Anis Amri, the current Islamic refugee suspect in the Christmas Market massacre in Germany, is about as extreme a test case in what you can do and have on your record without being deported as you can imagine.
Anis Amri settled in Italy after leaving his hometown of Tataouine, Tunisia seven years ago to travel to Europe as an illegal immigrant, his father claimed in a radio interview.
Which would mean that he actually showed up in Europe as a teenager. Illegally, obviously. And then proceeded to punish Europe for letting him hang around.
Amri, who has a €100,000 reward on his head, spent four years in an Italian jail after burning down a school before leaving the country for Germany last year.
So Amri did show up for the Merkel asylum policy, but he had already been in Europe. He was just fleeing one European country for another making the whole asylum thing even more nonsensical.
Since then the 23-year-old has been arrested at least three times but German authorities have allowed the him to slip through their clutches time after time - even though Amri has been identified as an ISIS supporter known to have received weapons training.
Well we mustn't be Islamophobic. You know. German authorities had ever conceivable reason to deport him. Yet they never did.
And in June German authorities reportedly tried to deport Amri after learning he was plotting a 'serious act of violent subversion', a source told the Washington Post.
Amri even tried to recruit an accomplice for a terror plot – and again the authorities knew about it – but still he remained at large, it has emerged.
Surveillance showed that Amri was involved in drug dealing in a Berlin park and involved in a bar brawl, but no evidence to substantiate the original warning. The observation was called off in September.
He arrived in Germany in July 2015 and was given a hearing by immigration authorities in April this year. He was denied the right to asylum and was due to be deported before the end of the year.In July this year he got into a knife fight over drugs and was charged with GBH. But he went underground before getting to court.
Yet he surfaced again in August in Ludwigsburg when he was arrested for possessing a fake Italian document. Again, why he was allowed to slip through the fingers of the security services, given his known affiliation to hate preachers, is unclear.
According to German news reports he lived with a time with hate preacher Boban S. In Dortmund, under arrest for involvement with ISIS.
An anti-terror investigator told BILD newspaper: 'To our knowledge he was ready in the early part of this year to find an accomplice for an attack and was interested in acquiring a weapon.'
He is believed to have had a criminal record in Tunisia, having carried out violent car robberies. Tunisian police are now said to be speaking to his family.
And the final act in this twisted comedy when, even while being hunted, his pictures were being distorted to protect his privacy.
Despite an unfolding international manhunt the first pictures of him released in Germany have his eyes deliberately covered, thought to be because of strict privacy laws there.
Just maybe, Europe is providing Muslim Jihadists with a few too many rights that they neither deserve nor believe in extending to anyone else.