The No To Racism campaign has its critics, all claiming not to be racist, of course. Heaven forbid, it’s not race or skin colour that leads them to question the campaigners’ motives. It is just they are gimlet-eyed and see the dangers to Maltese welfare – to culture, the economy and the national interest.

On this view, African migration to Malta is best characterised as the coming of the four horsemen of the apocalypse – war, conquest, famine and death. Culture wars, social conquest, economic famine, national death. Nothing to do with race, you see?

But racism, however disguised, is there. To see why it is worth remembering to which world we belong to. Or rather, what world makes us what we are.

First, let’s take a look at the world as a whole. As you read this, and at any given moment of the rest of the day, like any other day, the number of airborne passengers above the United States is the equivalent of Malta’s population. The US is not a peculiar country but indicative of the constant movement in today’s world. There are one billion legal international arrivals per year – amounting to a sixth of the world’s population. Four million air passengers travel each day.

Not only is Malta no exception. These proportions are exacerbated. The number of tourists who arrive here per year is three times the size of our population. Travel and tourism make up some 10.3 per cent of global GDP but some 25 per cent of ours.

Our other high-earning industries also depend on the mobility of people. Information and communication technologies are the infrastructure of a mobile world. Our electronic gaming industry has flourished not just because of financial incentives but also because a foreign workforce – fluent in the necessary languages – has been attracted to live here.

One could go on but the point is clear. It would become sharper if the national strategy to make the country a regional centre of health and educational services is fulfilled. Such services cannot flourish without people from different societies and cultures mixing.

The critics, who complain about African legal residents in Malta, claim they are not racist but simply solicitous for the preservation of Maltese culture. But which culture do they have in mind? Mobility is at the very heart of Maltese culture (or rather, cultures). If they complained as consistently about cultural change that comes about – in documented ways – through tourism and other services, they might free themselves of the tinge of racism. But complaining only about Africans suggests a hate that dare not speak its name.

Nor is this a matter of that weasel term “cultural compatibility”. If people deserve legal protection, it is because they are coming from countries devastated by war or tyranny. Of course, they are not going to come from a political background similar to ours. But a political culture based on human rights and the rule of law, in whose name the racists purport to speak, stipulates that it is precisely such people that should be given protection.

At this point, the racist argument often shifts to economic emasculation and welfare burdens. Once again, the arguments are props for a conclusion reached on other grounds. If Africans are seen to be doing well, economically, they are criticised for doing so off our backs; if they don’t do well, then they are spongers. Either way, they are leeches.

Somehow, however, other legal residents, with a different skin colour, and working here, are not criticised. And the real welfare crunches facing us – to do with pension reform and social entitlements going into the red in a couple of years – are never addressed anything like as strenuously by the critics purporting to have them to hear.

The negative reactions to the anti-racism campaign tells us a lot about shamelessness of the racists. When not belittling the dangers faced by refugees and others the law finds deserving of protection, they turn on the anti-racism campaigners and accuse them of running a business; as though they, too, are traffickers profiteering off human tragedies.

There is an ugly face apparent in such equations. Is it really our mirror? Can it really speak on our behalf? It goes against our national interest to accept such arguments.

We ought to say no to racism to say yes to ourselves. We cannot treat anyone as less than human without losing some of our own humanity. We cannot reduce the scope of our nation’s participation in world affairs without belittling ourselves.

ranierfsadni@europe.com