The second Paris fire in a year at accommodation for African immigrants awaiting rehousing is a tragedy if not a scandal. This spring, 24 people, ten of them children, perished in an apparently accidental blaze. Thursday night 14 more children were among the 17 immigrants who died in an inferno, the cause of which is still being investigated. What is clear is that both the buildings in which immigrants were packed, were poorly maintained and sub-standard. Whatever fire precautions existed were obviously inadequate. It could well be argued that to protect Third World immigrants unfamiliar with the dangers of a modern First World city, fire prevention and safety provisions ought to be more not less stringent than normal.

Whatever the prejudices currently building up against immigration in Europe, there can be no excuse for treating new arrivals with anything less than the dignity and care that would be extended to existing citizens. It seems rare that anyone in their comfortable, affluent European homes gives much thought to the immense sacrifices, not to say courage and optimism that cause individuals from distant countries to head off, often alone, to seek their fortune in a foreign land. Instead, the general and crass reaction is that immigrants are freeloaders, come to leech on a wealthy country, bringing poverty and backwardness with them.

To deny the dreams of others in this way is a gross injustice. Virtually every citizen in the First World has started their working lives with visions of success, with the belief that study and hard work will allow them to earn and save and build a home and a family. The dream of an African immigrant in Paris is no different and indeed is distinctly more challenging and ambitious, because such a person is often starting with absolutely nothing, not even a reasonable knowledge of his new country.

Any European national who feels himself profoundly French or British or Spanish and recoils at arriving immigrants today, overlooks the fact that yesterday, his forebears were almost certainly themselves immigrants too, either as conquerors or as refugees from the different waves of peoples that have swept over Europe from the East. Yet this is too often forgotten or simply not understood. Prejudices are fed by newspaper headlines about witchcraft and ritual murders, endemic diseases, criminal gangs and of course terrorism, but these in no way represent the vast majority of immigrants to Europe. These people have crossed seas and continents, sometimes at great personal danger and cost to stake out new lives for themselves. In this respect they are not unlike the European explorers who set out to colonize Africa from the 16th century onward. And like those Europeans, African emigrants send home much wealth that they have gained. Indeed in 2001, the latest year for which figures are available, its citizens working overseas sent close on $73 billion back to Africa. This figure dwarves the amount given to Africa by European tax payers in aid, yet the money was earned by work from immigrants, who also add to the wealth of Europeans.