time she tried to explain to the border guards that she wanted to request asylum she heard the same question: “Are you going to Europe to work?”

You only have two minutes to explain your situation, she complains over a cup of tea in the hostel room next to the train station that she is renting for US$7 a night. There is no privacy; everybody around can hear what you are saying. But the worst thing, she says, is that they do not want to listen. “They interrupted me many times and they kept asking: ‘Do you have family in Europe?’”

If “they” – the Polish border guards – were willing to listen, she would tell them her story. It is a story about her husband who was killed a few years ago, his body dumped at a petrol station. He had problems with the military, she tells, her eyes empty. Madina escaped to France, but returned to Chechnya after a few months, where the police, Madina says vaguely, kept harassing her and her family.  She did not feel safe. Besides, her late husband’s family, in accordance with Chechen custom, wanted to take custody of her sons. “I want to give my children a future; I want them grow up in a safe place,” she says.

Madina has some savings, but the money is quickly running out and she is worried. Each journey to and from Terespol costs $10 per person. Staying in Belarus is not an option. Human Rights Watch described the country’s asylum system as “dysfunctional”. The Chechens do not feel safe here, and there have been reports of undercover Chechen security force agents intimidating asylum-seekers in Brest. KGB, the Belarusian secret service, closely cooperates with Kadyrovtsy, the security service of the Putin-backed Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Madina casts a glance at her sons, who are watching a cartoon on a mobile phone. “Do you know a lawyer, anyone who could help us?” she asks, looking at me expectantly.

___

The migration flow into the Eastern border the European Union is not a new phenomenon. Since the 1990s, around 80,000 asylum seekers from the former USSR have crossed the border. The majority are Chechens, who fled their country after the first and then second Chechen wars with Russia.

Larisa Suleymanova, a philologist and translator, came to Poland via this route from the Chechen capital Grozny in 2004. “There was nothing … no integration courses, no psychological counselling, almost no NGOs dealing with migrants,” she recalls when we meet in Warsaw, where she has been living for the last few years working as a mentor and translator for other Russian-speaking refugees. “The whole assistance system was under construction. But people received us warmly’ there were no problems.”

Even in a homogenous country such as Poland, where in 2013 immigrants amounted to less than 1% of the population (a statistic that has started to change with the influx of Ukrainian migrants over the last few years), the 8,000 Chechen refugees who came to Poland were not a big group. Nor were they very visible –many of the refugee centres were located in non-urban areas, far from big cities.

Besides, Poland was a transit country for most: at least 75% of asylum-seekers who entered Poland continued their journey further west, to Germany, Austria or France.

That may help to explain why Poland had some of the highest levels of openness towards refugees in Europe – pollsters CBOS in May 2015 found that 72% of people thought that Poland should take in refugees. That would soon change.

___

In September 2017 a young Chechen woman was beaten in Warsaw after dropping her children off at kindergarten. The attacker was a Polish father whose children went to the same preschool. This was not an isolated case. Between 2014 and 2016 the total number of proceedings concerning hate crimes in Poland tripled.

Joanna Subko, from the office of the Polish Ombudsman, said the nature of hate crimes has also worsened. “While before the dominating form of hate crime was hate speech, now the proportions have changed and there are more cases of physical violence,” she said. “Their most common targets are Muslims now, though their minuscule number in Poland has not changed.” According to the State’s Prosecutor’s Office, in 2015 there were 64 reported cases of hate crimes against Muslims; in 2017 the number was 328.

Politics has contributed to this change of attitude. In autumn 2015, while thousands of asylum-seekers were crossing the ‘Balkan route’ and Europe started to talk about a “migration crisis”, Poland was in the middle of an election campaign. And while the Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans coming to Europe rarely reached Poland, they soon became one of the election’s main topics.

Further reading

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By Tino Sanandaji

The refugees bring “all sorts of parasites and protozoa”, declared Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which went on to win with an absolute majority. Kaczyński and other right-wing politicians also linked refugees to terrorist attacks in Europe, repeating that they would not expose Poland to such danger by accepting refugees from Muslim countries.

Despite the fact that the only well-known Muslims in Poland are a small community of Tatars who have lived there since the 14^th century, and that the vast majority of the population has never had any contact with Muslims, these campaign statements had a deep impact.

