There has been much talk these last weeks of clamping down on the exploitation of immigrant labour by 'unscrupulous' Maltese employers. As the rhetoric goes, this will serve to safeguard the rights of immigrants who, being 'humans like us' (you don't say), deserve equal pay and conditions.

This being a country where prigs and pulpits proliferate, I leave it to our many good men to comment on the morality of exploiting immigrants. What I am interested in, rather, are the dynamics of exploitation and the real effects of State intervention to stop it.

Take a hypothetical scenario. Joe, a plasterer, is looking to hire an assistant. Two chaps show up: Charlie, a Maltese, and Hassan, an immigrant. Joe's first reaction is to hire Charlie. He feels he would be able to trust him more, and that he would be jollier company on the job; Joe also senses a certain kinship with Charlie as a fellow countryman. (And please don't let's pretend that these feelings are incomprehensible, or 'racist' - after all, we're all brought up to think that there is something that makes us Maltese, and that nationality is there to be cherished.)

Hassan's services, however, come considerably cheaper than Charlie's, and in the end Joe decides that he could do with the extra profit. Besides, he knows that during a lean period, it would be easier to lay off Hassan than Charlie.

Hassan wouldn't have stood a chance against Charlie. He's black, Muslim, and doesn't speak Maltese very well. The thing that ultimately clinched it was that he thought it wiser to cut down on his pride and salary than to spend his days twiddling his thumbs and inventing Utopias. Above all, Hassan sensed that brute necessity doesn't always last forever.

The first migrants from India arrived in Malta 150-odd years ago. I actually have documents showing that they were exploited, not by Maltese but by their Indian employers (these migrants worked for Indian trading firms with branches all over the world). They stuck it out, however, and by the 1930s, most of them were well settled and could look back on exploitation as an aspect of their history. Today, 'Maltese-Indians' are very much a respected and thriving part of our population.

Likewise with Middle Eastern immigrants. When Syrian plasterers first made an appearance roughly 20 years ago, they had a reputation for doing the same job as Maltese workers for half the money. Nowadays, hiring a Syrian might save you a bob or two, but gets you nowhere near the rock-bottom bargains of old. That lowest rung has been occupied by African immigrants and a good number of Middle Easterners are well settled and earning a comfortable living. For them as well as the Indians, the current state of affairs would not have been possible without that initial period of adversity.

The one factor that makes all the difference is time. Migration is typically a long-term project of the time order of years and possibly decades. Migrants, especially those of the economic type who come from poorer countries, often show themselves to be remarkably resilient to short-term hardships.

This is not because they are ignorant or totally desperate, but because they think in terms of life, rather than immediate, chances. Besides, migration prospects are not necessarily defined in individual terms, but rather along the lines of family fortune - in the sense that migrants may be prepared to sacrifice short-term dividend in favour of the prospects of future generations.

There is nothing 'strange' about this, at any rate nothing stranger than Maltese parents working hard and investing in their children's future, rather than buying boats and rounds at the bar.

I recently did some research among immigrants in Malta for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), and I was impressed by how far-sighted and future-thinking many of them were. (So much for detention as a 'deterrent' - 18 months of hardship may well turn out to be a bitter pill worth swallowing, a whimsical cruelty rather than a rational policy.)

I am not saying that immigrants invariably graduate from sparse to green pastures. In some cases and for various reasons, severe disadvantage in the labour market may be passed on from generation to generation. The reasons usually include the intervention of a meddling 'righteous' State that forces them into dependency or restricts them, indirectly, to the outermost and most vulnerable fringes of informal labour. Which also eventually translates into increased polarisation of the labour market.

This is what will happen if government does indeed 'clamp down' on exploitation: migrants who are currrently quietly sticking it out with an eye on the future will be pushed into sectors which are almost implicitly informal and exploitative - piece rate agriculture, for example, or one-off jobs in shadowy construction projects. Then again, they might just not bother and fall back on the taxpayer.

So, who would want to stop Hassan from being exploited, and therefore to keep him out of work? Two types: First, well-meaning but misguided do-gooders - of whom, in a country where short skirts and the Internet are still solemnly moralised about, there is no shortage. These people quite honestly believe in fairness, but they cannot for one moment be practical and see that immigrants are exploited or jobless.

Second, Charlie and his champions, of course. They well understand that insisting on a level playing field will keep Hassan and a pay cheque nicely separated, but are too 'nice' to say so, preferring instead to go on about universal humanity and the children of God.

mafalzon@hotmail.com

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