Britain must do more for the new wave of asylum seekers

Over the summer I read Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, a documentary novel about the Swedes who emigrated to America in the 18th century. It powerfully describes what drove illiterate peasants to take such an extraordinary gamble on a country about which they knew almost nothing. The story, of course, could have been written about migrants from many European countries, and particularly those (including some of by relatives) from the Scottish Highlands. Moberg tells how some fled starvation, some religious persecution; some sought economic and political freedom. And they all risked a voyage which they might not survive: Moberg’s ship’s captain would take a clump of earth with him to scatter on corpses in the funerals he knew he’d be presiding over. But the reader is persuaded that Karl Oskar Nilsson and his fellow travellers – including pregnant wife and toddler children – had to take the risk.

It’s funny how little the world changes. Last weekend, an Afghan Sikh was found dead in a shipping container in an Essex port after making what seems to be a repeat of the emigration mission that poor Swedes were making in the 19th century.