REUTERS African migrants picked up from their sinking catamaran in the Mediterranean

FREE now and never miss the top politics stories again. SUBSCRIBE Invalid email Sign up fornow and never miss the top politics stories again. We will use your email address only for sending you newsletters. Please see our Privacy Notice for details of your data protection rights.

I have travelled to the places where migrants continue to land and the places where they keep ending up. Everywhere I have gone I have come to the same conclusion: our continent is in the process of self-murder. Amid the day-to-day distraction of life and politics, it is easy to forget this biggest event of our time. All pale into insignificance besides the story of the loss by Europeans of the only place we had to call home.

Whenever this country does have a debate about immigration it is minuscule. It tends to focus on Calais. The British public sees footage of people sitting in makeshift tents or hurling missiles into the roads to slow the trucks down so they can board them and break into Britain. Each time actors, celebrities and politicians head to Calais and visit the camp. They return to tell the British public that it must be more open-hearted and generous. The argument they make is humane. It is an understandable reaction to human misery but it is a core part of our society's suicide mission.

Migrant crisis: Key locations before and after Tue, April 4, 2017 In these composite images, a comparison has been made between a scene at a key location during the height of the 2015 migrant crisis last year and the view there now Play slideshow Getty Images 1 of 10 Aid workers help migrants up the shore after making the crossing from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos on November 16, 2015 in Sikaminias, Greece

Take that example of Calais. Before the latest clearance of the camp there were about 6,000 people living there. None of them should have been there. By being there they had already broken every one of the rules that our continent put in place which demands they seek asylum in the first country of arrival. Almost nobody arrives into France first. All these people have landed in Greece or Italy and made their way north. And yet still the celebrities and others pick at our consciences. Can we not be generous and at least let in the people who are there? It is wholly understandable - and also ill-informed madness. Over this year's Easter weekend alone about 8,000 people were picked up between the coast of north Africa and the south of Italy. They were described - as everyone always is - as being "rescued". In fact what happens - what has been happening for years - is that each day boats filled with migrants set out from north Africa.

GETTY Refugees on a rubber boat flash victory sign as they reach the shore of Greece

At first - after some high-profile sinkings - they pulled people out of their boats (or escorted the boats in) when they were close to islands such as Lampedusa. But over time the European vessels have gone ever-closer to the shores of Libya. Today the smugglers hardly put any petrol into the barely seaworthy vessels they now put out. The boats need go only a few miles out to sea before they are collected by European naval vessels and brought into Europe. The smugglers now do the smallest part of that journey. The Europeans do the rest. Of course it is possible when standing in a migrant camp in one of these places or speaking to the people who arrive - as I have done many times - to think that perhaps our continent can cope with this flow. From these far-flung outposts a few thousand people arriving every single day and then being shipped or flown up on to the mainland of Europe can seem a manageable prospect. In fact it spells a continent's catastrophe.

During the heights of the migration crisis of 2015, when Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel opened up the doors of Europe to the world, the whole continent began to buckle. But in reality that flood of millions into Europe only sped up a process that had been under way for years. Ever since the postwar period European governments had encouraged migrant workers to come in. At first - as Chancellor Merkel herself admitted in a speech in 2010 - they expected the workers to return home. But they didn't. They stayed. As did the flow after that and the ones for decades after that. The governments of countries such as ours failed to get anything right. All their predictions were wrong for decades. They were wrong that people would stay for only a short time. Wrong to think that they would not continue to come in large numbers. Wrong that they might not want to bring their extended families to join them. And wrong to think that once the tap was turned on anything but very radical action could ever bring the numbers to a controllable level.

GETTY German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened up the doors of Europe to the world in 2015

In a country such as Britain we are used to politicians promising things on lowering immigration that we know they will never deliver. Remember the promises to bring immigration down to tens of thousands a year? But even this is just a portion of the big-picture changes occurring across our continent into which millions of people are moving with no end in sight. During the course of researching The Strange Death Of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, I have travelled to see the places where those migrants who arrive on our continent end up. Last year the migrant crisis was widely believed to have slowed down. But it had not and its effects were still visible everywhere. In the outskirts of Paris I saw hundreds of young sub-Saharan men living in tents in the middle of roadways. The French police would occasionally move them a few hundred feet further along. In remote parts of Sweden areas that used to be filled with Swedes are inhabited instead by the residents of other continents. Still the dream of some Europeans is that the arrivals into Europe will become European. It is more likely that Europe will simply begin to look increasingly Third World.

Migrants clash with police across Europe Wed, February 15, 2017 Migrants clash with each other in over crowded camps across Europe. Play slideshow EPA 1 of 107 Moroccan Police look at immigrants trying to jump the six-meter-high fence in Ceuta, Spanish enclave on the north of Africa, 09 December 2016.

Part of the reason is that we keep lying to ourselves, or failing to inform ourselves, about what is happening. Even today the Left and Right in Britain and Europe still pretend that the people arriving are refugees. Yet as I found out for myself most are not. Most of those who arrived in 2015, for instance, are economic migrants. They are escaping economic hardships we are infinitely lucky not to have been born into. But they are not fleeing for their lives. Open borders campaigners and others deliberately smudge the differences between these groups, massively damaging their own cause but doing their part in the destruction of our civilisation. Neither is there any workable system to send people who should not be here back to their own countries. The system that existed on Europe's borders was never designed to cope with flows of the kind we now have. As terrorist attacks perpetrated by people who have used this system have shown - it is almost totally broken.