This was meant to be the week that Britain’s relationship with Europe was to start changing. When David Cameron would begin his bid to persuade his 27 fellow EU leaders at a summit in Brussels to accept the reforms he has promised British voters.

On Thursday night, he told fellow national leaders that they had to address ‘widespread unease about the UK’s membership of the EU’.

He had carefully laid the groundwork with face-to-face meetings with each of them, and is demanding, among other things, an opt-out from the EU’s principle of ‘ever closer union’, protection of the City’s financial services and a four-year ban on EU migrants claiming benefits.

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Migrants climb in the back of a lorry on the highway leading to the Eurotunnel in Calais, northern France

Predictably, Europe’s leaders gave him the brush-off. Not just because of their antipathy to what some have called the British Prime Minister’s ‘a la carte’ approach to Europe, but because they have other things on their minds.

The crush of current political events — Greece’s interminable debt crisis, Russia’s serial provocations in and around Ukraine and a migration problem running wildly out of control — meant Cameron’s big moment was squeezed into a late-night session after pudding.

Many of the leaders he was trying to persuade were, by this stage, exhausted by the endless chicanery of the Greeks and a bitter and hopelessly unresolved row over whether to disperse 60,000 migrants according to mandatory quotas for member states.

In the end, Downing Street officials were forced to concede that Britain will not be able to secure changes to any EU treaties in time for the referendum in 2017. All the Prime Minister can get is a promissory note instead.

It was a rebuff that serves only to highlight how small-beer and parochial our negotiations seem at a time when nobody — not Cameron nor any other EU leader — is prepared properly to acknowledge that Europe’s most urgent problem is the relentless human tide heading our way from several points of the compass.

Any talk of changing our welfare benefits system or dispersing thousands of migrants across Europe is simply fiddling at the edges.

It will do nothing to avert a catastrophe that is not only causing the deaths of thousands of migrants, drowning at sea, but could splinter the Continent, fostering xenophobic nationalism, as immigration swamps individual countries.

The appalling and anarchic scenes in Calais this week, where 350 stowaways were turfed off British-bound lorries in just four hours on one day, as British and French authorities traded insults about whose responsibility they were, will become commonplace unless firm action is taken.

Besieged lorry drivers, forced to confront people armed with knives who clamber aboard their vehicles, say it can only be a matter of time before someone is killed.

Yesterday, the Mail revealed that the Mediterranean boat crisis has now reached Britain, with police figures showing a 200 per cent increase in the number of migrants making it to our shores over the past 12 months.

Bedfordshire Police — who cover Toddington Services on the M1, 125 miles from Dover but where migrants are caught daily as they clamber out of the lorries they board in Calais — say they caught an average of 23 suspected illegal immigrants each month and 67 in May. In just two days last week, they found 36 stowaways.

The statistics are shocking. So far this year, more than 100,000 illegal migrants have successfully crossed the Mediterranean into southern Europe — 48,000 to Greece and 54,000 to Italy. And 500,000 more are said to be waiting in Libya to chance their arms.

And this does not include the increasing numbers entering the Continent overland from Turkey and Serbia into Hungary.

The European border agency Frontex — whose HQ, for political correctness reasons, is thousands of miles from the Mediterranean coast in Warsaw — is completely overwhelmed.

The inability of governments to get a grip on the problem is benefiting parties on the populist Right which exploit immigration.

And it’s not just Ukip’s huge tally of votes at the last British General Election; recent elections in Denmark, where the Right-wing Danish People’s Party won the biggest share of the vote in its 20-year history, and Finland, where the nationalist Finns Party is now part of the coalition government, are also cases in point.

A pair of Kuwaiti migrants were caught strolling along the M1 as lorries rumble past just yards away (pictured)

But before we address the question of what can be done about illegal migration, we have to understand how it happens and what is driving it.

Certainly, there are huge numbers fleeing war zones such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia, and many of them have a legitimate case to claim asylum as their lives are truly menaced in their own country.

In the case of Syrian refugees, although many have headed towards Europe, the vast majority have elected to stay in their own neighbourhood — in countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and the Kurdistan region, which are coping heroically with millions of refugees who want to return home when it is safe to do so.

This truth should not be forgotten when Europe is being asked to receive migrants who are travelling thousands of miles from countries which are safe and benign in order to better themselves economically.

While there are economic migrants from countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, many more are from Africa.

With the help of cynical people-smugglers, some make it through Turkey into the Balkans by land — a route used by about 40,000 people in 2012. This led to tensions between Austria and Hungary, each of whose governments insist the other country should take responsibility.

The bulk take the route across the Mediterranean, travelling from west, central and east sub-Saharan Africa to the coast of Libya, which is the epicentre of the people-smuggling trade.

A driver looks looks underneath a lorry as migrants continue to try and board lorries bound for the UK

In the days when Colonel Gaddafi despotically ruled the country, the smugglers were under his control.

Indeed, he earned himself billions — the Italian government under Gaddafi’s friend Silvio Berlusconi happily stumped up — just by threatening to allow migrants into Italy, thereby ‘turning Europe black’.

Now Gaddafi is gone, it is a smugglers’ free-for-all. The migrants pass from the hands of African nomads into those of the Libyan boat-people who send them out to sea with rudimentary navigational instruction and a mobile phone, to which they text a number for the Italian coastguard after ten hours have elapsed.