Poles started to be afraid. A new CBOS poll in May 2016 found that 63% of respondents were against accepting refugees from the Middle East and Africa. According to various opinion polls, Poles are now more afraid of terrorist attacks and refugees than losing their job or being victim of a crime.

The new, more hostile, political climate inevitably affected the situation at the border. In August 2016, when a few hundred desperate asylum-seekers organised a strike in Brest, appealing to the Polish state to recognise them as refugees, the then-Polish Minister of Interior, Mariusz Błaszczak, replied: “We will not succumb to the pressure of those who want to create an immigration crisis.” He added: “There is no war in Chechnya – it is an attempt to create a new route for Muslims who come to Europe.”

A significant number of people trying to cross the border in Terespol could probably be defined as ‘economic migrants’. But a sizeable minority are not. The Warsaw-based International Humanitarian Initiative Foundation, which provides psychological assistance to asylum-seekers and torture survivors, identified 320 people affected by torture in Chechnya and 122 direct victims of it among the migrants in Brest in the second half of 2016.

According to Maria Książak, a psychologist with the foundation, they found evidence that migrants had been struck with electricity, burnt with cigarettes, and beaten with sticks, cables and plastic bottles filled with water. They were illegally arrested, deprived of sleep, food, light and medical help. Many, she says, were threatened with death and forced to watch others being tortured.

Only a very small number of them were granted entry to Poland. Two particular cases ended up in the European Court for Human Rights. In the case of “Hamid K”, a Chechen asylum-seeker who tried to enter Poland 31 times, the court ordered interim measures that explicitly prohibited Polish authorities from returning him to Belarus. The Polish government ignored the order.

___

For the Polish Ministry of Interior, it is simple: the war in Chechnya finished in 2009, so Chechens – who are officially Russian citizens – who come to Europe are economic migrants. But for many, Chechyna isn’t safe.

Iwona Kaliszewska, an anthropologist from Warsaw University who regularly visits Chechnya and neighbouring Dagestan, says Chechnya is essentially a police state. Ruled by Kremlin-backed Kadyrov, it is a place of human rights violations, political persecution, torture and forced disappearances.

“Apart from the classic categories of political opponents and independent journalists, who face problems in the whole Russian Federation, one of the groups exposed to persecutions are homosexual men,” explains Kaliszewska. Last year, the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta revealed the existence of camps in which up to 100 gay men were detained, beaten and electrocuted, with at least three allegedly murdered.

Further reading

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Many women are also fleeing to Europe to escape from domestic violence that usually goes unpunished in the region. There are people fleeing honour crimes –not uncommon in the Caucasus region. And unsettled personal feuds – many dating back to the war – are often solved using the state apparatus of violence.

Finally, explains Kaliszewska, there are the Salafis, the followers of a purist movement within Sunni Islam who are considered terrorists by Kadyrov, who supports and promotes only ‘traditional Chechen Islam’ – Islam inspired by practices of the mystical Sufi order, Qadiriya. Salafis[1. Salafism, like Wahhabism, is a fundamentalist form of Islam that in some parts of the world is antagonistic to those considered to be enemies of Islam. In 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism.] are often the ones whose arrests, or even extrajudicial killings, boost the statistics of the ‘war on terror’ – for which the Chechnyan government receives funding from Kremlin.

___

The fate of some of those who are returned to the Russian Federation should also sound alarm bells. In February 2015, three months after being deported from Sweden to Chechnya, 23-year-old Kana Afanasyev was killed in Grozny. His corpse bore the marks of electric shocks. In July 2015, 30-year-old Zaurbek Zhamaldaev, recently deported from Poland, was believed to have been kidnapped in Moscow, and has not been heard from since. The total number of such cases is difficult to estimate because the families are often too afraid to speak up.

Ms Książak told me she recently got a WhatsApp message informing her of the death a man she met in Brest who had been trying to cross the border. His wife says he was beaten to death. She too is afraid to make it public. On 8 June, former Chechen policeman Artur Aydamirov disappeared in Brest, after trying to apply for asylum at the border nine times. He fled Chechnya with his family when he learnt he was required to perform military service in Syria. According to Amnesty International, witnesses in Brest saw uniformed men force Aydamirov into a van and drive away. He has not been seen since.

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By Beatrice Faleri

At the end of 2017, the Provincial Administrative Court in Warsaw quashed several of the Border Guard decisions to deny entry to Chechen migrants seeking international protection. The attorneys representing the migrants believe that, slowly, they are opening a new legal path.

