Malta's illegal immigration predicament: what policy?

So José Manuel Barroso Has discovered that Malta's search and rescue area is the size of Great Britain. He promised the Maltese that the European Commission would "continue doing everything it could within its powers, even if this was a complex issue".

In what may come across as concrete measures, he mentioned starting the hoped-for Frontex patrols, possibly arresting employers of illegal immigrants, possible readmission agreements with countries of origin, trying to tackle the governance or other problems at source (during the forthcoming African Union summit on July 3), more discussions with Libya...

Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi on his part was reported to have said: "We need to see who will integrate those who are given official refugee or humanitarian status. That's the question everybody needs to answer, including the UNHCR."

On the day that this report appeared in The Times (June 16), the correspondence columns were as usual agog with the question of mass illegal immigration to this island over the last few years. Joe Borg of Xghajra suggested that illegals should all be given Maltese passports so that then they would simply move on to other EU member states.

Louis Parnis of Fgura noted that as the exodus was a post-colonial one it was the UN who should "go in" and solve it. John Schembri of Zurrieq observed that illegals were mostly Muslim, uneducated men who were hoping to live a better life in Europe:

"Being good is humane and Christian; being too good is downright naïve and stupid." So where does that leave us?

As this is likely to be a main electoral issue next year, it may be worth clearing up some confused impressions and reconsidering policy options.

First of all, statistics prove eloquently that the vast majority of illegal immigrants-turned-asylum seekers in Malta, however pathetic their plight may be or seem, do not begin to qualify as Convention refugees at all.

Privileged access to documentary evidence would show them to be quite a mixed bag, not all of them exactly "tfal tal-missjoni", with at least three-fourths of the overall total of those asylum applicants slotting more or less into the "economic migrant" and/or "political instability" bracket.

The percentage of bona fide refugees is relatively small. I personally believe that Malta could integrate these and that several of them could even be, or indeed are, social assets. In any case such refugees deserve every protection, which they are generally getting.

I therefore disagree with the lumping of refugees together with "humanitarian cases", as so many others, including the local media, tend to do for diverse motives.

In practically all cases, some form or other of humanitarian protection is normally offered to asylum applicants because they are not refugees (in any international law sense, that is). Such status, which may have long-lasting implications for the Maltese, is generally given out of deference to non-mandatory UNHCR recommendations, as to which countries it would currently be dangerous to send back certain asylum seekers.

Such recommendations may be too blanket and static but also helpful guidelines since you would not want to send anyone back to a veritable inferno, even when he or she may not be personally threatened.

Hence the grant of "humanitarian protection" to illegal arrivals claiming such a UNHCR-"sponsored" nationality and/or provenance, although practically none of them come to Malta directly but only after transiting, sojourning or living in other usually African and/or Arab countries.

In Malta's case, most of these emanate from the one-time Italian Empire in East Africa, and arrive in Malta from the former Italian colony of Libya, usually after having lived and worked there for a time, sometimes for years.

Others come from further afield, including potentially wealthy states, such as Nigeria, or indeed 'safe' ones, such as Ghana, ex-British colonies. Still others come from the one-time French Empire, such as Côte d'Ivoire or Algeria, that particularly murderous exponent of French colonialism.

Many others, such as Turks, for example, come on tourist visas on the direct Air Malta flight routes, then apply for asylum when their visas expire, and then, often with the help of some well-wishing NGO, they appeal against their rejection in first instance, and then end up staying in Malta regardless.

In the last resort, when they have money, they may institute constitutional court proceedings, thereby further delaying or assuring their stay on the island. The police (and in the latter cases the Attorney General's Office) would possess all the relevant information.

Maltese peculiarities

It would be nice if EU member states, just possibly with UNHCR's prodding (for what that's worth, given their own quota arrangements), would willingly start sharing out among themselves the "humanitarian cases" currently cared for by Malta (Somalis, Eritreans, Ethiopians, now also Iraqis, to which we may soon be adding anti-Hamas Palestinians, etc).

Whether such a policy of solidarity would solve problems at the frontier or not is a moot point - in some respects it would; in some others it might not, the assumption being first of all that some such solidarity really existed outside of the political rhetoric.

