Asylum? Not in our backyard...

Turning out refugees has long been a cottage industry, almost a folk-art, down the Foreign Office end of the Whitehall village. Less than brilliant d?marches helped swell the waves of exiles in the Indian subcontinent during 1947-8, while at the same time we had a hand in the deracination of more than half a million Palestinians, whose descendants today stir bitter memories; we left Nigeria to a fate which included the flight of two million Igbo and the Biafran famine; in partnership with our allies (and with our enemies), we share some responsibility for the 3.5 million displaced in one direction or another from what used to be Yugoslavia.

Letting the blighted in, though, is thought ill of by the good folk at the Home Office. Since the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, whose passage Michael Dummett calls "the most shameful act of any British government since the War", ingenuity has been persistently deployed in shifting goalposts, prompting officials to ever-sterner rulings, and muddying the language so as to conceal from ourselves the cruel shabbiness of our policy. (Rumours that the Palace Theatre has been asked to rename its long-running musical Les ?migr?s Financiers are, however, unfounded.) Our society, we are told, is built on family values, by which is meant the value we set on our own little platoons; we'll do everything for our children, and that includes preventing the wretched of the earth from doing anything for theirs, at least within the frontiers of our United Backyard. Though the cant of "globalisation" and "the death of distance" is widely intoned, labour is one factor excluded from the "borderless economy", except when it suits us to cherrypick teachers and nurses from lands whose natural resources we have a tradition of despoiling.

At times it seems that "government thinking" is a contradiction in terms. Routledge's new series, Thinking in Action, brings philosophers to our aid in such quandaries. Jacques Derrida is himself an exile from his native Algeria and has often spoken of his "nostalgeria" for his torn home, of the "two sources of sighs" which remain to the uprooted, sighs for "their dead ones and their language". For a decade or more, Derrida has been reconsidering the legacy of monotheistic religions (in his terms, the "Abrahamic" heritage) in writings such as Of Hospitality (1996) and the two occasional pieces here published as On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. He speaks up loud and - given his reputation - surprisingly clear: the distinction between economic migrant and political refugee is "not ... merely abstract or gratuitous; it is truly hypocritical and perverse"; for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, "hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others". But though he supports "restoring a memorable heritage to its former dignity", he stops short of details about how to refresh in our day the duty of kindness to strangers, contenting himself with noting that it will involve something "entirely different" from "empiricist, relativist, or pragmatist resignation". True enough, but not exactly news to those who remember the parable of the Good Samaritan and why it was first told.

Michael Dummett would have written even more than he has on logic and the philosophy of language if he had not devoted such energy and resourcefulness to "the struggle against racism", and not just in fine sayings like Derrida's but in repeated acts of individual succour. In Immigration and Refugees he acutely spots a blank in the mentality of earlier political philosophers who "have seldom asked what obligations a state has towards those who are not its citizens" and argues powerfully against those who "hold that we have at most only negative duties towards strangers: that, for example, we may not kill them, but have no duty to protect them from being killed". He exposes the fraudulence of the phrase "bogus asylum-seeker" and points out the incompatibility of the two most popular alibis for callousness in this matter - that there are so many of us in "this overcrowded little island" we have no room for more, and, secondly, that we are in imminent danger of being "swamped". As he rightly says, "collective selfishness is no more admirable a quality than individual selfishness".

It would be rash to expect so decent a voice will get much of a hearing. After all, selfishness is not only admired but encouraged all round us, by leaders who proudly declare they will always put British interests first, as by advertising campaigns in Marks and Spencer's stores, those cool palaces of wholesome normality, whose posters recently declared their big, ready meals were "Too Good To Share". None of us batted an eyelid as we bought our strawberries.

Other titles in the Thinking in Action series include On Belief by Slavoj Zizek, On the Internet by Hubert Dreyfus, On Science by Brian Ridley and On Religion by John D Caputo.