HOW we control our borders, and whom we choose to give sanctuary to within those borders, is one of the most vexed questions of our day.

Yesterday came another raft of figures that appeared to show that the numbers of people seeking asylum is this country is continuing to fall. Good news, surely.

But the same figures also showed that the number of failed asylum seekers who are forcibly removed from the UK has fallen. This is bad news. The Conservatives condemned the Government, and the Government conceded that it needed to make ''more progress'' in this area. Progress can only mean a crackdown. More people's feet won't touch the ground as they are whisked away as their application is rejected.

This is black and white justice. If you can't prove that you have a right to be here, out you go.

It would be nice if life was always as simple and as clean cut as that. But it isn't.

This morning we tell of a failed asylum seeker who has been sheltering in Middleton St George but who is about to be returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo where four million people have been killed and which is too dangerous for British people to enter. Understandably, local people who have come to know Kissi Kilondo as a human being are campaigning for him to be allowed to stay.

Last month, we reported the horrific scenes in a Teesside primary school where the children of a failed asylum seeker were taken from the classroom and put into cages. A teacher put her fingers through the wires of the cage in an attempt to touch the terrified 11-year-old girl and calm her down.

Understandably, local people who had come to know the Pakistani family as humans rather than animals campaigned for them to be allowed to stay.

Earlier this year, we reported that 17,000 people in Stockton had signed a petition demanding that a failed Zimbabwean asylum seeker should not be returned home.

It is clear that we cannot house everyone who comes to our crowded isle. But the simplistic right-wing has hijacked the asylum debate. All the shouting is about inhuman statistics but, as people in the North-East are demonstrating, behind many of those statistics is a frightened, vulnerable human being who is more than a number.