Europe’s asylum compromise

IT TAKES A lot of misery to jolt European politicians into action on migration. Only when bodies started piling up on Lampedusa, an Italian island near Tunisia, did European leaders in 2013 first properly acknowledge the refugee crisis at its border. At its peak in 2015, when 1m people entered the EU, only the very worst stories cut through. In one incident, 71 people—including four children—suffocated inside a meat lorry. Their bodies were discovered beside an Austrian motorway when a policeman noticed their liquefied remains seeping out. Compared with those horrors, the long-running misery of Moria, an overcrowded, squalid refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos was a side-story.