I’m a firm believer that no one can ever take an iota of credit for having been born in Malta, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.

Nobody can pat themselves on the back for having had the random and haphazard good fortune of having been born on a peaceful sunny island, as opposed to a war-torn country seized by terror; it’s just pure and utter luck which only goes to prove that whilst all men are created equal, some are ‘blessed’ with luck whilst others are not.

It is essentially because of this fundamental belief that I was never against the Citizenship Investment Scheme, not even when people tried to make it sound like a quick sale of a couple thousand passports and, as the New York Times called it yesterday, ‘crass opportunism’. 

You see in my ideal world there are no geographical, political or economic borders, but whilst I welcome the Citizenship Scheme as one way of breaking down such borders, the scheme discriminates so blatantly in favour of the rich and, so horridly against the poor, that it makes me want to fight it anyway.

We have no choice but to live with man-made borders but if we had a spine to speak of, then we would not only agree to bend them open for the right price but also for the right cause; perhaps for a little something called empathy, or an obvious concept called natural justice and, who knows, perhaps even for our human duty to protect other fellow humans.

 Whilst I understand that there’s a myriad of international treaties and legal reasons that allow us not to grant citizenship to poor refugees even when they’ve been residing in Malta for years, I still, for the life of me, can’t understand why we don’t do it anyway.  It’s certainly not because we’re too small because we all know that had we to grant refugees citizenship (which comes with a Maltese passport and freedom of movement), the majority of refugees would immediately leave the island to go join family and friends in other EU countries.

If the government has the legal right to grant citizenship to whomever it deems suitable, then why not to refugees?  If the Government has the guts to ‘upset’ the EU the way it did for a couple thousand rich people, and a billion Euro, then why not also for refugees? And if this had to happen (in my dreams I know) would the opposition threaten to withdraw the refugees’ citizenships, once they’re back in power?