A PICTURE’S worth a thousand words, and whose heart did not break at that photo of the innocent little boy of three in his smart red T-shirt, blue shorts and trainers lying dead face down on a beach in Turkey?

Like the little Polish boy with his hands up in the Warsaw Ghetto, or the crying burned child of the Vietnam War – these are appalling heart-rending icons of a cry for help.

The dreadful deaths of migrants in the sea, the squalor of the Jungle camp in Calais, the chaos in Budapest – all these things are symptoms of a wider malaise.

We are witnessing the largest mass migration of peoples in the history of the world.

Behind it is warfare in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism in much of the northern half of Africa and Middle East, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,poverty in half the globe (the other half is obese), the pernicious effects of and people using religion as a cover for their own greedy, violence. demented ends.

These were predicted by the Willy Brandt Report 35 years ago and are now taking place.

I absolutely agree with all of my constituency correspondents that that “we must do something about it”.

But I also have every sympathy with those who reply: “Yes, but what?” The other half of my mailbag in the last few months has been full of letters of outrage at the very high immigration figures, demanding that we should close our doors to migrants, arguing we have neither space nor resources to house them.

Half of my constituents want compassionate immigration. The other half want the drawbridge pulled up at Calais.

My own view is that we must try to differentiate between economic migrants (the Dick Whittingtons of the 21st century), genuine political asylum seekers like the Afghan interpreters and the millions of refugees displaced from homes and homelands by warfare and persecution.

How you differentiate among the different categories each being worthy of a different type of help, is anyone’s guess especially when they are jumbled up in migration camps in Europe.

I very much welcome the Prime Minister’s statement last Friday that “we need to act with head and heart to help those most in need,” and I welcome his announcement to Parliament on Monday that we will take 20,000 refugees from the camps on Syria's borders.

I am also delighted that Britain has already provided over £900 million in aid for those fleeing war in Syria and Iraq – more than any other European country.

But there isn’t a solution to this problem that is simply about taking people. Simply throwing open our doors, as some suggest we do out of compassion, would solve really very little.

Indeed, it might make things worse since it would say to the remaining people in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere: “make your way to the borders of Europe and we will give you shelter.”

So we must be compassionate; we must find a way to help these poor people whose lives have been destroyed by warfare at home; we must give political asylum to true asylum seekers, but we must filter out the fakes and economic migrants and violent terrorists who may be hiding among them. We must – by overseas aid or military means – try to establish peace and security in these peoples’ homelands. We must police the vicious thugs who traffick them and rebalance the world inequalities of food, water and economic resources.

If you fancy that job you’re braver than me.