JACOB knows only too well the desperation that drives the thousands trying to enter Britain through the Channel Tunnel. The 30-year-old sitting in front of me made exactly the same journey.

He used to be a teacher but was imprisoned by the military in Southern Eritrea. Last year, he escaped and successfully made it to Scotland.

He has come to the National through the Scottish Refugee Council, a small charity which provides help and advice for some of Scotland’s estimated 20,000 refugees.

When you look at some of the newspaper coverage of the “crisis” in Calais, or hear David Cameron talking of swarms, you realise that those trying to cross into Britain have been stripped of their humanity.

They are no longer seen as individuals but as a homogeneous group of “migrants”, a “problem” that needs to be “solved”.

Jacob has had his humanity stripped away from him before. In Eritrea he was forgotten. He was jailed for filming and documenting people who had been beaten so severely by soldiers that they were broken and too damaged to walk. Most of them young, most of them female.

Then in September 2014, he had the chance to escape. Jacob had to choose between leaving the country where his wife and nine-year-old son lived, or dying beaten, abused and forgotten in an Eritrean jail. He chose to try to live.

Jacob travelled through Sudan, a country with hundreds of thousands of refugees living hand to mouth.

Then on to Libya where he stayed hidden in a room with 200 others with little sanitation or food or even a place to sleep.

“You are always expecting to move on” he says. “You’re always on the move, so you don’t think about it”.

Smugglers took him from Libya to

Sicily and eventually to Calais. With a decent grasp of English, Jacob thought his best chance would be to head to the UK.

“There were people who came before” he says of Calais, “and they had a tent and blankets we could use. We didn’t sleep though. You had to find a truck.

“When the trucks are on the motorway you have to get the chance to sneak on to them without anybody seeing you. If you get lucky then you will cross the security scans.”

For two weeks, Jacob tried to be lucky. He can’t tell me how many trucks he tried to sneak on to in that time. A few times he made it, only to be discovered by the drivers.

Eventually Jacob relied on smugglers. His family paid €500. That wasn’t a guarantee. It was just a better chance. A lot of money but his family pulled together. “They’re saving your life. You’re escaping torture and bad things. They’re choosing to save your life” he says.

The smugglers took him to Belgium where he was sneaked onto the back of a lorry taking bags of onions across the Channel.

There were three others on his truck. One was almost crushed to death.

At the other end, one of the four managed to get through canvas and signal to the car behind them. Someone in the car phoned the police and the truck was stopped. Jacob and the three others were taken away by immigration.

All four were processed and sent to Scotland. A year later and Jacob has now been granted asylum and the right to stay here.

It means he can go to college, and improve his English and try to get the right qualifications so he can go on and study nursing.

It also means he has a right to a family life. If he can get his wife and son out of Eritrea they can come and join him here.

In Scotland. Free from the risk of torture and imprisonment. That’s why he escaped. That’s why he crossed through the tunnel.