We know a thing or two about refugees. Often our capacity to take in people who seek shelter on our island has been stressed beyond all limits.

Yet the Malta experience is not unique. The Greek island of Lesvos, six times this island’s size but with just 85.000 inhabitants, has seen 200,000 refugees swimming and rowing to their shores this summer.

The beaches of Lesvos are littered with thousands of life jackets, paddles and collapsed inflatable boats. “Experience the real Greece”, boasts the Lesvos tourist board on its website, “unaffected by mass tourism.” A claim miserably outdated by tent-cities, lack of sanitation, and mushrooming litter.

Neither Malta nor Greece is the ultimate destination. The tens of thousands of people we see walking over country lanes and railway tracks every day, winding their way through Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia and Austria, are all heading towards Germany. Frontex, the EU border agency, estimates that by Christmas a million people will have reached it. Supported by many local volunteers, police and military are trying to bring this unprecedented situation under control.

The refugees hail mostly from countries that we, the West, have destabilised by military intervention: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and of course, Syria. We looked on when Middle Eastern countries were weighed down by mind-boggling numbers of refugees: six million Syrians running for shelter are bunkered down in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey alone.

We foolishly hoped that the problems will stay away and some more bombing might reverse the process – David Cameron suggested we target the smuggler’s boats and everybody hoped that bombing the Assad regime might bring some sparkling new forms of democracy.

Europe’s political leaders tussle for solutions, challenged beyond their capacity. Twenty-six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, new fences are being built: in Hungary, Slovenia, and now even Austria; millions of asylum seekers are waved through in the hope that none of them stays; and, with the usual reflexes of political self-preservation, politicians exchange blame and accusations. Demagogues from the right have a field day, promising their aggrieved electorate that they will keep foreigners out.

When the European Council meets this week for the Valletta Summit at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, the irony will not be lost on those who know that in the 16th century the building was a hospice for emigrants. African cooperation will be discussed, the ‘root causes’ of migration, ‘direct camp help’, the problem of trafficking and such. These are certainly worthy topics for a broad discussion, but in the meantime we are running out of time.

Nobody in his or her right senses will leave family, friends, her own cultural embedding behind for an unknown future without having a really good reason. Escaping death is a good one, and we should all be utterly supportive. Yet those lovely Bavarian villages with their shingle-roofed farmhouses and quaint baroque spires will not be thrilled when woken up by a Syrian muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Our support must be extended with social cohesion in mind.

There is, of course a valid economic argument for accepting all these immigrants. All European countries, to various degrees, have a shrinking population, with dire consequences in the not too distant future: we will all, sooner or later, have too many pensioners to care for.

As long as there is war and hunger, refugees will keep coming. Whether we like it or not

This problem is acute for Germany, where working-age pension-contributors will shrink drastically over the next decades. The key word is ‘work’. Nobody will gain from mass immigration if all these worthy immigrants – many of whom are skilled workers who speak English better than most Europeans – cannot adapt to their local environment and be put to good use.

Neither social peace nor the future viability of our pensions stand to gain by the virtual incarceration of those we feed, clothe and keep locked away in asylum centers. The refugees themselves strive for meaningful and prosperous living conditions, yet too rigid work regulations will prevent this.

We ought to be realistic as well as humanitarian. New arrivals have to be evenly distributed over countries and communities. It is critical that local communities are not overwhelmed and alienated, critical that voluntary ghettos are avoided. Three thousand Eritreans in a Finnish community of 300 reindeer farmers will not do much for cultural understanding and future-building.

And we need to think and act radically: Massive public employment ought to be put in place to give work to locals and new arrivals alike and demonstrate that immigrants can make a positive contribution. We need large, public-work programmes in infrastructure, care homes, tourism, road repair and building, cleaning services, health care and home building.

Where the public hand is the paying employer, for at least a few years all fetters of employment should be suspended, and that includes taxes, minimum salaries, working time regulations, apprenticeship rules, age and gender limits. Let us remember under what conditions Europe had to be rebuilt after World War II.

I once had a leaking terrace. No matter how much I tried to plaster the cracks, plug the holes, or heap up sand bags, as long as the water was there, it seeped through. As long as there is war and hunger, refugees will keep coming. Whether we like it or not. We therefore have to make the best of it.

We have done this before. After the war, after the 1956 Hungarian uprising and after the Prague Spring in 1968. We are 500 million Europeans. We can do it again. We can.

Andreas Weitzer is a journalist based in Malta who writes for Condé Nast and other leading publications.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.