It would be still better if EU member states would share in search and rescue, and readily apportion saved souls on a per capita basis, but Malta's courageous proposal in this regard apparently has already been dismissed as "simplistic" by the deputy director of Frontex.

One factor peculiar to Malta, as things stand, is that most asylum seekers, however much they may have been rejected as 'refugees' at all stages of the adjudication process, with the reasons for rejection fairly and squarely stated in the process and known to the authorities, end up being somehow assisted with free or subsidised board and lodging or indeed also with regular pocket money, often enough even when they may have jobs (but not necessarily legal ones).

As Mr Barroso observed, it is a complex problem; whatever any pundit may say, the Maltese input, military, logistical and humanitarian, has been totally disproportionate to Malta's size and resources. The more so when there is neither physical nor social space here, or so many ready jobs on the employment market.

But what would the alternative to helping all such failed refugee applicants be, in the absence of gainful employment? Encouraging them to become destitute, pick pockets, prostitutes, drug pushers or to contract (more) marriages of convenience with young Maltese women? But then again, what about job-seekers who are tax-paying Maltese citizens?

Before answering this question, please pause to think about it. Because another factor peculiar to Malta is this: hardly any of the thousands of failed refugee status applicants, even after having served 18 months of detention, are being repatriated, or resettled in third countries.

In other words, even as the boatloads of lost passport holders disembark, and the expired tourist visas mount, there is not much of a systematic repatriation or resettlement of failed applicants; not even of those with criminal backgrounds; nor of those who come from so-called safe countries, in some cases actually EU accession and/or applicant states.

I do not know the full answer to this one. When a couple of hundred Eritreans, most of whom had not even wanted to apply for refugee status in Malta, had been sent back at considerable cost to the Maltese Exchequer, at a time when UNHCR was conducting some kind of a voluntary repatriation to Eritrea just before their own policy changed subsequently, all hell had broken lose - Jesuits, Franciscans, Amnesty International, UNHCR itself, readily repeated and propagated allegations, worldwide, that some had been tortured or killed on arrival, although the testimony of Air Malta cabin crew who had accompanied them to the terminal did not tally, so far as that went.

An allegation by the leading Eritrean publicist of that campaign, who had ably made his way to London, that Malta's Commissioner of Refugees had told him that he would not accept him as a refugee because too many were arriving, was undoubtedly false; and the more so when considering that his very Office had one of the very highest rates in the world of granting some form of protection to 'its' asylum applicants.

On the whole, with the exception of returnees to some neighbouring countries who are diplomatically represented and co-operative with regard to their nationals, such as Egypt, so far as I can recall that was the first and last substantial repatriation that the Maltese government attempted since the flood-gates burst in 2002.

More recently some 17 Nigerian 'rejected cases' were repatriated in a joint EU exercise with Germany, which means that organisational and financial costs at least would have been shared or skirted.

One question to be asked, therefore, perhaps to Mr Barroso, or to ourselves, is this: should a policy of repatriation, to at least reasonably safe countries of origin, of twice rejected applicants, not be actively pursued? The EU cannot give Malta land, of which Malta has precious little (witness the booming skyscraper mania).

Clearly it cannot give Malta a tangible solidarity (burden-shifting not burden-sharing rather, as Minister Tonio Borg put it, using the all too familiar jargon). But perhaps, in the not too distant future, it could offer Malta some help in this "return home" direction, at least for an identifiable category of failed applicants, if that were a government priority or need.

Embassies are often not present here, and not so co-operative even when they are; besides it is expensive to charter flights, police them and whatnot. In the absence of such a policy or means, one wonders whether there is not perhaps a local market pull factor at play after all.

The Dublin disgrace

But there is a third factor, arguably the most crucial one of all, which puts the EU and its bigwigs to shame in a big way. That is the so-called Dublin Convention, signed before Malta's entry, which in spite of some touches here and there essentially still requires the country where asylum-seekers first land to assume responsibility for them indefinitely.

This is supposedly to avoid 'asylum shopping', but believe me there is very little of that further to the north, in the Baltic states for instance. Sweden is known to have repeatedly returned to Malta asylum-seekers who tried making it there, even when some of these allegedly had relatives. The same for Ireland, I am told.

