Bungling of refugee crisis gives Europe a major headache

A Vietnamese boat people-like solution will not work with Syrian refugees. In Hong Kong, where I worked in the 1980s and 1990s as a journalist, much was made by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees of the "pull factor", which drove tens of thousands of Vietnamese to take old boats and brave the waves in the South China Sea.

The "pull factor" is best defined as something which persuades people facing appalling hardships, oppression, war or simply economic disaster to take the most unimaginable risks to reach what they see as a haven of safety and hope.

For the Vietnamese boat people who numbered about 2 million, the draw was the US; they had seen the extraordinary largesse of the American troops who fought a bloody but unsuccessful war against communist North Vietnam.