YOUR correspondent (Jan 4) asserts that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were only three.

This overlooks that they were part of a much larger movement of people, which is why there was “no room at the inn”. Nevertheless, some space was found for them.

The figure quoted from Migration Watch needs to be treated with much more critical care – this is not an objective study institution, but a tightly focussed and highly political pressure group.

We have moral obligations to those in need of refuge out of common humanity, aside from our own accumulated responsibility for more of the world’s ills than it is usual for us to acknowledge.

Other than refugees, where we cannot claim as much credit for our efforts as we like to think, those immigrants who have come to the UK have, in the vast majority of cases, come to fill vacancies, which presumably satisfies our anonymous (why anonymous??) correspondent’s desire that only those immigrants whom we can make use of should be let in.

Mr Drax has repeatedly in his columns emphasised that those wanting to live here should, among other things, accept as a test the Christian ethic (as distinct from the faith) on which our culture is nominally based.

Our anonymous correspondent would presumably leave Mary, Joseph, and the Infant to drown in the Mediterranean: test failed.

BARRY TEMPEST

Romulus Close, Dorchester

Want to respond to this letter? Email letters@dorsetecho.co.uk send them to: Have Your Say, Dorset Echo, Hampshire Road, Weymouth, DT4 9XD