But for now, nothing changes for the desperate people in Brest. On a Sunday morning, the 8.18 am train to Terespol is full of people. Among them is Madina, hoping it will be sixth time lucky.

A few days later, then-Polish Minister of Interior, now Defence Minister, Mariusz Błaszczak said on television: “It is thanks to the fact that Poland does not accept refugees that we are a safe country. We will not repeat the errors of Europe.” No matter the human cost.

The Ministry of Interior was working on a decree that will see asylum seekers, including children, placed in container camps, though this particular idea seems to have been put on hold for now. Unsuccessful asylum applicants may be deported without the chance to appeal.

The day I leave Brest, I get a text message from Madina in the early evening. “I didn’t make it. Do you know a Polish man I could marry? I need to cross the border as soon as possible. Help me.”

This story was written as part of ‘Reporting Migration and Trafficking in the Western Balkans’, a journalism workshop run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

–––

The year is 2025. The death toll in Syria has exceeded one million. We have come a long way since March 2011, when 15 boys were detained and tortured by Syrian authorities for writing graffiti in support of the Arab Spring. The hopes of the western policy establishment that Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad would return the country to ‘stability’ – flatteringly known as the ‘realist’ position – have proven illusory. Aside from the horrific death toll, nearly 10 million Syrian refugees have fled the country as rebellions against the dictatorship have continued to flare.

It is a grim irony that the impetus for inaction in Syria on the part of the international community was based on the forlorn hope of containing the conflict. Yet a willingness to let Assad remain in power – at an exorbitant human cost – has created a refugee crisis the scale of which European nations have been forced to confront. To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, European electorates may not be interested in war, but war is interested in them. The globalisation of refugees is a reality whether or not the isolationists of Left and Right care to acknowledge it.

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By Henry Olsen

If the European project teeters on the brink of collapse it is due in part to this willingness to acquiesce in Assad’s slaughter. As millions of desperate people have sought refuge outside of Syria’s borders, many hundreds of thousands have ended up in Europe. Sections of the European media have been running a steady stream of articles over the past decade blaming the new arrivals for all of society’s maladies. Indeed, populism’s appeal on European soil stems in large part from its single-mindedness in running against the spectre of the newcomer.

The eurozone has also been dragged down by the increasing unwillingness of some of its member states to adhere to the bloc’s fiscal rules. While the worst fears of many pundits have not been borne out – predictions of the impending collapse of the European bloc have been receiving ample airtime since 2008 – in recent years nearly everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.

Ground zero of the latest crisis is not in one country but spans three: Italy, Germany and France. In Italy, the right-wing Lega (led for more than a decade by Matteo Salvini) has ridden to power on the back of frustration with the compromises of its larger coalition partner, the Five-Star Movement (M5S). First elected in 2018 after a meteoric rise, the M5S movement has progressed from ramshackle upstart to another spoke in the wheel of the status quo. Much of this rests on little more than the fact that the M5S – like all governing parties – has been forced to compromise with political and fiscal reality.

For all of its pretence at partnership, the Lega sought to undermine its senior partner at every turn, pushing for a much stronger line on immigration (echoed vociferously by much of the press) while blaming Italy’s economic problems on the vacillations of M5S. Record numbers of refugees arriving on Italian shores – mainly from Syria – have driven an even more virulent wave of anti-immigration sentiment, which the Lega has done little to quell, instead fanning resentment at newcomers and adopting the Putinist line that all opposition to Syrian dictator Assad is Jihadist in nature.

Somewhat paradoxically, the Lega has toned down its anti-European rhetoric just as it finds itself on a collision course with Brussels. Along with several continental parties of the hard-Right, the Lega has never been as anti-European as common parlance suggests. Indeed, in the mid-90s the party sought to join the Euro, a position that would be unthinkable for hard-line Eurosceptic parties such as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

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However, it is the Lega’s approach to the economy that has facilitated the gravest concerns in Brussels. In the past seven years Italy’s budget deficit has ballooned to 8% of the country’s GDP. Much of the deficit was accumulated during the Lega’s period in coalition with M5S, when the two parties sought to mollify two radically different constituencies with an anomalous and at times incongruous set of policies. Tax cuts, the scrapping of pension reforms and the introduction of the universal minimum income scheme have all precipitated the crisis at the Italian treasury.

