Modern technology has completely transformed mass migration

I consider myself to be bad at making predictions, but one of the obvious things about the migrant crisis last year was that public sympathy for the Syrians, spurned in particular by the image of the drowned 3-year-old boy Aylan Kurdi, would soon evaporate. A large number of men from war zones moving into an ageing, peaceful and culturally very liberal society presents lots of ‘challenges’, as the Economist might put it; Sweden’s generous immigration policy has already been blamed for an increase in sex crimes against women, so there was a possibility that #refugeeswelcome might be blamed for problems in Germany.

Still, the reports coming in from Cologne and other German cities from New Year’s Eve, of up to 1,000 men of ‘Arab or North African appearance’ allegedly committing dozens of sexual assaults and robberies and at least one rape are nonetheless shocking. While it’s not yet clear whether the men were migrants, descriptions by the police and witnesses suggest they spoke neither German nor English.