Borderline sanity

Only now does Angela Merkel concede that her admitting a million refugees last year was a mistake. It was obvious to most people in Europe at the time that her warm-hearted gesture would lead to catastrophic results. In declaring that all Syrian refugees would be welcome if they made it to Germany, she doubled the fortunes of the human trafficking industry. The asylum seekers came from Syria and North Africa through Austria and Hungary, having landed on the shores of Italy and Greece. Thousands died on the way.

When Theresa May addressed the United Nations this week in New York, she was able to point to a British way of handling the crisis. Rather than reward those with the strength or money to make it to a western country, Britain has ploughed hundreds of millions of pounds into giving food, shelter and support to far more refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. Mrs May didn’t quite say it, but the lessons from the British approach are clear: the 1951 Refugee Convention (the obligation to shelter those who arrive) was designed to prevent a recurrence of problems seen in the 1930s. It needs updating. The world is on the move, but its migration policies are not.

The consequences of getting this wrong are political as well as humanitarian. In Germany, in particular, there is a sense that the authorities have lost control and that established political parties cannot think or talk plainly about the problem. Last weekend, the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won 14 per cent of the popular vote in Berlin state elections, and is now set to become the third-largest party in the Bundestag after next year’s national elections. In Berlin, the Social Democrats, led by the city’s mayor Michael Müller, scraped victory with 22 per cent of the vote. Never in Germany’s postwar history has a winner attracted such a small share.