As a consequence, Italy has broken the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact, sending risk premiums on bond markets soaring. As the Lega’s war of words with Brussels has grown increasingly vituperative, financial markets have begun to soberly contemplate Italy dropping out of the Euro altogether. This would arguably facilitate a severe economic crisis in Italy – and so the Italian government has opted instead to flagrantly break the eurozone’s fiscal rules.

Elsewhere, particularly in Germany and France, migration has had the greatest impact on the political weather. Emmanuel Macron narrowly lost the French Presidency to National Front leader Marine Le Pen at the 2022 elections, sending shockwaves reverberating around European capitals. Macron had led in most opinion polls leading up to the vote, though the two candidates switched places after a terrorist attack rocked Paris a fortnight before France went to the polls. Le Pen responded predictably with a fiery speech denouncing ‘non-European barbarians’, charging them with ‘polluting’ Europe, an accusation which seems to have captured the revengeful zeitgeist of a country living in fear of the next attack.

Yet only a fool would claim that the crisis in France has nothing to do with economics. Public sentiment in France has undoubtedly been made more susceptible to anti-refugee rhetoric by a bourgeoning economic crisis, driven in part by instability across the eurozone. As incomes in France have stagnated – and as the country has been gripped by industrial strife stoked by Macron’s attempts to push through pro-market reforms – a sense of chaos has prevailed. The French have sought someone to blame, and someone to follow. Moderation and managerialism have been eclipsed by the familiar search for scapegoats. The trite buzzwords of the centre – ‘forward not back’, ‘progress’, ‘on the move’ – have been replaced by an increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric which brings to mind splashes of petrol sprayed on a bonfire.

Since coming to power three years ago, Le Pen has threatened – albeit sporadically – to withdraw from the European single currency (though few take the threats seriously). Perhaps more ominously, the French President has set in motion plans for a 2026 referendum on France’s membership of the European Union.

Some 65% of the French public now have an unfavourable opinion of the EU, the highest recorded figure since 2016. France’s exit from the EU would precipitate the end of the European project in theory if not in practice. The 26 other members states will still be signed up to a host of European treaties, but the ideal – of a supranational foundation anchored in Germany and France – would lie in tatters.

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Germany no longer remains at the epicentre of European moderation either. Angela Merkel finally stepped down as German Chancellor in 2021 after nearly two decades in power. Her successor – both as leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and as German Chancellor – is 44-year-old Jens Spahn, the former Federal Minister of Health.

Spahn’s main challenge seems to be to fend off the hard-Right Alternative for Germany (AFD), now the second largest party by vote share. Spahn has achieved a modicum of success in this regard by stealing the AFD’s policies: Spahn has banned the niqab and rejected in toto the pro-refugee policies of his predecessor in the Bundestag.

But it is Spahn’s economic worldview that has potentially greater repercussions for Europe. Beyond his obsession with law and order, Spahn is an uncompromising free-marketeer who has little sympathy for southern Europe’s inability or unwillingness to pay its way. Germany still desires to be the European project’s hegemon, but not at any price. Eurozone GDP is shrinking while Germany powers ahead. And while Germany can prosper without Europe, the inverse is by no means guaranteed.

It is true that Germany remains the euro zone’s largest creditor, meaning it has much to lose if the euro collapses. Yet with Spahn in office, pragmatic attempts to shore-up the Euro at any costs are undermined by the prevailing view in the Reichstag that southern Europeans are feckless and lazy. It is ultimately a battle of ideology versus common sense, and it is ideology that is on the march.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, many pundits have been making apocalyptic pronunciations forecasting the end of the eurozone. Every commentator wishes at some level to be an actor in an epoch-defining era (see the characterisation of former American President Donald Trump as a fascistic return to the 1930s), yet very few are. Institutions rarely walk headlong into disaster. Catastrophe, when it occurs, is usually the result of a steady accumulation of blunders that build up over decades.

As far as the European project is concerned, we have likely progressed beyond the end of the beginning and are approaching the beginning of the end. There will be no big bang, no Sarajevo moment in which Europe collapses cataclysmically into poverty and strife. Instead, Europe as we know it will probably expire quietly in the offices of the continent’s parliaments and chancelleries, as weary bureaucrats rush back and forth clutching reams of glistening white paper. Given the awful historical precedents, it is what happens next that should concern us.

