We Have the Houses

We can’t house all those millions of refugees. How many of us have heard this excuse raised by some who never ever wanted to accept the refugees in the first place and seek to justify their xenophobic prejudice by quoting practical "facts".

More than 11 million homes lie empty across Europe – enough to house all of the continent's homeless twice over – according to figures collated by the Guardian from across the EU. Spain has more than 3.4m homes lie vacant, in excess of 2m homes are empty in each of France and Italy, 1.8m in Germany and more than 700,000 in the UK.

We can both house the homeless and provide homes for refugees.