Many readers, on seeing this newspaper’s report that Malta’s population has shot up to 460,000, with non-Maltese nationals making up almost 12 per cent, will have paused. It’s right to pause. But we also need to pause on what that pause should mean.
The pause we need should not be code for jingoism. It’s true that the rapid growth – up from 415,000 only a few years ago – is largely due to foreign workers. The rate has been an average of 7,000-8,000 every year.
Even so, some 2,000-3,000 vacancies remain unfilled, according to Clyde Caruana, chair of the national employment agency, Jobsplus, in an interview given to another newspaper. Another four years of the current rate of economic growth would mean another 30,000 people added to the population.
That said, nationalist jingoism is misplaced. The issue is separate from citizenship. Around a third of the foreign workers leave before their first year is up, while over two-thirds have left within three years.
The incoming workers are not taking Maltese jobs. They are contributing to keeping pensions sustainable and to the economic growth that, in principle, permits massive investment in the institutions from which Maltese citizens benefit.
Neither should the pause we need be code for saying things are out of control. The situation is monitored even if many workers remain unregistered (largely because of the urgency with which extra labour is needed).
We know, for example, that there are currently circa 42,000 foreign workers. Around three-quarters are EU citizens, while a quarter are from third countries. Those proportions indicate that, should the economy begin to slow down, there is room for manoeuvre offered by the possibility of restricting or eliminating permits granted to non-EU nationals.
Finally, the pause we need should not be code for saying that nothing good can come out of such growth, apart from ‘materialistic’ economic benefits.
Population growth covers the growth of an internal market for a wide range of things. It’s not just property and restaurants. It also grows the larger internal market for, say, cultural events, permitting more frequent, better quality productions whose cost might be prohibitive in a smaller population.
So, contrasting ‘materialism’ with things of the spirit doesn’t work here. Population growth can actually foster both one and the other. So why the need for pause? Precisely because of the wide impact, on the spirits as well as material well-being. We cannot continue to speak and think about the development only from the economic angle.
Such growth is not unprecedented in our history. Because we have precedents we can better appreciate the wide impact and broad ranging significance.
When the Knights of St John arrived in Malta in 1530, the population was around 30,000. In other words, the population you’d expect of an island of Malta’s size in the Mediterranean right up till today. It’s what a largely agrarian economy can sustain.
By the time the Knights left, in 1798, the population was 100,000 – the result of a transformed economy and, among other factors, significant immigration. Historians often remark about how easily immigrants came to be incorporated into local society (as evidenced by patterns of marriage or burial, for example).
Between the beginning and end of the 19th century – the first 100 years of British colonialism – the population doubled, to 200,000. It doubled again during the 20th century.
Again, it was partly cause and partly consequence of economic growth. For example, around the turn of the 20th century Italian labour was imported to push through with the building of breakwaters and other colonial projects in the port areas. With those labourers, however, also came other journeymen to service the growing population – from tailors to confectioners.
The town of Ħamrun grew and flourished during this period. It’s no wonder that, around the same period, a young priest called Ġorġ Preca began his lifelong mission in that town – a mission that profoundly changed the local Catholic Church, and which was itself triggered by the new spiritual needs of a society undergoing important change.
The divide is between the holistic and the one-sided, the prudent and the irresponsible
This thumbnail sketch serves two purposes. To those for whom dramatic change is frightening, and who are apt to take refuge in a utopian national identity, it serves as a reminder: Without significant immigration in the past, we would never have become a nation, with a diversified enough economy to make us independent and a culture that enables both solidarity and individuality.
But to those who are blasé about such dramatic change, it also serves as warning. The change is radical and covers all the spheres of life, from family formation to the patterns of power, wealth and belief.
Moreover, there are two important differences between accelerated population growth in the past and now.
First, this time growth is taking place in the wake of nationalism and democracy: there is an important imbalance of power between inhabitants who have a vote and those who don’t, and an important sense of boundary between those who ‘feel’ Maltese and those who don’t.
Second, the nature of the state has changed. It is now expected to be responsible for the welfare of its inhabitants and to provide access to important services like education, health, etc.
These two changes are ignored at a country’s peril. The UK governments run by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997-2010) ignored them, and focussed only on the economic and culturally cosmopolitan benefits of a high rate of immigration. The strain on infrastructural resources and public services was not sufficiently addressed. The seeds were sown for the whirlwind that is Brexit.
The significant change that high, rapid population growth brings needs to be thought about holistically. Open-mindedness means not just openness to change. It also means openness to considering consequences across a range of sectors, a range of time-frames and a range of scenarios.
Right now, we are still at the complacent stage of acknowledging that sooner or later we may reach a ‘threshold’, and at the fatalistic stage of thinking that there is nothing we can do about it for the moment because we cannot afford to brake the economic growth.
But there’s actually a lot we can do. We can be at work, distinguishing between different kinds of thresholds and figuring out the options concerning each.
If state schools are going to become increasingly international, do we simply need more classrooms or resources (and how much by when)? Or do we even need a new understanding and valuation of the teaching profession, such as Finland has?
If homes are going to get smaller, do we therefore need more proximate, safe public parks, and better local public libraries, that will make smaller homes less chaotic? Do we need laws passed to guarantee their local presence if they are deemed a public good?
Realistically, it’s going to be practically impossible to keep tabs on all irregular third-country workers offering domestic services. Are there policies that can be borrowed from other EU member states that will both respect the concept of legality and offer social insurance to such irregular workers – to prevent the wider injustices and social ills that follow from the lack of such insurance?
Given the time needed for consideration, debate, investment and development, in several areas we may well have reached the threshold already.
On these matters, the significant divide is not Labour versus Nationalist, or conservative versus cosmopolitan. The divide is between the holistic and the one-sided, the prudent and the irresponsible.
ranierfsadni@europe.com