IN March 2016, Turkey made a deal with the European Union. It would curtail the flow of migrants to Greece, which by 2015 had passed one million. In return Ankara accepted $3.3 billion from Brussels, which it was supposed to be devoting to the care of the 3.5 million largely Syrian migrants it was hosting. The EU also agreed to allow Turkish citizens free movement within the borderless Schengen area and promised to “reenergize” stalled talks on Turkey’s accession to the Union.

One of the scandalous details of the deal was that the Turkey would accept back Syrians who were deemed by EU officials, specially drafted into Greece, not to have a valid claim for asylum. However, Brussels also agreed to grant entry to one Syrian migrant for every other Syrian sent back. Such was the relief at stemming this vast tide of human misery crashing onto European shores, the cynicism of this provision was not widely noted by European media. Few people asked how these mathematics could be applied to a substantial group of terrified refugees, almost every one of whom had a valid reason to flee their Syrian homeland and the brutal repression of the Bashar Assad dictatorship.

There are good reasons to suspect that in fact the EU asylum selection process was based on self-interest rather than humanitarian principles. Applicants with professional qualifications useful work experience, language skills and perhaps access to financial savings, have been preferred over less-educated Syrians. In Brussels, there was also emphasis on the need to weed out Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) terrorists seeking to inveigled their way inside Europe, where their forerunners had already created murder and mayhem on an horrific scale.