Migrants

I sympathised with Leave voters who yearned to ‘take back control’ of British borders. After all, if being a country means anything, it surely entails first and foremost a clear understanding of who comes under that country’s protection — and who doesn’t. Otherwise a country is just a patch on a map. Yet I’ve always found Leavers’ high hopes for reduced immigration heartbreaking.

Home In fine weather with calm seas, 565 migrants in four days crossed the Channel in small craft. French officials said that 33 migrants in two boats that got into difficulty had been returned to Calais. In July more than 1,000 migrants crossed the Channel. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, appointed Dan O’Mahoney as Britain’s Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, tasked with somehow making such voyages ‘unviable’. Employment fell by 220,000 in the three months to June, the biggest quarterly fall since 2009, but unemployment remained at about 3.9 per cent, as millions stayed on the furlough scheme. At the beginning of the week, Sunday 9 August, total deaths from Covid-19 stood at 46,566, with a seven-day average of 53 deaths a day.

The refusal by Italy’s new 'populist' coalition government of the alt-left Five Star Movement and the hard right Lega to allow an NGO vessel with 629 African migrants on board to dock in Italy is an historic moment. The leader of the Lega Matteo Salvini, now Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, is determined to fulfil his campaign pledge. That is to say: I will stop any more migrants being ferried to Italy by sea from Libya and I will deport all of the 500,000 illegal migrants already arrived from Libya by sea who are not refugees – i.e the lot. Since the first government in western Europe of what are popularly known as populists was installed in Italy 10 days ago, Salvini has talked about nothing else but the migrant crisis.

In her keynote lecture for a conference on ‘The Muse and the Market’ in 2015 Aminatta Forna mounted a powerful advocacy for the political novel, challenging the assumption that politics or ‘subject’ undermines literary aesthetic. ‘A political novel can fail as a work of art as much as any other novel,’ she argued, ‘but the fact that it is political does not sentence it to failure.’ Her own approach to fiction is something like Paul Klee’s approach to his art: where Klee talked of taking a line for a walk, she says: ‘When I write a novel it is like taking a thought for a walk.

When Angela Merkel invited refugees to Germany in 2015, tearing up the rules obliging migrants to seek asylum in the first country they arrive in, the consequences were pretty immediate. Over 160,000 went to Sweden, leading to well-publicised disruption. Next door, things were different. Norway took in just 30,000; this year it has accepted just 2,000 so far. To Sylvi Listhaug, the country’s young immigration minister, this might still be a bit too much. ‘We have a big challenge now to integrate those with permission to stay in Norway to make sure they respect Norwegian values,’ she says. ‘Freedom to speak, to write, to believe or not to believe in a god, how to raise your children.’ Also, she says, what not to do.

What is happening in the 300-mile stretch of sea between Sicily and Libya, day in and day out — in other words, what ‘we’ are doing there — is beyond reasonable doubt insane. A sane person would assume that the 181,436 migrants (a new record) who made it by sea to Italy last year had done so under their own steam in flimsy fishing boats and dinghies at least some of the way across the Mediterranean. This, after all, is the message aid agencies and governments put out. In fact, every one of those 181,436 was picked up by EU and non-government aid-agency vessels off the Libyan coast just outside the 12-mile territorial limit, then ferried across to Europe.

The civil war in Syria, and the resulting displacement of half the population, has been the tragedy of our times. We cannot turn our backs on the ten million people who have been forced to flee their homes. Every decent society knows this and knows that it’s our moral duty to come up with a workable way of helping the refugees. But while the scale of the displacement is substantial, it is not unmanageable. The 21st century should be capable of dealing with such catastrophes and we must prepare ourselves actually to do so. To rise to the challenge, we need to combine the instinctive compassion that mass suffering arouses with the dispassionate analysis necessary to craft an effective response. We need the heart supported by the head.

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 5: Ivar Arpi's piece, which was written following the mass sex attacks on women celebrating New Year’s Eve in Cologne. In his article, Arpi says that authorities in Sweden covered up similar incidents involving migrant men    Stockholm It took days for police to acknowledge the extent of the mass attacks on women celebrating New Year’s Eve in Cologne. The Germans were lucky; in Sweden, similar attacks have been taking place for more than a year and the authorities are still playing catch up. Only now is the truth emerging, both about the attacks and the cover-ups.

A ticket to paradise comes very cheap in Gambia — as long as you’re headed in the right direction. Thomas Cook charges just £230 for the six-hour flight from Gatwick to West Africa, and in the cheaper hotels along the cream-white palm beaches, a week’s stay costs even less. For the 100,000 Europeans who flock here each year — half of them Brits — it’s a much loved, if slightly tatty, African Benidorm, where donkeys can be found not in the souvenir shops but grazing rubbish on the streets outside. For the equally large numbers of Gambians seeking desperately to go the other way, however, the ticket is far pricier.

The massive operation by 1,200 French riot police and gendarmes to bus the migrants in the 'Jungle' at Calais to reception centres elsewhere in France and to raze the illegal camp to the ground has begun. Allelujah. You might think that the destruction of this crime-ridden and rat-infested shantytown, where up to 10,000 mainly African and Afghani migrants live in shacks and tents without running water or mains electricity, was good news. At last, those poor migrants will have a decent roof over their heads while they finally get round to applying to the French government for asylum, as nearly all are required to do by the law. But no. Instead, the British left and the French right, joined in unholy alliance, are outraged: How dare François Hollande do such a thing!