The migrants pass from the hands of African nomads into those of the Libyan boat-people who send them out to sea with rudimentary navigational instruction and a mobile phone, to which they text a number for the Italian coastguard after ten hours have elapsed

Local smuggling networks in Africa offer pay-as-you-go and full package options. The former involves a migrant travelling in stages, stopping — often for a year — to earn enough money for the next leg of the journey.

The latter can cost anything up to $40,000 and involves entire families, including members already in Europe, making an investment in a single payment, on the promise that once successful, the migrant will send money back home from the ‘El Dorado’ of Europe.

Smugglers also offer a credit option — the most perilous — which can lead to a migrant being in perpetual debt and forced to work in prostitution or slave labour in the black economy.

So what can be done about this tide of humanity heading our way? One option mooted by politicians is to disrupt the smugglers’ operations in the source countries.

It sounds a good idea, but on a practical level the complicated payment methods for smugglers involving extended families means that deploying special forces and spies to close them all down is fanciful.

There are simply too many people involved, and families conniving in the trade could hardly be considered criminals. Smuggling is also facilitated by the corruption and weakness of many of the states concerned, whose borders are often unpatrolled.

And this is where EU governments can bring influence to bear: they can use their generous foreign aid budgets as a lever to make the migrants’ home-states cooperate with our national interests.

Migrants (pictured) are spotted breaking in to lorries on the approach road to the Channel Tunnel this week

Last year, 48,000 refugees sought asylum in Europe from Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. Even 50 members of the national football team have absconded in recent years. They are fleeing a regime which uses indefinite military conscription as a disguised form of slavery.

The EU has recently decided to give Eritrea €312 million to crack down on people-smuggling.

But most African countries are not hell-holes like Eritrea. Burkina Faso, Chad, Gambia, Ghana, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, not to mention Kenya and Uganda, all nevertheless produce economic migrants, even though there are plenty of places — from Lagos to Nairobi — where they could find work locally.

Burkina Faso has 3,200km (almost 2,000 miles) of land borders with six neighbours. It has just 19 fixed border-posts and 300 frontier police earning $200 a month with no money for fuel or spare parts for their jeeps.

Since a smuggler can earn $5,200 by packing 30 migrants into a bus for a single trip, he can easily afford small bribes that represent a fortune to a policeman.

Europe should get tough with Burkina Faso. It should force the government to act by diverting aid towards a proper, well-equipped border force and threaten to cut off aid altogether unless the government cracks down on smugglers.

It can be done. President Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger, which will have received €600 million of EU aid by 2020, recently introduced 30-year jail sentences for people-smugglers, and under new laws, owners of buses and trucks who collude in smuggling will lose them, too.

A migrant sits under the trailer of a lorry as he attempts to cross the English Channel, in Calais, on Wednesday

Aid money should also be spent on sending European policemen to these countries in Africa to focus the minds of the local police on the problem. There should be a massive public information campaign in the migrants’ home countries to help puncture delusions about life in Europe.

This should highlight the deadly risks that illegal migrants take, going so far as to point out that many drown and their bodies end up being picked apart by crabs and fish at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

If Europe was serious about this problem, it would also introduce draconian penalties for domestic employers of illegal migrant labour or those who cram dozens of them into tiny basements or garden extensions and sheds in areas such as suburban London.

Above all, there should be a serious European debate about whether the 1951 UN Refugee Convention (designed to deal with displaced people inside Europe after World War II) should now apply to economic migrants from other continents.

The entire process of repatriating failed asylum-seekers should be accelerated, only allowing them to appeal decisions once outside the EU area.

That would diminish the opportunities for human rights lawyers and humanitarian organisations to prolong matters at public expense. Also, Europe should seriously explore the policy of the Australian government of processing its illegal migrants outside its borders.

It rents detention centres in and off Papua New Guinea to which it immediately deports migrants picked up at sea heading for Australia. From there, the migrants make applications for asylum in a considered way.

Although the global human rights industry, supported by liberal media organisations such as the BBC, euphemistically describe these centres ‘concentration camps’ because of riots caused by disgruntled migrants there, at least no migrant has drowned trying to reach Australia since they were introduced.

A 10-year-old migrant boy called Aman climbs on to a lorry helped by his older brother Daniel Fasih, 17, on the approach road to the Channel Tunnel

It should be an EU priority to establish similar facilities in one of the North African states, such as Algeria or Morocco, where boat people intercepted by a European-wide naval task force can be deposited, and where their options are realistically explained and economic migrants are weeded out and flown home.

It is time they learned that life in Europe can be tough, too (as it is in many countries), and that its population has had enough of a problem that is now completely out of control.

Uncontrolled migra-tion impacts unfairly on benefits, education, housing and public transport in ways that destroy any notion of the contributory element that lies at the heart of European welfare states.

As we have witnessed in various European countries, the anger this engenders quickly assumes political forms, with the rise of neo-Nazi parties. What on earth do Europe’s leaders imagine is driving this angry populism, including that of established legal immigrants? The common fisheries policy?

Sections of the liberal media insist on relentlessly depicting the individual tragic stories of illegal migrants, with the BBC correspondent Clive Myrie, for example, telling one passing migrant ‘you’ve made it’ as he disembarked from a rescue ship in the Mediterranean.

In fact, illegal migration is an insidious problem that strips desperately poor countries of precisely the sort of enterprising young people who ought to remain there, while oppressing the poorest sections of our own societies with people who compete for diminishing resources.

It also raises the questions of whether one can simply uproot people from entirely different cultural universes and expect them to thrive in societies that may subscribe to other values, with radically different expectations of their citizens.