Editorial

Last Tuesday's mass breakout by illegal immigrants kept at the Safi Barracks detention centre and the record arrival of 266 illegal immigrants in one go on Wednesday, followed by other arrivals throughout the week, focused attention more than ever before on the illegal immigration problem.

Though the violence of the breakout must be roundly condemned, the prolonged detention must have exacerbated the feelings of the illegal immigrants, whose 'crime' is to try to enter, albeit by illegal means, developed countries in the hope of escaping from the poverty and despair to which they have been condemned. The criminals are those who exploit their despair by charging them huge sums to put them on rickety boats and abandon them to their fate.

Certainly, waits of up to ten months for an interview regarding illegal immigrants' application for humanitarian or refugee status, can be very exasperating, especially if the application is refused and the detainees have to spend another six months awaiting release.

Apart from the very obvious solution of speeding up application procedures, surely there are ways of keeping illegal immigrants usefully occupied while in detention. When despair is coupled with boredom, as in their case, the result is could be a highly volatile combination.

Surely those in detention could be employed in mundane but necessary tasks, as we have suggested a number of times, like tidying up roads and thoroughfares, or in maintenance of public areas such as gardens, for which they would be given an allowance which they could spend on personal needs. They could also be given instruction in English and arithmetic by members of voluntary groups.

The degree of despair which animates African illegal immigrants is evident in the daily crossings from North Africa to the Italian islands of Sicily and Lampedusa, and of course to Malta, no matter what their physical condition is - witness the woman who gave birth on a Maltese patrol boat a few days ago, or, worse, the scores of drownings reported (many more go unreported) in the attempts to reach the land of hope.

It is quite obvious that this problem is immensely larger than Malta can ever cope with. Rock star and African aid campaigner Bob Geldof, who is not noted for minding his language, bluntly described the two million euros allocated by the EU's border agency to sea patrols around Malta as "a joke". Addressing a business breakfast last Wednesday, he impressed his audience by his insight into the problems of Africa and even more by his forthright accusations to the European Union of failing to understand the enormity of the immigration problem, calling on the EU not to leave Malta alone. There is no alternative to facing the problem all together, he insisted.

Geldof made an excellent case for helping Africa develop through trade and development, since this is the only long-term solution to the immigration problem. Piecemeal approaches and stop-gap solutions will turn out to be more expensive for the developed world than a wide-ranging agreement with Africa on trade, debt cancellation and massive doses of development and infrastructural aid.

An impassioned plea for more EU aid to Malta in dealing with illegal immigration was made by Foreign Minister Michael Frendo in his talks with the Hungarian Foreign Minister last Friday. In the last ten days, he said, almost 1,000 illegal immigrants had landed in Malta, which is equivalent to 50,000 landing in Spain. "Yet while Spain is getting assistance, Malta is being left in the lurch" by the EU, Dr Frendo complained.

Dr Frendo was right to insist that efforts to stop the criminal organisations making money out of the illegal immigrants' plight should not be limited to traffic from Morocco to Spain, but embrace that from Libya to Malta and Italy, and the whole Mediterranean.

But while efforts to stop the immigration flow must be kept up and strengthened, no time must be wasted on long-term solutions aimed at helping underdeveloped African states. This is a tall order, considering that in many cases African governments are corrupt, while some countries wallow in anarchy.

However, thanks to unrelenting pressure from Bob Geldof, fellow rock star Bono and like-minded visionaries, a start has been made by relieving some African states of their crushing debt burden. Now, development aid has to be taken up a notch or two. Unless this is done, the immigration problem is bound to get worse.