The Beehive has a dilemma on its hands as it grapples with the growing pressure to increase the quota for refugees who are allowed into this country.

As they gather in the Beehive's tenth floor Cabinet room today, they'll look at the numbers, and how increasing the intake from 750 a year will affect the services that we give to the dispossessed when they come here every year.

The world reacted with shock when they saw the photograph of the toddler, dressed like any western kid, lying face down drowned and washed up on a Turkish tourist beach. It'll become the iconic photograph of this crisis, just like the badly burnt nine year old girl running along a road in Vietnam after a napalm attack on her village.

And let's hope it has the same result. The Vietnam image was credited with hastening the end to that pointless war.

But if they decide on an increase to the quota, and stick to the the United Nations formula, then they'll have no control over where the refugees come from.

The expectation in this country from the deafening chorus, urging the opening of the immigration gates, is that we'll be extending a humanitarian hand to the suffering Syrians. But an increase in the quota could see refugees coming from any one of a number of countries, from Indonesia, Somalia, the Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan, Serbia, or the Ukraine.

Are Syrian refugees any more deserving than those fleeing in fear of their lives from any one of more than 30 countries? Those people are desperate to get away from their countries. Others are in camps awaiting resettlement, like the several hundred languishing on Nauru after their boats were turned away from Australia.

That's the dilemma facing those gathered around the Cabinet table today.

But they could, as Helen Clark did with several hundred Afghans on the stricken Tampa off the coast of Australia, target a specific, desperate group. She ranked the action as one of her proudest moments as Prime Minister.

And her predecessor Jenny Shipley allowed several hundred, fleeing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, to come here to settle, but with a proviso they would be assisted to return to their country at a later date once things had settled down.

So there are precedents and on this one John Key's considerable political capital isn't even at risk.