First Clemantine Wamariya chose an appropriate political moment to publish a long and dazzling article about her childhood as a Rwandan refugee and asylum-seeker, and her adulthood as a US citizen and Yale graduate. She cloaked those words, “refugee” and “asylum seeker” – words that have become effortlessly dehumanising – in the raiments of her fierce, complex, open individuality, and did that not only for herself, but for everyone who has ever been described that way.

Admittedly, though, appropriate political moments for such writings come along pretty regularly. Sometimes, it feels as if it’s only when the nation is discussing ways of ensuring other people don’t come here that we all remember we’re lucky to live on the island of Great Britain: a moat of sea around us that must never be allowed to hamper our own travels through the world, but must also be a fortification against the troubles of the rest of the planet.

Many believe that Britain’s problems will be eased by withdrawal from the EU. Many believe that Scotland’s problems will be eased by withdrawal from the UK. It’s a common theme, this idea that problems are always things that originate elsewhere; things that, left to our own devices, we’d be able to fix.

The specific problem now unfolding in Calais, mainstream politicians will say, can be traced back through France, though Europe, to the countries from which these troublesome travellers originate – mainly, at present, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and Afghanistan. Not many of the British holidaymakers being held up by the crisis will be heading for those places. Mostly, westerners are as frightened of the countries asylum-seekers come from as they are of the asylum-seekers themselves. You can’t help wishing that this sort of reticence had been a more pervasive British characteristic in the past.

Sympathy with someone whose holiday in France has been disrupted by ongoing security efforts in Coquelles is more effortlessly summoned than sympathy for someone whose desperate, dangerous journey towards a hoped-for new life has ended in injury or death. Because everyone knows what it’s like to have your holiday messed up, or at least can allow themselves to imagine it, without risking a few minutes of true despair piercing through disgruntled complacency.

It’s easy, while consuming headlines and absorbing statistics, to set aside the fact that each of the people trying to reach Britain through the Channel tunnel has a heroic story to tell, of courage and hope in the face of inhumanity and suffering, just as Wamariya has. It’s easy to forget that this “swarm of people”, as David Cameron put it, embody the virtues that Conservatives are supposed to espouse – self-reliance, aspiration, adaptability, determination, a willingness to invest all they have in the risky hope of a better future. It’s more comfortable for many to believe instead that these aliens are greedy and parasitical, scroungers and vagabonds who want to take our stuff – our jobs, our homes, our school places, our cures for our sicknesses.

But it’s also pretty easy to spout pro-immigrant rhetoric without offering any solutions. The truth is that although “immigration” is supposed to be one of those issues that has come to define the chasm between the political left and right, the only real difference is whether one feels repulsed and guilty about the demonising of humans in distress, or one feels perfectly relaxed and justified in nodding along to xenophobia, or even indulging in it.

Andy Burnham tweeted about Cameron’s “swarms” remark, saying that it shows that “there’s no dog whistle these Bullingdon Boys won’t blow”. “Bullingdon Boys” being the acme of scrupulous dog-whistle-avoiding language, of course. It’s almost as if Burnham has forgotten that he was re-elected only a few months ago as an MP for a party that saw fit to inscribe “Controls on immigration” on a giant slab of rock, in case anyone had missed the jolly red mugs boasting the same legend. Much good it did them.

The SNP’s airy attitudes to immigration, and its ideas of a civic nationalism in which all you have to do to be a citizen is to want to be one, are attractive to progressives. But Jeremy Corbyn, attracting similarly optimistic supporters, has had to explicitly spell out that he wouldn’t want Britain to leave the EU any more than the SNP does. This is a problem for the left: squaring utopian ideas of expansive internationalism with more practical complaints about migrant labour driving down pay and conditions. The free movement of people in search of economic opportunity is as profoundly neoliberal as it gets. And yet, in this regard, it’s the right that calls for protectionism, with its own massive ideological contradiction barely questioned. Theresa May is happy to explain that asylum-seekers must be brought to an understanding that there is no warm welcome for them in Britain. Austerity isn’t just about lack of sympathy for vulnerable people in Britain, but also about a lack of sympathy for vulnerable people throughout the world.

It’s a profoundly depressing idea that the most simple way to make the world more equal is to limit support and opportunity for one’s own citizens, because generosity of spirit might encourage others living further afield. But it’s the politically dominant idea in Britain at the moment. Ukip may not have achieved the electoral earthquake it sought, but the poison of the party’s rhetoric has seeped everywhere.

Nigel Farage, complaining in his inimitably “non-racist” way that it’s only a matter of time before a British holidaymaker or lorry driver dies as a result of the Calais migrant crisis, ought to be ashamed to admit that such petty league tables of human mortality lurk in the darkest recesses of his mind. Instead, these remarks are seriously reported as part of Farage’s call for something “radical” to be done. What is the radical thing he wants? I dread to imagine.

At the end of her online essay, Wamariya has this to say: “When people ask me what to do to ease human suffering, I don’t have a big answer. I just say, ‘Look, you have this one life. If you keep being selfish and unkind, it’s going to come back to you. Ask yourself why you’re scared, why you hate.’” Maybe it’s not a big answer. But maybe it’s where the big answers start.