Malta does not need to become cosmopolitan by importing cheap, unskilled, third-country nationals to work in Malta.
Instead, our Maltese labour force should be better utilised by shedding off the thousands of unskilled workers employed politically, uneconomically and inefficiently during the last five years with government departments, parastatal corporations and quangos. Quangos are administrative bodies created outside the civil service with senior members appointed by the government.
These cushy, politically-employed workers should be put on the Jobsplus unemployment register, given unemployment benefits, trained to become skilled in the trades on demand at the moment and in the future, using EU funds and employed in the private sector where they will be efficiently and economically employed. But most importantly they should then be paid adequately, not with the minimum wage.
However, this is not wanted by those who employed them. Although the above is economic sense, politically it is not wanted as they mean votes during election time. Many of these workers do next to nothing except sign in and out daily.
The idea of the need to import unskilled, third country nationals is another ploy invented by the developers, contractors, businessmen and employers who while amassing millions of large profits, want to be able to employ cheap foreign labour from countries whose minimum wage is much lower than ours. Thus by coming here these foreign workers will earn more than in their own country, be employed on our minimum wage or in clandestine employment or join the masses working in precarious employment.
Third-country nationals will also have a negative impact on the lower end of the rental market by competing with minimum income Maltese citizens, not to mention other various bad effects of a further ethnically mixed population.
We welcome wholeheartedly those who are saved from drowning, but are we now going to import other cultures ourselves, considering the small size of and large population of Malta?
But what is important is that we appear as a grandiose country with skyscrapers and foreign workers. Big projects mean big money and big percentage cuts; see report of Commission Against Corruption presided over by a retired judge. Underemployment of Maltese workers does not matter because people’s taxes make good for political patronage!