SOME time ago - March 23, 2000 to be precise - this column spotted a gap in the market for a new line in spectacles. So that day saw the launch of Dr Cole's Sensible Perspective Lenses. Once worn, the manufacturer promised, the world will seem a saner place.

These spectacles, still available from a dusty shelf somewhere or other, come in a tough case, guaranteed to withstand the daily battering of populist politicians on the make and headlines from newspapers that ought to know better.

Now seems a good time to take them out again and look at the world afresh. Incidentally, these glasses were first used to peer at the nonsense spouted about the "curse" of Romanian gipsies and the asylum flood. Romanian gipsies have long since gone from the headlines, along with other pet-hate crazes of the day before yesterday.

Sadly, the fuss over asylum has not abated and continues to stir much vile nonsense. New Labour seems in danger of forgetting its humanity when it comes to immigration, what with Home Secretary David Blunkett using pejorative words such as "swamping", and Prime Minister Tony Blair talking of sending warships to intercept illegal immigrants.

All of this is in line with the leaders of Fortress Europe who are rushing about in a panic and pandering to the basest fears of their electorates, pushed on by the rise of the Far Right.

So let's put on Dr Cole's Sensible Perspective Lenses and have another look.

First fresh squint: the Sangatte camp in northern France. It looks as if Mr Blunkett and his French counterpart could stitch together an underhand deal to close this facility.

No one is going to say Sangatte is a humane place, especially not with all those reporters bumping about pretending to be immigrants. But closure won't help because Sangatte is a symptom, not a cause. Take away the official camp and illegal alternatives will spring up on the beaches.

This illustrates some broader truths about immigration, as a second sensible squint will reveal. Europe could ring itself with the biggest, razorwire-topped fence in the world and have Cilla Black run round it singing, and immigrants would still try to come in.

This is not because they are young, lazy opportunists with one eye on our social security systems. It is, in the main, because they are desperate.

People do not risk suffocation or drowning unless they are desperate; they do not stuff themselves into containers or hang beneath trains unless they are in dire need; they do not pay fortunes to criminal fixers unless they are at the acute end of life.

Immigration has been with us for always, and often it was Europe sending out immigrants while colonising the globe. The Pilgrim Fathers who fled intolerance in this country sought a new life in America. Unfortunates convicted of small crimes were shipped to sunny Australia - where many of their descendants ended up with better lives than the offspring of those who stuck to the straight and narrow in rainy old Britain.

Immigration is a basic human impulse, the desire to improve life. Here we may wish to step up the property ladder; in assorted troubled parts of the globe, it's a step away from poverty and degradation and a chance of a better life in the wealthy West.

Keeping out all incomers, an extreme view which too many people seem keen to embrace, is no answer. Immigration is important, both to Europe as a whole and to Britain. A free-for-all wouldn't work or be wise, Europe ought to set sensible quotas for each country to accept. That way, our societies could go on being enriched.

And with that I shall put away Dr Cole's Sensible Perspective Lenses, at least for now.

Updated: 10:59 Thursday, May 30, 2002