The Maltese way with immigrants: nasty and stupid

This is my column in The Malta Independent today.

The comments-board on timesofmalta.com has long been infamous as a gathering-point for those Maltese who believe that the internet exists so that they can communicate to the world at large their stupidity, ignorance, semi-literacy, absolute lack of general knowledge and absence of rational thought.

For that I am grateful, because short of standing for hours in queues or spending the day on the buses, something I no longer have much of an opportunity to do, I wouldn’t have much access to those sorts of ‘conversations’. But reading the comments posted beneath stories about people displaced by war and strife, who have ended up as boat-people eventually stranded in Malta, is really sickening.

I am well aware of the murky depths of the Maltese psyche – vile, twisted, full of simmering hate and resentment, and contorted by a mixture of rage and envy that comes from the unvarying feeling that one is hard done by, and deserves more but doesn’t get it because others are getting it instead.

I have been at the receiving end of a barrage of this kind of sentiment for more than two decades, but I am largely indifferent and certainly not vulnerable. When I see the same sort of vileness directed at people who are extremely vulnerable at all levels, who cannot defend themselves, and who are terribly insecure and frightened, I am not sympathetic. I am horrified, and my impatience increases with those who further violate people who have been immeasurably violated already.

There are those who say that timesofmalta.com should not upload these hideous, racist and inhumane comments. But I am in two minds about it. I can see that the flood of nasty spite, the unadulterated ignorance, allows those who think this way to feel that they are right merely because so many others think as they do, that their stance is justified by ‘majority rule’. They might even encourage others to think the same way, promoting racism and repeating dangerous untruths.

But then again, I also think it is crucial that we are made aware of this widespread hatred and stupidity. You cannot counter what you do not know exists. It’s probably too late with adults, but many of them will have children who they raise in their own image. Just as attitudes towards bird-shooting, smoking, waste separation and environmental issues were systematically and successfully changed by targeting children in schools, so the same should be done now with racism, xenophobia and hatred of The Other.

Education minister Dolores Cristina, who I know would be as dismayed as I am by the horrors on the internet, should see immediately to the planning and implementation of a proper education programme on immigration. I realise from what I read of these inanities that many Maltese actually think that Africa is a single entity and that ‘Africans’ are one people: Muslims who live in grass huts.

As I write this, the news has just come in that 150 people are missing, presumed drowned, after an overloaded and shoddy boat capsized off Lampedusa but in Maltese waters. Many Maltese will be celebrating this fact while pretending not to do so – that is the level of ghastliness to which many have descended. They would rather those boat-people drown than have to deal with them, and the way our fellow Maltese speak and write, you’d imagine that they were dealing with them personally, when it is obvious that most of them have never even had the shortest conversation with a refugee or displaced person.

It is irritating to see so many speak about ‘the EU not helping us’, an outlook which is encouraged by our politicians, though it was a relief to know, through Bondiplus last Monday, that the minister of the interior, Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, is equally impatient with those who say that Malta must tackle the situation from the perspective of somebody small and helpless demanding help. It is an insufferable sense of entitlement which reveals even more ignorance and an inability to consider the standpoint of others.

I really cannot bear to hear people talk about ‘the EU’ as though it is a foreign entity or a colonial master. Malta has been an integral part of ‘the EU’ for the last seven years. It is not a foreign organisation, but one which includes Malta. When Maltese isolationists talk about ‘the EU’ they sound exactly like English isolationists and they are probably not even aware of it.

The EU member state with the biggest immigration problem is the United Kingdom. It’s the very place where all the people who enter Europe illegally want to end up, because it is so easy to disappear there and because its social services are so good. The next on the list is France, mainly because it is the through-port for the United Kingdom. People make their way overland to France en route to England and then get stuck there, waiting to smuggle themselves across the channel.

There are makeshift camps on the French coast, full of young men waiting to strap themselves to the undercarriage of some truck, or get into the back of a lorry. And they don’t include only the ones who enter Europe by sea through Spain, Malta, Italy and Greece – but also the ones who come in overland from the Middle East, from Afghanistan and Iraq, and from south-east Asia. Lots of Chinese are smuggled in, and thousands of women from the former Soviet Union, many of them trafficked.

