I'm surprised that Mr Maurice Mizzi, writing in The Times on Tuesday from his estate in Bidnija, didn't start his letter with the time-honoured disclaimer "I'm not a racist but...". His use, throughout his letter, of charged and emotive language, to say nothing of the sentiments expressed, should have prompted him to make it clear that he is not a racist, lest anyone forms an opposite impression.

I bow to no man in my admiration for Mr Mizzi as a horticulturalist and an entrepreneur. In both these activities, he is a man of substance, one who should be listened to and given credence. That, however, is as far as it goes and his views on "the immigration situation" should not, to my mind, take on aspects of validity by association with the validity of his business and gardening acumen.

Mr Mizzi writes that he thinks there are people "who think that we have the immigrant situation under control", betraying immediately a susceptibility to demarcating the matter into an "us" (presumably native Maltese) and "them" (presumably dark-skinned immigrants, since no-one has ever whined about the light skinned or blonde variants) He then tacks on the emotive phrase "under control", showing a perhaps sub-conscious desire to ensure that immigrants are properly penned, corralled and controlled.

He goes on, becoming more overt, consciously or not, giving expression to the disappointment of those who have "long ago given up hope of ever seeing the back of these 9,000 illegal immigrants", fretting that these human beings (I'm just reminding everyone, incidentally, that these are human beings we're talking about) will become "a large-enough force to obtain more and more rights for their community to the detriment of us Maltese".

This latter sentence is demonstrative of Mr Mizzi, and those of his ilk's, inherent ghetto mentality. Leaving aside the basic ludicrousness of the concept that just because there are or might eventually be a relatively large number of former immigrants forming part of Maltese society, they will "bully the government", what detriment to "us Maltese" will there be if they are given basic rights?

Does Mr Mizzi imagine, say, that an Eritrean or a Somali woman who is given - for instance - the "right" to decent medical treatment, will deprive a Maltese woman of the same thing?

Would, according to Mr Mizzi, the grant of human rights to former immigrants result in a direct diminution of the same rights in favour of "us Maltese"?

What, pray, is he talking about? He fails to make it clear, unsurprisingly, because he proceeds from an unacceptable premise: that there is a finite pool of rights and giving some to one group of people diminishes the availability of such rights to other groups. Pogroms have been started for similar reasons, forgive me for pointing out.

Mr Mizzi goes on to pronounce himself on the matter of the religion to which, according to him, "most of these immigrants" belong, characterising it as "aggressive religion". He doesn't mention Islam by name, but the code -words are there, and he goes on to tell us that while he "personally [does] not have a problem living with people of a different religion to [his]" he confesses to "a slight aversion to eventually being told what to do by people who were not born in our islands".

Do you spot the flaws in the gentleman's logic? He doesn't like being told what to do by people of a different religion because the people who espouse it were not born in Malta. My apologies if this sounds like nonsense, but I didn't write it, he did.

Incidentally, I don't like being told what to do by anyone either, of whatever religion, if they try to impose their views on me without objective, democratic justification, and I'm sure that like me, Mr Mizzi is perfectly capable of ignoring the strictures of inconvenient moralities that emanate from fundamentalism, be it Christian or Muslim or Jedi or whatever.

So what is he worrying about?

Mr Mizzi goes on to propose a solution to "solve this problem" and, in the manner of entrepreneurs everywhere, he reduces it to cash. He proposes paying immigrants to return to their country, where "these people could start a small business".

I wonder, to be honest, what country Mr Mizzi thinks these people, to use his own divisive phrase, come from. Many of them have spent significant sums of money to cross deserts and seas, in conditions that are unfit for animals, let alone pregnant women and infants.

Does Mr Mizzi think that with a few thousand euro in clutched in their hands, "these people" are going to catch the next flight to Somalia or wherever and open a corner grocer shop or set up a branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken or something? If he does, then he really should try to learn something about the real world.

Mr Mizzi closes his expose' of the solution to the immigrant question with an appeal to the wallet, invoking the "fact" that 50,000 Maltese live below the poverty line. He neglects to tell us out of which work of fiction he plucked this figure of fifty thousand Maltese living below the poverty line: does Mr Mizzi even know where the poverty line starts?

In contrapuntal synchrony with this, Mr Mizzi cites "these illegal immigrants" receiving social benefits, including weekly cheques from our Government.

Where would we be without people like Mr Mizzi reminding us that caring for people costs money?