Around 180 immigrants living at the Marsa and Ħal Far open centres have been given their marching orders and asked to vacate the centre to make way for others leaving the detention camps.
Many of the migrants have been there for nearly seven years, settling in their rooms and taking advantage of free lodging, food, water and electricity. This is going against the spirit of setting up open centres in the first place, a government spokesman explained.
Open centres were originally meant to serve as a half-way house between detention camps, where migrants are detained until their asylum application is processed and considered, and integrated with the rest of society.
However, although most of the migrants have a stable job and a steady income, they have not sought to move out of the open centre to make space for others.
A few months ago, the group of around 180 migrants were given a verbal warning that they had to move out of the open centre.
Two weeks ago, the migrants received the request in writing and were given until Tuesday to move out. Notwithstanding this, the government is not intending to show them the door when the deadline is up. The idea is to help migrants out of a job to find employment and find alternative accommodation.
The majority of the migrants are resisting the move and are insisting they should be allowed to continue living at the open centre, where they have made friends and live as a community with other migrants.
Alex Tortell, the director of the Agency for the Welfare of Asylum Seekers (AWAS), told The Sunday Times that the group of 180 who were asked to leave was staggered and not all of them had to leave this week.
He said some of them had already left the open centres, adding that the agency found cooperation from those who were asked to leave.
Mr Tortell explained that the normal procedure is was that migrants spend around a year living at the open centres and were then expected to “move on with their lives”.
This is not the first group of migrants who were told to leave the centre. This, he said, was “normal procedure” in “any residential set-up” in Malta where people do not live there for the rest of their lives but are expected to move on.
Since May, the agency set up an employment support office to help immigrants find employment although “strictly speaking it’s not the agency’s role”. Social workers and community workers help the migrants find a job.
But unfortunately, not many of them take up the offer of assistance, with most preferring to line the streets every morning in localities such as Marsa and Ħal Far, where the open centres are located, waiting for anyone passing by to offer them some form of work.
Migrants who are not working receive financial assistance of €65 every two weeks. To receive assistance, the migrants must be registered at an open centre and sign in three times a week.