It's funny what the sight of a black face does to some. Perhaps the litmus test for xenophobia is not the stick and jackboots, but the extent to which one is prepared to suspend rationality in favour of hyperboles and nonsense. Climate change has meant that the silly season now extends into autumn, which is also when the balance sheet for summer arrivals of migrants is drawn up.

Over the past week or so I've come across at least three instances of rotten arguments by people who should know better. I am quite honestly not looking to bash anyone in particular. Nor am I interested in whether immigration is 'good' or 'bad' for us. Rather, what follows is an appeal to sober good sense.

First there was the EU Immigration and Asylum Pact. According to some, the government should have been 'firm' and used the veto. Malta is a special case, our burden is uniquely heavy, and we now have the same political clout as the big EU hitters, the argument goes, so why be lily-livered?

All three premises are wrong. There is nothing special about Malta except the delusions that come with being a small island, and our burden compares very favourably with those of countries that have taken millions of immigrants (including Maltese) over the decades.

As for our political clout, a sense of perspective is called for. It is true that on paper Malta has as much right to a veto as France or Germany, but fact is that we remain a miniscule country. Self-respect is one thing, behaving like a spoiled brat quite another. The government cannot afford to throw its 'weight' around and use its veto to try to harry the big countries into some sort of submission, without making a complete fool of itself. We've been there before and the memory of the polite smiles still hurts.

The second source of face scrub has to do with, well, eugenics. Some saw fit to tell us that the 'rate of immigrants' has exceeded the 'local birth rate'. The intended implication is that we are being taken over by the invaders. This, however, is a textbook case of garbled reasoning based on wobbly statistical knowledge.

First, the natural birth rate and number of immigrant arrivals per year are different types of statistics and not easily commensurable. Second, the birth rate cannot simply be extrapolated into long-term population projections. There are other factors, like death rate and what is known as population momentum, that need to be taken into account. Migration is, of course, one of these, but it is so variable and subject to political and economic shifts, that future projections based on contemporary numbers can only be speculative.

In any case, let us, as a divertissement, imagine Malta in 50 years' time as an island inhabited mostly by Muslims and black people of African origin. I challenge anyone to tell me, without being racist and/or supremacist, why that would be a bad thing. I say this half in jest, but there is a serious point to be made about the racial or ethnic engineering of populations. It is distasteful at best, and history shows that it has more often than not ended in tears.

The third yarn of the day has to do with the demographics of burden-sharing. The culprit in this case is that little piece of arithmetic known as the simple proportion. Example: If the population of Malta is 400,000 and that of Germany 82 million, what is the German equivalent of, say, 2,000 immigrants landing in Malta? The answer is around 400,000, a massive figure which we are assured would have the Germans in something of a fit. Which means, first, that we are entitled to a right royal fit ('the situation is deeply worrying'), and, second, that we are fully justified in asking others to relieve us of our burden.

In this case the flaw in the argument is the unsound geography. Take Finland, which, the burden-sharing pundits tell us, is a thousand times bigger than Malta with a population that is only 13 times ours. There are, however, such things as wolves and giant owls, and they like to be left alone in their forest. Which is why so many Finns choose to live in, say, Helsinki, rather than evenly spread out across the country. This gives that city a population density that is double ours - and around 10 per cent of the population of Helsinki is foreign born. By that yardstick - where Finns actually live, that is, as opposed to 'Finland' - our immigrant figures begin to look rather slim.

My point is that in this case it is misleading to think in terms of national territories and population densities. National territories usually include both densely-populated urban formations and all-but-empty spaces: forests, mountains, moorland, and such. No one really wants to cohabit with the wolves and owls, which means that migrants, like natives, tend to gravitate towards and concentrate in urban areas. (The best way to observe this is to take a train from a major city out to the hinterland.) Plus, there are many factors which may result in immigrant hubs or their obverse - Cottonera, for example, is relatively densely populated, yet the number of immigrants living there is next to none. The simple proportion argument simply doesn't work, because the unit of analysis ('countries') is wrong.

Immigration is a real concern that deserves to be discussed on the basis of solid premises and sound logic. Bullish talk of national clout and spurious number games, on the other hand, belong in the dustbin.

mafalzon@hotmail.com