In the light of mandatory detention and the way that Australia locks up, asylum seekers and refugees as the bearers of human rights, the insight of Emmanual Levinas makes sense: the core of the ethical relation is constituted by the welcoming of the other.
I knew that Levinas breaks with Heidegger's phenomenology by understanding the ethical relation to the Other, the face-to-face, as exceeding the language of ontology. Ethics transgresses the liberal centering on the self-relation and its various forms, and centres on the relation with the other.
This is a return to the lived experience of a primordial "face-to-face" or person-to-person encounter, whilst the primacy of the ethical relation provides a more adequate description of human relations in a community.
The penny drops.