Perhaps if Maltese people looked more often beyond the bars of their hamster’s cage on a rock positioned between Tripoli and Sicily, they would know these things and be able to keep the situation in perspective.

One of the main factors obstructing burden-sharing is precisely this: Malta thinks that the only immigration burdens that will be shared are Malta’s and, if we are feeling generous, Italy’s. But you can’t have that kind discrimination in a European context. So if burden-sharing comes into play, then the immigration burdens of the United Kingdom, Greece, Spain, France and Germany will have to be shared too.

Malta, with its collapsing birth-rate, might very well end up with more immigrants and not fewer, but it looks like nobody’s thought of that one.

The reality is that it is not the numbers which bother us, but the colour and the religion and the place of origin. Throughout Malta’s history, right up until the 1990s, the only black people on these two islands have been slaves – right up until the early 19th century – and in the 20th century, American sailors.

Black people have never lived in our community in the last 200 years, and before that, they lived here as chattels, leading to the notorious dictum, spoken by those who are left out of distribution of goods, services and food ‘Mela jien iswed?’ (‘Am I a slave?’). Marlene Mizzi used it on Super One television a couple of weeks ago, and immediately realised her error.

People from North Africa look no different to the Maltese. We have had plenty of opportunity to examine that reality with all the news coverage we have been watching over the last three months. But we are wary and suspicious of them because their religion, from the 15th century onwards (and not the 11th, as some fondly imagine) has been Malta’s historical enemy.

Malta cannot simply rush ‘to the EU’ and demand that boat-people who come here are offloaded elsewhere. You have to consider the position of other member states. On Bondiplus last Monday, Simon Busuttil was the only one to point this out. You have to see where the others are coming from. Why should they share Malta’s burden when they are not sharing the United Kingdom’s? Why should member states which have never had a problem with immigration opt to create difficulties for themselves?

The level of ignorance is truly abysmal. Somebody posted a comment on my website (this website) arguing that the arrival of 800 immigrants in Malta is greater in impetus than the arrival of ‘190,000 in Lampedusa’. It was not 190,000 immigrants who landed on Lampedusa, but 19,000. This man is keen to talk about burdens and about not being able to cope, but his geographical knowledge and ability to absorb data are far from adequate.

As many of my readers know (or at least, I hope so) it would be impossible for 190,000 overnight arrivals to fit on Lampedusa. Malta’s 800 arrivals are certainly not equal to 190,000 on Lampedusa or even to 19,000. Lampedusa’s population is 6,025 and its land area is 25.48km. Malta’s population is 413,609 and its land area is 316km. To equal Lampedusa’s 19,000 arrivals in terms of ‘burden’, Malta would have to receive 1,302,868 immigrants in two days (3.15 times its population). Going on this man’s assumed 190,000 on Lampedusa, that would make Malta’s equivalent burden 13,045,227 arrivals in two days – and as with Lampedusa and the imagined 190,000, there would be no physical space for them, either.

The real argument he should be using is that Lampedusa is part of Italy, but even there, we cannot make the mistake of going on the basis of land area, because immigrants have to be integrated into cities, which have population pressures much worse than Malta’s. They do not settle in country towns, mountain villages or have new towns built for them in all that empty space.

The same man repeated the canard that ‘we’ have to house, feed and clothe ‘them’ (refugees are able to work and do so) and the other canard that ‘they jump the queue’ at hospitals. Try ‘jumping the queue’ in hospital and see what happens. You cannot queue-barge, because your name is called out and you go in when you are called. That misconception comes from the fact that when ‘illegals’ are taken to hospital for medical treatment, accompanied by a police officer and usually and humiliatingly in handcuffs, they are rushed through – not so that they don’t have to wait, but so that the police officer doesn’t have to.

Not being nice to the vulnerable is bad enough, but so many Maltese seem determined to add crass ignorance to their problems. I find that the two often go together and even define far-right political sentiment (which crosses the two main political parties): nasty and stupid.