In my weekly column, I made passing reference to the ludicrous expectations of various sectors of society, amongst which those of the crypto racists. This inspired a gentleman by the name of Peter Mifsud to send me quite a thoughtful email, whose permission I have to reproduce the salient bits of it. I’ve edited it only for reasons of space.
Mr Mifsud wrote “Lowellian desires can rot along with his racist bunch of...... (probably unprintable anyway), although it worries me how many people I meet who privately agree with what this man says. It’s disconcerting to think that racism and xenophobia are rising again.
No thrones on the seashore here, however your question [about what people expect] requires an answer, and one which we *have to* come up with. Am I the only one who feels there is a clock on this? How many more immigrants can we handle? 1000 more 5,000 more, 10,000 more? Then what? My point is that somewhere some kind of line will be drawn and I'd rather it were drawn by our Minister within some EU framework.
Presently, once some poor souls have landed on our shores we incarcerate them for 18 months after which they are moved to an open centre presumably with nothing to do but foment idleness and discontent. Idle hands are the devils tool and an idle mind is the devils workshop, so we should occupy both. The hands require work and our nation needs cleaning and rebuilding (as in rubble walls in fields, general public waste collection and cleaning, separation of waste for recycling, planting of trees etc.)
Can we not employ these idle people for these tasks? It seems a fair trade that if you come here illegally, we will clothe you, feed you, house you, keep you healthy and possibly even educate you (basic education) but the least you can do is not be a dead weight, but contribute and just to be clear here, I'm talking about mandatory work.”
Interjecting my own views here, while the idea isn’t probably one that will find favour with the comfy people sitting in their comfy offices pontificating on how badly Malta treats immigrants, while their own, more Northern countries, sit on their own hands, I have to say that – handled sensitively – it’s not necessarily a bad one.
Mr Mifsud continues: “If you're healthy and idle then you must work - you need to work. After all we locals all work and a good portion of our taxes is going to maintain these people.
I think we should make it abundantly clear to ALL illegal immigrants that they can never have a permanent home here and eventually they and their families must go back to their country and be part of the rebuilding process that restores their home.
I also think this would start getting the message filtering through (back to the relatives of these people) that Malta is definitely not the place to come to. I also think that if enough of these immigrants got this message, many less would be willing to make the water crossing which in turn would turn up the heat on the African coast as illegal immigrants would be unwilling to leave.
He then concludes “I know that my tuppence worth may be old hash and if so my apologies for wasting your time reading this but on the other hand maybe my ideas have some merit or start the ball rolling. I honestly believe that we must do our Christian duty towards anybody who comes to our shores and I personally harbour no ill feelings towards these people and cannot but wonder how bad a situation I would have to be in, to make me leave everything behind, grab my family and cast myself onto the water and hopefully the beneficence of others. However I think part of this duty is to help these people, and locking them up in a pseudo prison and then transferring them to a slum is not right nor is it help.”
He leaves the best bit to the very end: “Thanks for your regular column. I do so enjoy it :)”.
I don’t necessarily agree with all that, but there is a decent mix of robustness and compassion. Compare and contrast that with the views of a columnist in Saviour Balzan’s rant-rag, who was, admittedly writing in the form of a letter, so presumably not as a columnist.
Without a single word of disapprobation or comment, unlike when some contribution fails to comply with the strict standards, though hardly cast-iron consistent ones, imposed on a week-by-week (not to say page-by-page) basis in this fearless publication (excuse me while I fall about laughing)the gentleman concerned, whose blushes I will spare by not naming him, dedicated two full columns to “Immigration – Malta’s Biggest Problem”. It is unclear whether the following words of wisdom were written while the author was taking his ease in Gstaad or in his garden.
He starts out by saying that he “is not a racist”, which is usually quite a good indicator to the contrary. I’m not going to copy out whole chunks of the turgid prose that constitutes this contribution to the sum of human knowledge, but I’ll give you a few choice bits.
This analytical genius tells us, for instance that “Maltese families are frightened to venture out of their homes at night”, which is twaddle of the first water. Continuing in the same vein, we’re told that the “upkeep of this people is costing our Government millions of Euros”, though we’re not told whether this is per month, per year, per decade or per what. Millions sounds good, though, so why let accuracy get in the way of a good punch-line, is clearly this concerned tax-payer’s point of view.
In a sentence loaded with racist sentiment and barely concealed, and cheap, sarcasm, our hero continues: “At the same time, our North African neighbours are taking us to task for accidentally letting some immigrants drown.”
After a few more lines of ill-informed raving, amongst which is the astounding revelation that our MEPs are more interested in repatriating Russian and Ukrainian tourists (don’t ask me, I don’t know what he’s talking about either) the writer states, apparently seriously, that the last thing he “personally wants is to see our churches transformed into mosques as is happening in the U.K.”, adding a non sequitur of astounding proportions that “apparently some 800,000 Britons left England this year”. One has to assume that this because they couldn’t find a church that hadn’t been turned into a mosque.
In this exemplary Christian’s (he was the one who brought religion into it, not me) “humble opinion” rescuing immigrants “is not an option”. The options in this regard, apparently, are for the armed forces to meet these people on the high seas, give them food and water, and turn them back towards Libya (after having towed them to its territorial waters) or point them towards Sicily. At first glance, this appears not to be a completely impossible course of action to contemplate, but you, dear reader, are intelligent enough to spot the inherent stupidities.
In any case, this expert in humanitarian dealings goes on to write, and here I quote his final paragraphs in full: “Finally, our Government could announce that our boats will no longer race to rescue these immigrants. Then our armed forces will cut all communications and stay in port and let other nations look after this problem. After all most of these immigrants are not political refugees. They come to Malta uninvited with mobiles in their hands in order to seek a better life. Perhaps we should copy the Australians who absolutely do not allow any immigrants even to land on their shores. Are we too polite to do just that? We are being kinder to these people than to our countrymen, who are living below the poverty line and who need help”.
Further comment from me would be superfluous. I’ve no doubt that in the comments section, there will be a depressing proportion of what can only be described as racist raving, because that is the nature of the beast, but hey, the idea is to provoke debate.