To help real refugees, be firm with economic migrants

When the migrant crisis first pierced the British imagination, there was barely a Syrian in sight. On 30 July 2015, when the prime minister warned that a “swarm of people” were heading for Britain, I could not find one refugee from Assad in the shanty town in the fields north of Calais.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but going back through my notes I see I met Eritreans, Nigerians, Ethiopians and Sudanese. French volunteers told me there were Syrians somewhere in “the jungle”, along with Afghans and Pakistanis. But they did not make up the majority or even a large minority of the men and women planning to stow away on the Eurostar or jump on a passing lorry.

The great wave of migrants moving towards Europe has never been composed solely of Syrians. An arc of instability surrounds our continent. In Nigeria, Boko Haram still operates and the collapse in the oil price has wrecked the economy. In Chad and Niger, global warming has turned farmland to desert. Warlords and their barbaric militias have pushed civilians to the edge of starvation in Sudan. Eritrea remains a police state from which the young want to flee. Libya remains a failed state, where the same impulse applies. The Middle East is locked in a sectarian war between Sunni and Shia, which feels as if it will be as long and monstrous as Europe’s Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants. And the Russians are once again menacing Ukraine.

It says much about the parochialism and self-indulgence of the British right that they are threatening to add to the chaos by yanking Britain out of the EU at a moment of continental crisis. But it also tells you that hundreds of thousands would still try to get to Europe, even if the Syrian conflict were solved tomorrow. There was something else I didn’t notice at the time, which strikes me now. The Calais migrant camp was so small. There were about 3,000 people there and you could cross it in 20 minutes.