Constitutional approach to immigration policies

The government and the opposition are locking horns over the European pact on immigration provisionally reached last week. The shouting, however, is drowning out two facts that deserve more attention.

One has to do specifically with Joseph Muscat's Labour Party. It is one thing for a political party to evaluate the objective facts as it sees fit. It is another for it to distort the facts.

Regrettably, this is what the MLP appears to be doing. It has referred to the number of immigrants covered by this pact as a small number. The meaning of small is elastic. But does it cover 56 per cent (and rising)? That is the percentage of immigrants, as of mid-September, who this year alone would be covered by the pact. Last year's figure is 64 per cent.

That percentage covers the applications processed for the status of refugee and humanitarian case (or "subsidiary"), not the total number of boat-people arrivals. But this year the number of applications processed has already reached 1,932. It is commensurate with the number of this year's arrivals.

On this point, Labour cannot argue that the facts are obliging it to speak up. The reverse is true: to justify its alarmist tone it has to stretch one of the key facts.

Ironically, the quantifiable contrast between the statistics and Labour's rhetoric has barely been noticed by the governing party's own media. In time, however, we may look back at this moment and see it as a turning point: when the moderate tone on immigration, so far largely preserved by the two major parties, was lost, because the self-proclaimed centre-left swerved to the right.

There is still time to turn back. Labour can walk its talk and push the government to formulate a holistic progressive policy on immigration.

But for this to happen, the second fact about last week's pact needs to be recognised and accepted. It is a pact for burden-sharing, not burden-ridding.

Malta can argue about what is fair for it to carry, but it does have to carry some responsibility. That means we need a holistic policy that addresses irregular immigration not only as crisis but also as routine. In other words, a policy that addresses the integration of immigrants in the long term.

There is no European model that Malta can straightforwardly follow. No European country has been successful in this area, although there are no outright failures, either. And with those immigrants coming from the former colonies, the major European countries could build on a shared language and formal culture. Even if there were complete success stories, Malta is necessarily different.

I would not, myself, place my faith in a liberal policy of integration, which emphasises the individual and the state at the cost of the civil associations that form the tissue of integration. And I am wary of any communitarian approach that could lapse into ghetto-ism.

But I believe our Constitution indicates the way forward - by which I mean both the principles that should guide us and the real issues we should debate. Its first article defines who we are and what we stand for. Our policies should be joined up to ensure that all our children are raised to feel included in those provisions.

For example, the first part of the article stipulates the territory covered by our republic. This is not just to delineate state sovereignty. It delineates popular sovereignty: the rest that is contained by the Constitution, its laws and values, should exclude no one.

What this means, among other things, is that our country should have no housing ghettos - whether of race or underclass. That principle, however, raises a political issue we should debate.

Immigrants, like other members of the underclass (say, ex-convicts), gravitate to areas where housing is cheap. That tends to create pools of social failure and reproduce it. Should the government intervene to create a social market for housing? Should there be centralised spatial planning of the distribution of immigrant households?

To take another example, the second part of the Constitution's first article defines us as a republic based on work. The idea is to dignify work: to do things together and for each other is to think together and for each other.

A Labour policy that simply instrumentalises immigrants economically is bound to fail. In robbing immigrants of their dignity, the rest of us will lose our own. The issues to debate do not just cover whether the minimum wage should be extended to immigrants but also whether any professions, including those of the forces of law and order, should be barred to children of immigrant background.

I believe this constitutional approach could inform even our policy on cultural integration. Most importantly, perhaps, it would delineate an approach that would involve not just the state but also civil society, in both the formulation and the implementation of the policy.

The second half of this article is an abbreviated version of a talk given at the concluding conference "Say EU... And Action" organised by the Fondazzjoni Temi Zammit and Meusac.

ranierfsadni@europe.com