TO READ that police are having to deal with migrants on an almost daily basis brings home the scale of the problem.

Though we have been reporting on cases at Newhaven Port in The Argus, today we reveal how the problems are far from restricted to our ports.

In fact the ports are a small part of it as all the migrants found in lorries and other vehicles each week could have made it in from anywhere.

We hear that people traffickers are targetting smaller ports like Newhaven but the desperate people being picked up by the police in Sussex will have come in from a range of places.

These people must be desperate to be hiding in cramped and dangerous places in lorries for hours.

Reading in The Argus today of migrants being found after a lone hand was seen waving out of a vehicle is a heartbreaking snapshot of the story of people willing to travel by whatever means, often coming from the war-torn countries of Iraq, Syria and Libya.

The police are doing what they have to do. We cannot have people, often children, travelling in these conditions.

People travelling to the UK through a process of paying opportunist trafficking gangs with some dying in the process will go down as a black mark in history.

And we need to make sure that as a nation we do not look back in disgrace at the way we have dealt with this problem.

While it may not be our fault that these people are so desperate to leave their homes that they are willing to come here in inflatable boats and inside lorries, we must continue to help those in need, like we did in the past.

Thankfully there are groups like the Brighton-based Hummingbird Project that are doing great work to help them. And we need to remember the human cost when our leaders decide on immigration policies.