There’s no excuse for treating migrants as human cargo. We are all made in God’s image

When we fail to see people as made in God’s image, we fail them as humans, says George Pitcher. It is our ability to ‘other’ people and put them in categories that leads to the worst of human behaviour

A much-loved member of our congregation told me after church last Sunday that most of the illegal migrants landing on our shores were Albanians. Members of his family had visited Albania recently – in fact, one of them is Albanian – and found that the country is, in my friend’s words, “not too bad”. As supporting evidence, he revealed that they stayed in a 4-star hotel.

It’s easy to mock this view (which he expressed to me because I’m reckoned, here in Sussex, to be more sympathetic to small boat migrants than most) with the summary that the case for Albanians staying in their own country rests on the fact that they have a half-decent hotel. But there’s more to it than that.