It doesn’t take fate, these days, to end up in the company of people who take pride in calling a spade a spade. A minute into their rant, though, it becomes apparent that anything they can wave their arms at is a spade: shovels, trowels, rakes, even the elephant in the room.
Especially the elephant in the room: immigration. It is their ace of spades.
Whether it’s insisting that all immigrants who end up here by boat should be deemed illegal or thumping on about how they’re taking jobs the Maltese can d0, or pronouncing that integration is impossible... it’s all done in the name of calling a spade a spade.
The problem is that none of those claims are true. We owe it to ourselves to get the facts straight. The prime minister has begun to broach the subject of integration. The European Parliament election campaign will soon heat up. If we continue to get the facts wrong, it will become increasingly more difficult to get a complex policy issue right.
First, are the African boat people illegal or irregular immigrants? Is the Labour MEP candidate, Mario Farrugia Borg, correct to say that ‘irregular’ is just a piece of soft-soaping political correctness?
No, he’s wrong. ‘Irregular’ is the legally correct term. ‘Illegal’ is legal nonsense.
Farrugia Borg and others base their argument on the idea that the boat people enter Malta illegally. But they don’t.
To begin with, in practice most African immigrants end up in Malta because they’re rescued from drowning by our armed forces. They’re actually brought to land by the Maltese authorities, who can hardly be accused that in doing so they broke the law.
Entering Maltese waters unannounced is not illegal, either. International law grants the right of passage. It’s a law that the Maltese authorities have often relied on when letting a seaworthy boat of migrants pass through Maltese waters on its way to Italy. If entering Maltese waters were illegal, the authorities would be obliged to arrest them.
International law also gives migrants the right to smuggle themselves into a country – if they qualify for asylum and humanitarian protection. In that case, sneaking in is irregular but legal.
The only illegal immigrants, therefore, are those who do not have a right to asylum or humanitarian protection. Some of the boat people (a small minority, in our case) are indeed illegal. But we can only know if they are after processing their applications.
Why the fuss about a single word: ‘illegal’? Because the spade experts insist on it. Their use of the word is insidious. It suggests we owe the migrants nothing – whereas we owe them what others would owe us if Malta had a political disaster.
And let’s not forget that it’s difficult for us to have our national interests represented well by people who cannot even sum up the situation properly with their international counterparts.
If immigrants are illegal, then we need not, and should not, host any of them. If, however, they have rights, then it’s a different situation. Then we need to begin to recognise, officially, that some immigrants are here to stay. Permanently.
Burden sharing is not burden riddance. Sharing something means keeping some of it. We cannot begin to discuss sharing without having an official position on how many immigrants – the ballpark figure – we can cater for.
Our sense of what we’re capable of doing, however, is distorted by other pieces of spade-calling.
Immigrants are stealing Maltese jobs, right? In fact, the figures show the construction industry couldn’t function without them, in the same way that the hospitality industry cannot function without workers from other EU states and beyond.
The only illegal immigrants are those who do not have a right to asylum or humanitarian protection
In their respective sectors, they are actually keeping wages down. If wages had to rise to attract Maltese to do the work, then the rise in costs would be passed on to us. Hello, inflation.
Officially, there are about 21,000 non-Maltese in the labour force; some 11,500 are from non-EU states. With those numbers, we cannot speak of migrants stealing jobs. If two pillars of our economy cannot run without them, then they’re not thieves lurking on the sidelines; they’re fully integrated in the labour market. Far from them stealing from us, they are contributing to our quality of life.
The obsession with Africans stealing Maltese jobs isn’t eagle-eyed patriotism. It’s blindness to what’s happening around us. The two largest groups of non-EU workers are not African but Filipino and Chinese. If you hadn’t quite noticed that, then perhaps that says something about our ability to manage social integration reasonably well.
We hear about the integration problems in the south of Malta, especially Marsa and Birżebbuġa. There are real difficulties that need addressing there. But, to understand them properly, we should compare the south with the north.
Places like Qawra and St Paul’s Bay are low-rent areas that attract many migrants, too. How many? Consider this: the primary school in St Paul’s Bay, which caters for several surrounding areas, has 38 nationalities represented in it.
Yes, let it ring: 38 nationalities between 900 pupils. From Bulgarians and Lithuanians to Filipinos and Moroccans; from Venezuela to Nigeria and Burkina Faso.
Is it taxing for the administration and teachers? Yes, of course.
Is it a mess? No.
It does take the dedication of the school head and her staff. It also needs more special human resources from the Education Department. However, the situation is manageable.
The school offers another lesson, one directly relevant to the south. Low-rent areas also tend to attract Maltese families with financial and other difficulties. The school, to its detriment, used to have to deal with a disproportionate number. The problem has been mitigated since social housing began to be planned better, with distribution around Malta.
Better planning for the south would be as helpful as it has been for other problems in other areas. The problems of Birżebbuġa and Marsa do not stem from immigration, in itself, but from the disproportionate concentration of young single men. Elsewhere, like Balzan, the experience is different.
Better planning would mitigate problems, not conjure them away.
If immigration was only an unambiguous asset to the economy, we’d have our fellow Europeans begging to take immigrants off our hands.
There’s also no doubt that some of the international rules and European standards governing migrants were not devised with stressed Mediterranean economies in mind.
But making headway on the European front begins with acknowledging the need to make long-term plans. Those plans need to build on recognition not just of the problems but also of our real achievements in labour and social integration.
The worst thing we can do, for our own self-interest, is to continue to peddle nonsense in spades.
ranierfsadni@europe.com