Editorial

The parliamentary debate on illegal immigration was a useful and, on the whole, a cathartic contribution to a matter of enormous public concern. While the bi-partisan approach to this most challenging of national problems has been slightly dented, it cannot really be said that it has been broken.

The Leader of the Opposition's intervention was in the best traditions of an opposition's duty to hold the government in office to account. Joseph Muscat's 20-point action plan formed its crux.

The action plan is both good and original. But the regret must be that what was original is not very good. And what was good is not original. Dr Muscat agreed that the government's centre-piece policy on detention is the right one for Malta. He advocated that the conditions there should be greatly improved. There should be an admissions policy where the vulnerable, especially women and children, and ethnic groups were kept separated. There should be courses for those held in detention to prepare them for life in the community and to keep them gainfully occupied. He stressed the need for greater security and discipline. He drew attention to the imperative to have more doctors to relieve the need for migrants to go to clinics and to prevent "queue-jumping" in the hospital.

All these are worthy proposals on which the government can rightly be criticised. For its part, the government can claim that it is already trying to do them. The fact is that it has lamentably failed over the last seven years mainly because it has not been prepared to invest in the human, financial and infrastructure resources (especially the need for more closed and open accommodation) to do so. The political will has been lacking.

Dr Muscat was on more slippery ground when he attempted to move beyond the purely organisational shortcomings to the concrete steps he would take to deal with the source of this intractable problem: an unstoppable influx of illegal immigrants from Africa, together with the EU's apparent unwillingness to help. Here, Dr Muscat allowed the temptation to play to the populist gallery to get in the way of reality and common sense.

Of course, he was right to point towards the invidiousness of the Dublin II Convention, the inadequacy of the asylum pact voluntary readmission agreement and the woeful lack of burden-sharing support from EU countries. But he was wrong - and naïve - to suppose that Malta could overcome these obstacles by a unilateral declaration of "how many migrants it would host" and a threat to abrogate its membership of the asylum pact, suspend international agreements or "use its veto where unanimity was needed in the EU" if that self-declared number was breached.

These are policies that have failed this country in the past. Like the nuclear option, application of the veto to disrupt EU business to get our way is a possibility the repercussions of which would be likely to have severe unintended consequences for Malta. What is desperately needed is for Malta to do better that which it is not doing now: primarily a far more energetic and forceful diplomatic effort to revise Dublin II, to repatriate those asylum seekers who have been rejected and to persuade EU countries to implement resettlement agreements. These take hard graft which the Minister for Foreign Affairs must now start to apply.