As Jews, he said, “we know better than most what it means to flee persecution and that is why we have a particular responsibility to recognise and react to the current crisis”.
In an interview with Parliament’s House magazine this week, the archbishop said that Britain had to find ways to take its fair share of refugees.
But he emphasised it was important to listen to the concerns of people worried about the effect of setting them.
“There is a tendency to say ‘those people are racist’, which is just outrageous, absolutely outrageous,” he said. “Fear is a valid emotion at a time of such colossal crisis. This is one of the greatest movements of people in human history. Just enormous. And to be anxious about that is very reasonable.
He said that in fragile communities particularly… there is a genuine fear: what happens about housing? What happens about jobs? What happens about access to health services?”
He added, that “fear is justified, I wouldn’t want to criticise that for a moment, but so is hope wholly justified, because we have the capacity. We’re those kind of people, we always have been. But it needs the organisation, it needs the macro and it needs to happen at a European level.”
