Elsewhere, the far-right AfD – which has expressed support for remigration policies in the past – continues to make progress in Germany. And in the US, Donald Trump has won Congressional approval to more than treble the budget for immigration enforcement so he can ramp up deportations, ensnaring plenty of people with a legal right to live there and causing terror across US cities.

But those who support these shifts, and see mass migration as an existential threat to national identity, struggle to explain how their countries will manage declining populations without bringing in more working-age adults. One popular idea on the radical right – that the need could be negated through schemes to boost native fertility – runs up against the failure of any country to do so, including those like Hungary, which has put significant resources into trying. Policies such as improved childcare, cash payments to parents and better access to housing can make a small difference at the margins but cannot overcome more fundamental changes in gender roles, or the cultural impact of the internet, which means young people spend much less time socialising in person.

Some anti-immigration activists will admit they prefer the idea of gradual economic decay to solving the population problem through migration, but no government can realistically let standards of living go into permanent decline. Voters may worry about immigration, but that doesn’t mean they won’t blame the government if they can’t pay their bills and there is no one to look after their ageing parents.

How rich states manage this tension will be a key political dynamic over the coming decades. Combining tacit support for economic migration with rhetorical hostility will not be sustainable – both because that hostility will mean losing out in the global competition for workers, but also because voters who object to migration can see right through it, undermining trust further.