The old masters of dialectical thinking - China's Laozi pre-eminent among them - revelled in the intellectual gymnastics which demonstrated things turning into their opposites: compassion into cruelty, decency into depravity, legality into criminality and vice. Such thinking can sometimes locate a thread of intelligibility in cases of otherwise senseless tragedy, when the absurd sadness of events threatens to overwhelm and paralyse the mind.

Such a case occurred late last week, when 19 illegal Chinese immigrants, gathering shell-fish for a mere US$1.80 a day, drowned in the icy waters of a rising tide in north-west England's Morecombe Bay. Memories will perhaps be stirred of the even more terrible event in June of 2000, when 58 Chinese - also illegal immigrants - suffocated in the back of a truck at the English port of Dover.

Voicing what will surely be the conventional wisdom, the area's local parliamentary representative said: "The people that died last night have not just been victims of the treacherous conditions, they've also been victims of exploitation."

While "snake-head" people-smuggling gangs and ruthless employers of uncertified labour undoubtedly played an ignoble role in this miserable story, the ultimate causes cannot so easily be ascribed to a mixture of misfortune and viciousness. Misguided good intentions have also made their dialectical contribution, one that is arguably far more fundamental.

Human migration in pursuit of economic opportunity is a constant factor in modern history, being at least as old as industrialism itself, and probably far older. Yet the status of such migrants has undergone substantial changes, typically for the worse.

In the 19th century, much of the world enjoyed conditions of relatively unimpeded population flow, a situation mightily benefiting the economic life of advanced industrial nations, most especially the US, a society built upon immigration. Britain too was energized and enriched by flows of adventurous immigrants from throughout its empire and beyond. But the situation today is far more restrictive, casting many of the boldest or most desperate migrants into illegality with all its attendant dangers, such as the snake-head gangs and brutal exploitation that figured in the recent case.

The dialectical irony in all this is that it is the well-meaning social reforms beginning in late 19th century Germany, leading to the modern welfare state, which have done most to destroy the prospects of migrants. Those eager to seek their fortune in a new land through hard work and entrepreneurial initiative increasingly found themselves portrayed as "parasites" or "scroungers" seeking access to the cornucopia of unearned state benefits available to the citizens of rich countries.

Within half a century Bismark's welfare state had become a xenophobic, militaristic and proto-fascist monster on its way to genocide. Thus do bleeding hearts reverse themselves into bleeding bodies. Laozi would surely have smiled grimly.

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