Their sinking didn’t start in the Channel; it started the moment they left their homes. Maybe they even started to sink the day they got the idea in their heads that everything would be better elsewhere, when they started to want supermarkets and child support, when they heard about Social Security or when a cousin living in London told them you could become a billionaire doing the washing up in a Tamil pop-up. You could say, I repeated, that all their problems stem from their inability to stay sitting quietly in a room.