There is no more vexed issue in politics at present than the status of asylum seekers. It’s a complex debate that understandably focuses on the difficulty of absorbing more people and the struggles of those who are already here. But for now I want to focus on just one aspect, because I think it can get lost. We’re talking about people, many – though by no means  all – of whom are eventually recognised as genuine victims of persecution.

Take Connie. She fled Congo where soldiers in one of the warring factions had raped and tortured her. She came to the UK where she received treatment for trauma. . I met Connie myself because my father and stepmother befriended her.  Over time, they helped her build a new life.

Behind the statistics are many more people like Connie, and their presence in our society confronts us with an issue that’s at the heart of Buddhist practice. How do we respond when we encounter suffering? A political response is one thing, but there’s also a spiritual dimension.

Buddhism teaches that when we encounter suffering with an open and balanced mind, the natural response is compassion. Compassion differs from pity, which includes a sense of being superior  to another person; and from hatred, which rejects them entirely. For Buddhists, compassion begins with a willingness to recognise the reality of others’ suffering, and brings an impulse to help them.

My father responded to Connie because of his own experience. He came to Britain in 1939 on a kinder transport train from Berlin. Britain is rightly proud of the scheme that rescued ten thousand Jewish children from the Nazis, but it’s less often mentioned that it came very late, and on the condition that private groups took financial responsibility for them. Only unaccompanied children were allowed to come and adults remained behind. Most were killed, like my grandfather and many others in my family.

My father responded to that history with determination to be compassionate, and that, in turn, prompted my own faith in the Buddhist insight that what we dwell on becomes the inclination of our minds. Compassion moulds us, and so does anger. Whatever immigration policy we favour, I think the role of wisdom traditions like Buddhism is to remind us of the cost – to ourselves and to society as a whole – of closing ourselves to others’ suffering.