Crucial evidence is emerging on the ground in places like Jordan, where some things have been made to work, and Lebanon, where economics have lost out to politics. Meanwhile, the balance of conversation about refugees in Europe is stuck on whether or not they are coming this way. They are not. Media images of refugees are emotive but dishonest, showing them in camps or on boats, when in fact they are in cities like Jordan’s capital, Amman, trying to fend for themselves.

Countries like Jordan, Lebanon and Ethiopia, where a refugee jobs pact has been struck, will determine where and in what conditions refugees live. These ideas and experiments need the oxygen of attention and journalistic scrutiny to keep career politicians and multilateral lenders honest about what is working and what is not.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

I wrote last year about the traumas many of them had already experienced before they arrived. Now, new research from US-based Pew Research Center looks ahead to the implications of this sudden mass migration.   What will the religious landscape of European countries look like in thirty years’ time, when the newly arrived people have settled and their children and grandchildren are part of our communities?

First, the caveats:

Pew are very clear that their research offers projections, and not predictions. Demographic forecasting is an art as well as a science, but it’s important to note that Pew had already published religious demography projections and then felt the need to change them after the mass migration of 2015. The refugee crisis changed the picture significantly.

The data they published this week drew from population statistics from September 2016, and extrapolated using assumptions about age and family size. Their analysis also makes some important points about the asylum process, and Pew have assumed that nearly a million Muslims who arrived in Europe in the last couple of years will not have their application for asylum approved, on the basis of past approval rates.

There will be more Muslims

Pew found that Muslims currently living in Europe are generally slightly younger than the average host populations – by 13 years, on average – and that they usually have one more child per family. We know that religious identity is transmitted primarily from parent to child which, along with other factors, means that it is reasonable to assume that there will be higher proportions of Muslims in most European countries by 2050. This is particularly likely in countries with younger Muslim populations and the largest families, including Italy, France and Belgium.

Pew have calculated three scenarios, based on high, medium and zero migration from this point. Even if there were no more migration into Europe at all, the Muslim population would rise from 4.9% (as it is now) to 7.4% by 2050, according to Pew. Under the ‘medium’ scenario, which assumes all refugee arrivals would stop but that immigration based on other reasons would continue, Pew suggest that Muslims could form 11.2% of the European population by 2050. And in the ‘high’ scenario, which allows for increased refugee arrivals, we might see 14% of Europe’s population identifying as Muslim by 2050.

Will there be more Christians?

It’s important to note that almost half (47%) of the people who arrived recently in Europe are not Muslims, and that Christians are the next largest religious group. Usually, religious people who arrive in a Western country from elsewhere are more highly observant than the communities in which they settle. Ten years ago,  Catholic churches in Britain were noticing an increase in Polish worshippers. It’s possible that this may be reflected in our religious landscape over the next generation.

Settling in

In Western countries, while first and second generation diaspora are often highly religious, it’s not unusual to find that by the third and fourth generation, people have settled in to their host community so much that they become less highly observant. Britain’s population currently identifies more as No Religion (53%) than all other religious affiliations combined, and the implications of assimilation are commonly discussed by faith leaders across many traditions – Nigerian church leaders, Pakistani imams, etc. If Pew’s ‘zero migration’ scenario holds true, then it’s possible that we will eventually settle back to a broadly secular culture, with some religious practice among significant minorities.

Rubbing along together

In the meantime, there are clear challenges for European countries. In our work with employers who commission us for research and consultancy on faith in the workplace, we regularly hear stories of Muslims struggling to be accepted in the workforce. Muslim women tell of taking their headscarf off before interview, in case the recruiter is put off, or of being asked questions which assume they aren’t free to make their own decisions: “are you SURE you’re able to travel?”And Muslim men who work as drivers – delivering take-aways, or driving a bus – are often subject to verbal abuse, and worse. One global retailer recently called me for advice about a situation in Belgium, where the narrative about radicalisation is strong, and some people travel onwards to Syria. They had found that if they put someone on the checkout who looked as though they were Muslim, customers would yell at them or refuse to be served by them.

There are labour market challenges to face, among others, whichever of Pew’s scenarios come to pass, or even if none of them do. Muslims are here, and they are here to stay.