When I look around me, I see faces with shades of colour never seen before on these islands. This seems to challenge my sense of security, and appears foreign in a land which for centuries was proud of being homogeneous, pure and white like the bread we ate.

I see people with different backgrounds and different religions, which may be perceived as a challenge to our long-held beliefs.

These people are poorer than I am, with a lower social status, working, if at all, in lowly occupations which none of us would dream of taking up. Nonetheless, some would consider them as a threat to Maltese workers’ employ­ment opportunities.

Even those employed to look after these people show a considerable alarm at possible contagion, and avoid contact with them, wearing gloves and masks to render less likely the possibility of undesirable organisms jumping across the sacrosanct space between them and us.

The idea of my daughter marrying someone who is so distinctly, and, let’s face it, so undesirably foreign, fills me with a certain degree of trepidation about their future in a land where tolerance of difference is in short supply.

On these bases alone, I have a very strong suspicion that I am a racist.

But then I console myself with the thought that racists are not a pure breed. There is a whole spectrum of racism.

At the mildest end of this spectrum there are those who are well aware of their basic bio-social feelings and do their utmost to overcome them. At its worst there are those who cannot tolerate the idea of sharing anything with anybody who has a different skin colour.

I keep hoping that my racism belongs to the first category, and that, while I am fully aware of my undesirable tendencies that spring from the dark underworld of my primitive unconscious, I believe that through a continuous mental effort I can overcome any inhibitions, when I see the human tragedy resulting in the process of irregular migration.

I contend that we are all basically racists, and that it takes a real effort to overcome racist tendencies. Moreover, I start with the premise that unless we know and understand ourselves, there is no chance of admitting that we are racists, still less of taking measures to control such feelings.

But I see very little evidence that there is a concerted effort on the part of the Government to ensure that the average citizen is made aware of both the human tragedy associated with this problem, as well as the need to approach it with a degree of compassion, the store of which is rapidly evaporating.

The idea of my daughter marrying someone foreign fills me with trepidation about their future in a land where tolerance of difference is in short supply

One of the best and most educational television programmes I have seen is the one prepared by the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS, Australia) called Go Back to Where You Came From.

In that programme, a group were taken to several of those countries where prospective migrants are held waiting their turn as card-carrying asylum seekers. For several days, they were treated in exactly the same way as prospective migrants.

The impact on both the participants as well as the viewers has to be seen to be believed. One person who was particularly against the whole process of migration before participating in this experiment actually ended up starting a process to adopt a small Ethiopian boy!

The Pope’s recent visit to Lampedusa, an island which, like Malta, is overflowing, suffocating almost, with irregular migrants, emphasises that Christians more than anybody else are expected to dig into their reserves and come up with an ethic of tolerance.

It also emphasises the truism that no island is ‘an island entire unto itself’. We cannot help being part of a bridge separating the relatively well-off from the misery overflowing from countries to the south of us.

We certainly cannot be ex­pected to carry the burden by ourselves, but it would certainly help if more effort is made to influence the mindset of a people, if only to help accept more stoically and sympathetically that which we cannot change.

Prof. Maurice Cauchi is president of the Maltese Community Council of Victoria, Australia, and author of several books on Maltese migration.

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