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It’s almost 5 years since we all saw images of three year old, Aylan Kurdi’s body lying lifeless on a Turkish beach after his family tried to reach Europe in a small inflatable boat. The journalist who took the photo, said that it was the ` only way I can express the scream of his silent body.’ The image stirred Europe’s conscience causing many western countries to open their borders. Over the last few days we’re again seen pictures of people in overcrowded dinghies crossing the English Channel, all hoping to start a new life. The response has been mixed – some speak of a clampdown and further surveillance to stop dangerous crossings and illegal people smuggling. Others have called for greater empathy and hospitality. Europe for all its internal challenges is seen as offering hope and freedom to so many. But on this complex issue, Europe is struggling to distinguish between the moral person and the legal person. In many faiths and ethical traditions, every human being has an inherent moral value even if they don’t have legal value. Their moral value is unconditional by virtue of their humanity whereas their legal value and membership of a nation rests on a range of conditions. A legal community is always based on exclusivity and boundaries. The question for Europe is to what extent it continues to make this distinction. There are no easy answers. Governments have much to weigh up. And if the response is more hospitality, hospitality is itself complex. In Islam, while hospitality is a fundamental virtue emerging from the harsh desert environment, feeding and helping others is never reduced to charity or watered down to soft piety. It demands reaching out and inviting in and comes with both risks and rewards to others as well as ourselves. The response has to include more than just a question of how many or how few people we might allow into our borders. It has to focus on the human story. And it must surely begin with reflecting on the causes of instability in parts of the world and our responsibility to alleviate the situation. Our moral compass has to inform the legal challenge because when people are desperate to escape, they will do anything, they will gamble their lives on the seas, even with the cruel knowledge that should they die they will simply disappear. When Edward Said wrote about migration as a consequence of war, famine and other conflicts, he asked this simple question, `who will chronicle the sad experience of contemporary exiles, émigrés, refugees, and expatriates?’ it seems to me, that no one will write about them until we do more to acknowledge that their lives matter – and not just at the point that they choose to make a dangerous sea crossing.