So-called national problems are very much seasonal creatures that come and go depending on their perceived, rather than actual, magnitude. At the moment the big two are the flu and jellyfish.
On the first, it's interesting how the prefixes 'swine' and 'H1N1', used strategically by the media in full silly-season swing, transform an unusually-mild cough into a terrible pestilence. The former has a bestial ring about it (and no one likes to make connections between human and piggy bodies), the latter a kind of science fiction Armageddon gloom.
On jellyfish, we really can't seem to digest the thought that the sea is home to critters other than starfish, pearl oysters and Nemo. The best one I overheard (hand on heart this is true) was that 'government' should, instead of frittering away money on Piano, wage war on the stingers by setting up a turtle farm. Heaven knows why people should prefer to rub bikinis with heavily-armoured beasts rather than pink blobs that are 90 per cent water.
In any case, what until June 5 was our 'Number One National Problem' seems suddenly to have become much milder. It is worth remembering the reams of news reports, Parliamentary speeches, letters to the editor, and online comments on the scourge that was immigration. Then, just as disaster seemed inevitable, it turned out it was at least 90 per cent hot air.
Immigration looks not to be such a big problem after all. The immigrants that are not locked away in detention or manning hotel receptions mostly mind their own business in Marsa and Ħal Far.
Mornings they line up at some roundabout waiting their turn for piece-rate work (very convenient if you happen to be a plasterer or tile-layer), evenings they play football or watch telly. They appear reluctant to rape 'our' women, barricade our streets with stones, or dirty our front gardens. Nor do they litter the beaches with spent charcoal, write silly reports on the evils of divorce, or wage genocide on the crabs at Baħrija. At any rate, they certainly don't sting or bring on the sniffles.
Two years ago I had lamented the fact that immigration was being sidelined by politicians. My argument was that, the sooner immigration was brought on the national agenda in a mainstream rational way, the better. My mistake was to attribute too much rationality to the mainstream, and especially to the mainstream in election jitters. For as soon as the politicians in suits came on the scene, they ended up practically indistinguishable - save sartorially - from the 'politicians' in jackboots.
Two things in particular struck me as very stupid indeed. First, the numbers game, a daily balance sheet of immigrant arrivals (at least with respect to the boatloads) matched against some vague notion of national resources. We succeeded in boiling people down to bare digits, irrespective of their reasons for being here, nationalities, backgrounds, and so forth. Never mind conflict in Somalia or religious persecution in Nigeria, everyone that looked dark and didn't speak Russian was a klandestin. And a bane on our resources, so stretched we can't even fund our own roads, poor devils.
The second, equally Quixotic, factor was the famous 'burden sharing' business. We're still at it in fact and miserably so too, because it's again being punctuated in terms of bare numbers - 'France takes 92 immigrants' and such. For one, the numbers do not add up. Even if each EU member state were to take, say, 100 (at present beyond the dreamiest Minister's wildest fantasies), we would still be left with a positive figure on our balance sheet.
Which means we'd still have to live with the rapes, barricades, and soiled front gardens - only, there would be less of these than the present terrible pestilence. Norman Lowell is right when he lampoons the efficacy of burden sharing; he, like the men in suits, can only think in terms of numbers.
Besides, badgering our northern neighbours to take our 'burden' is not necessarily as clever as it may look. Have we considered that they might actually be cherry-picking the best people, i.e. those immigrants who are smarter, more enterprising, and less likely to cause problems than average? Selection, let us remember, is based on performance at interviews among other criteria.
In fairness, I'm reliably informed that the burden-sharing agreements do factor in a certain number of 'vulnerable' immigrants - those who are more likely to be a burden, that is. The fact remains, however, that we're losing our best people to countries who can tell a deal when they see one. The deal in this case is human resources who are articulate, eager to integrate, and have biographies of long-distance mobility and resilience. Surely no national interest could desire better than that?
This is what happens when politics 'listens' too much. I am not arguing for tyranny, but for a type of politics that looks at things as objectively as possible and relies on the technical advice of experts rather than the 'mood' of 'the people'. This is what I had hoped for when I said immigration should be politicised. Unfortunately what we got was five months (there were some convenient major landings in January) of pandering to the basest motives.
No matter, all's well that ends well. It's all sorted post-June 5, and we can spend our time talking about the flu and jellyfish. Until next election, when we may again need protection from the country's part-time Number One National Problem.
mafalzon@hotmail.com