Why we've decided to call it Europe's refugee crisis

Europe is seeing a crisis at the moment, but nobody can agree on what sort of crisis it is. If you believed some of the language used by British politicians – David Cameron’s description of those arriving in Calais as a ‘swarm’, for instance, or Philip Hammond’s characterisation of them as a group of people ‘marauding around’ who will threaten Europe’s ‘standard of living and social structure’ if allowed to settle in the UK – then you might be forgiven for thinking that this is a crisis for Britain or Western Europe; that it’s just an immigration problem which can be solved with more dogs and bigger, reinforced fences. According to commentators like Katie Hopkins, who infamously referred to those rescued from sinking boats in the Mediterranean as ‘cockroaches’, then the solution is little more than a large-scale exercise in pest control.