Why are the nerves of empathy severed when it comes to immigration? | Jonathan Jones

That the Daily Mail can print this picture confident it will not make people want to help these men is a distortion of Britain

Men are running behind a truck, trying to jump up and grab on to it, so they can hitch an illegal lift into Britain. It's a self-evidently dangerous game. Like the "super-tramps" in Depression-era America who jumped on and off moving goods trains to get from city to city, these migrants are risking life and limb in search of a better life, or at least another place to be poor in.

Eighty years on, who fails to feel sympathy for the victims of economic and political world turmoil in the 1930s who left their homes or were driven to the adventurous lifestyle described by WH Davies in his Autobiography of a Super-Tramp? Perhaps one day these truck-jumpers will be celebrated as heroes or mourned as victims. But right now there is little compassion for those who come across a continent or a world in search of a life in Britain: no curiosity about motives, no pity for need, no recognition of potential.