Europe's refugee crisis: The West has turned its back on its values

It began with the creation of the catch-all concept (a legal freak) of a migrant’, which obscures the difference, central to the law, between economic and political migration, between people escaping poverty and people driven from their homes by war.

Unlike economic migrants, those fleeing oppression, terror, and massacre have an inalienable right to asylum, which entails an unconditional obligation by the international community to provide shelter.

Even when the distinction is acknowledged, it is often as part of another sleight of hand, an attempt to convince credulous minds that the men, women, and children who paid thousands of euros to travel on one of the rickety boats washing up on the islands of Lampedusa or Kos are economic migrants.