Editorial

The fine summer weather brings with it not only high temperatures and lazy days at the beach (for those who can afford them), but also boatloads of illegal immigrants to our shores - three, four or more a week. In a 24-hour span yesterday alone we had 80 arrivals in three boatloads.

Actually, compared to the much tinier Italian island of Lampedusa, to our south - and thus much nearer to the Libyan coast - what we have been getting is a trickle. In the space of 24 hours last week, that island of 4,000 souls was overwhelmed by 800 illegal immigrants.

All those who made it to Lampedusa, Malta or the coast of Ragusa, in Sicily, should consider themselves lucky, however. Only yesterday we got to know that a boat carrying 27 souls, which managed to make telephone contact with both the Maltese and Italian authorities, was unaccounted for (although it is probably one of the boats which arrived yesterday), and the Christmas Day tragedy of 1996, in which something like 150 persons lost their lives trying to make it to Italy, is still fresh in our minds.

The need of tackling this ballooning illegal immigration problem at source grows more urgent by the hour. It was thus good to learn last week that the European Union and Libya, at the behest of Italy and Malta, had started technical talks to finalise an agreement on close co-operation in a bid to curb the immigration flow. For it is from Libya that most of the illegal immigrants headed for Italy (they only land in Malta by accident) leave on ramshackle boats. So it is the Libyan government which, strictly speaking, is responsible to ensure that these departures do not take place. More, it is responsible to round up the human traffickers and their agents which operate in the country and who must necessarily rely on a support network of informants, safe houses, boat-owners, and probably even corrupt officials.

Libya, with some justification, pleads that the sheer length of its coastline - 4,000 km - makes any serious patrolling and control practically impossible. This is why the EU is offering (as Italy has already done) to carry out joint air and sea patrols with the Libyan forces, and to press for repatriation agreements.

However, in whatever actions are taken, the asylum-seekers must be treated with the dignity and compassion they deserve. For theirs, by all accounts, is a tragic tale. Whatever circumstances they are fleeing from - political repression, war, ethnic cleansing or grinding poverty, mostly the latter - they must be pretty dire. Typically, asylum-seekers come from sub-Saharan Africa; they leave their country, put some money aside to undertake a perilous journey across the Sahara (during which a number of them die) to reach Libya, where they find a boat (after having handed over their entire savings) to undertake an even more perilous journey - by sea, this time - in the hope of reaching Italian territory.

Some of them land in Malta instead, where they are put in detention centres until their request for refugee status is decided. Thankfully, the time they have to spend in far from ideal conditions in detention here has been reduced, and the Maltese government points out that most requests for refugee status are upheld.

But the immigration phenomenon is having a profound effect on Maltese society: it is bringing out latent racist and xenophobic tendencies among a population renowned throughout history for its hospitality. One now hears racist and hate-filled sentiments in the asylum-seekers' regards which one never heard, say, a couple of decades ago.

The results of the national conference on irregular immigration held earlier this year are not yet obvious, but a clear policy is called for, to include, for example, a more liberal employment policy by putting these people to work and by helping them integrate better and facilitating their legal migration to other countries.

The priority, however, is to tackle illegal immigration at source - in the short term by pressing the Libyan government to exercise greater control on movements in and out of its territory. This can be done with the help of the EU. In the long term, Europe and the West have to ensure that the conditions leading to illegal immigration cease to exist in the first place: by encouraging the transfer of technological know-how to African nations, helping to build their infrastructure, giving their products easier access to Western markets, and investing heavily in health, sanitation, education and job-creation. The British government's initiative to forgive African debt, if adopted by the G8 summit, should ease the burden on sub-Saharan countries and free resources which could then be used to improve their citizens' lot.

Only then can we hope to stanch illegal immigration.