LAST weekend alone, 13,000 migrants arrived on the Italian islands. A normal weekend in Europe.

So normal that it got no more attention than each weekend before or since.

4 Angela Merkel has 'invited the world into Europe' Credit: Reuters

Because the crisis which Angela Merkel and the EU Commission fired up in 2015 is not really a crisis.

It is in fact the ongoing disaster of an entire continent.

Italian authorities have threatened to close their ports. People are arriving too fast.

Today the flow is partly caused by NGOs like Medecins sans Frontieres and Save the Children.

These groups have good instincts — to save vessels and stop people drowning.

But they are helping to increase the flow and their short-term decencies are now triggering serious long-term fall-out.

4 Austrian riot police deployed on the border with Italy Credit: EPA

4 Armoured vehicles have also been stationed on the frontier

Ever since Mrs Merkel invited the world into Europe in 2015, the borderless continent about which EU leaders had dreamed began going into reverse.

Austria’s announcement this week that it is deploying 750 troops to its Brenner Pass border with Italy is only an escalation.

Nobody trusts the EU and increasingly they can’t trust their neighbours.

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The EU’s plans to bring the continent together are driving the continent apart.

Yet it continues to try to force countries to take quotas of Merkel’s migrants.

But most countries refuse to pay the price for Merkel’s short-term moral spasm.

And the arrivals themselves do not want to be moved around.

4 Rescued migrants in Reggio Calabria, Italy Credit: Rex Features

One Eritrean migrant sent to Latvia complained he got only 139 euros a month — but in Germany they give an apartment and 400 euros.

They cannot all go to Germany any more than they could all come to Britain.

But dispersing migrants is a disaster.

The flow must be stopped with those who shouldn’t be here returned.

For the meantime our continent continues its current experiment.

Crazy. Unforgivable. Suicidal.

Douglas Murray is the author of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigraion, Identity, Islam.