The wrangles with Italy and Spain are well known. Two or three EU member states have kindly offered to take handfuls. The US has been somewhat more generous, but ironically this too can be risky as the last thing Malta wants is to appear as a magnet or a conduit, more than it already does if only considering the increasing satellite telephone link-ups clearly existing between persons "resident" in Malta and some of the arriving boatloads from sub-Saharan Africa via the Libya traffic route.

The US Department of State should be alerted to this 'convention' before it continues rubbishing Malta as the Mediterranean's human trafficking centre (sic).

Unless the Dublin Convention is scrapped or drastically revised, and asylum seekers allowed voluntarily to move on to claim asylum in countries other than the smallest front-line island states of Malta and Cyprus, and particularly if the onrush of arrivals by sea and air continues unchecked in the EU's smallest, most densely-populated member state, itself a former colony until not so long ago, the Maltese nation may be faced with two stark choices in a few decades from now.

Orribile dictu, one is to cease to exist as such. The other is to leave the EU. In the former scenario, it would mean forfeiting an elaborately moulded and long fought for Maltese nationality, in favour of, at best, a new 'mix-and-match' reality.

In the latter scenario, Malta would revert to a special partnership of sorts without being bound hand and foot to obey all EU regulations, or at least to stay in only if allowed some opt-outs which correspond to its sui generis conditions, as these become more evident.

Frontex will not make much difference; nor will giving away Maltese passports to all and sundry; nor will asking the UN to sort out Africa, or the Middle East.

In an article I once published in a leading Australian journal about the plight of border crossers to Papua New Guinea from the 'genocidal' Indonesian-held Irian Jaya on the same island (one incomparably larger than Malta or Cyprus) I said this about the UN, which is composed of all genres of states:

"When the interests of states conflict, it tends to be impotent. When the interests of states converge, it tends to be redundant. Sometimes it may occupy the periphery to good advantage, but it can also be an accomplice to deeds that do not become it. More often than not, the UN clears the debris rather than removes the injury."

I also quoted Nehru, who said that the convictions of mankind ran hand in hand with their interests or class feelings, "and they take good care, when they have the power to do so, to make laws to protect their own interests".

Of course, Nehru added, "all this is done with every appearance of virtue and with every assurance that the good of mankind is the only motive at the back of the law... It is amazing how people deceive themselves, and others, when it is in their own interests to do so." ('The UN and the Refugees', Quadrant, vol. XXXII, no. 6, June 1988.)

Given Mr Barroso's assurances, 'solidarity' and 'pooling' principles, the EU should not come to deserve Conor Cruise O'Brien's definition of the UN as "merely the fading repository of the hopes of the well-meaning and weak-minded... Real power remains firmly in the hands of sovereign states, big and small.

"If even some powers, like Iraq and Iran, go to war there is nothing the United Nations can do about it. And if the super-powers go to war, the United Nations will simply disappear together with much of the planet it now vaguely represents."

Neither the UN nor especially the EU should disappear, not after 60 years of relative peace, prosperity and democracy in Europe. A question facing the 400,000-odd Maltese islanders on Europe's southern-most flank, even as Europeans, is whether or not they will just about 'disappear' or 'go under' half a century or a century from now, swamped or transformed by unrelenting inflows from a hugely larger world outside, far to its south and east. At present, it seems unthinkable, or at least remote.

As long ago as 1937 the Australian historian W.K. Hancock had asked of Malta if it was fair to expect even self-governing institutions "to root themselves in a territory exposed to such fierce gusts blowing from outside." (Party Politics in a Fortress Colony: The Maltese Experience, 1979, p. 210.)

Malta has had a brush with that too, and it's hardly over. I always argued nevertheless that contemporary history had proved Hancock's fears wrong: Malta pulled through as a small democratic nation-state; and it may well do so again, in spite of the current pressures, misinterpretations, scares and fears.

But, of course, as Fisher and Popper have held: "history depends, in part, on ourselves."

A former UNHCR resident representative in Africa and Asia, Professor Frendo has written several books on Malta's road from colonialism to nationhood and statehood. He has chaired the Refugee Appeals Board since its inception in 2001 and is a research partner in the EU's migration programme 'Challenge: Freedom and Security'.

© Henry Frendo, 2007