Why don’t we launch a Kindertransport scheme for Syrians?

I never knew my paternal grandfather, who was apparently a bitter, angry right-wing journalist who thought the world was going to hell; although as this was the 1930s, he was pretty much right. Almost the only thing I remember being told is that in 1938 he and my grandmother took in an Austrian boy as part of a scheme in which 20,000 Jewish children were taken away from Hitler. (I only heard this story from my mum, as my father was too English to talk about his parents, and felt rather less uncomfortable in war-torn Beirut or Biafra than actually talking about his own emotions.) I don’t know what happened to the boy, except that he stayed and was apparently still living in England by the time I was told the story as a teenager.

Britain was reluctant to take in Jewish refugees at the time, as was America. Much of the moral impetus behind the 1951 UN Refugee Convention was collective guilt about the 1938 Evian conference, when the world refused to accept many Jews from Germany (except the nutty Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, who was generous to any refugee so long as they weren’t black).