Last week, France’s youthful and dapper president Emmanuel Macron swaggered into a battle of wits with the inexperienced and much-mocked lugnuts who run Italy’s new populist government. Macron was humiliated. That very same Italian populist government, meanwhile, threw down a gauntlet before half a dozen of its European neighbors and won.

While everyone was paying attention to refugees from Syria tramping into Europe across Turkey and Greece, sub-Saharan Africans started crossing the Mediterranean from Libya and Tunisia into Italy on fast motorboats at the rate of 150,000 a year. There are more than 600,000 of them now in Italy’s cities and villages, and they are costing the Italian government, which is already dead broke, $5 or $6 billion a year in lodging and welfare. Negotiations are ongoing in Luxembourg over how other countries in the 28-member European Union might share the costs with Italy, but since this would likely mean sharing the actual refugees, the talks never go anywhere. Under the E.U.’s “Dublin accords,” the first country immigrants come in contact with is responsible for them. This is to keep migrants from flocking to the northern European countries that have the most generous welfare states.