Claim: The narrative that young people are leaving Malta is false.

Verdict: More young people have returned to Malta than have left over the most recent two years for which data is available. The number of young people leaving the country has dipped gradually over the past two decades.

Robert Abela’s claim last week that young people are not really leaving Malta was met with widespread incredulity.

Abela was speaking at the launch of a landmark labour migration policy that will regulate the entry of foreign workers to Malta’s labour market.

Introducing the policy, Abela sought to bust a series of myths about Malta’s migration flows, including that foreign workers were taking the place of locals and that local youths were leaving the country in droves.

"The narrative that young people are leaving Malta is false. Figures show that those who left are returning," he said.

"In 2023 alone, 500 more Maltese and Gozitan people returned to Malta than those who emigrated," he added.

The claim sparked a landslide of comments, many of which questioned Abela’s figures. Several people also wrote to the Times of Malta asking for Abela’s claim to be checked.

Are more Maltese returning than leaving?

In a nutshell, yes, at least according to official figures.

Data sent to the Times of Malta by the National Statistics Office shows that in recent years, Maltese citizens returning to Malta regularly outnumber those who leave.

This wasn’t always the case. Throughout much of the period between 2006 and 2017, more people chose to leave the country for pastures new, compared to those who returned home.

In 2006, for instance, almost 2,500 Maltese people left the country, far more than the 1,000 who returned. The same is true in several other years, including 2010, 2013 and 2016, albeit to a lesser extent.

But this trend seems to have changed around 2018 when, for the first time in several years, more Maltese nationals chose to return home.

Since then, some 11,000 Maltese have returned to Malta, far more than the 8,300 who left.

Figures for last year are not yet available, but those for 2023 show that, as Abela pointed out, almost 500 more Maltese returned to Malta than left the country in that year.

What about youths?

A similar pattern is also true of young people, even as we tiptoe around the contentious definition of “young”.

Malta’s national youth policy describes young people as aged between 14 and 30, but the age classifications used by NSO don’t precisely mirror this, meaning we can only look at data for people aged between 15 and 29.

Nevertheless, the data shows that the number of people within this age group who have moved to Malta has increased over the last couple of years.

Throughout 2022 and 2023, the most recent years for which data is available, youths returning to Malta outnumbered those who left by some 400 people.

But the opposite was true for most years across the previous decade. Bar the occasional exception, more young people opted to leave the country between 2012 and 2021.

Even if we exclude teenagers altogether and only look at youths in their 20s, the data shows that the number of young people leaving the country has been dwindling over the years, going from highs of over 1,000 (in 2006 and 2013) to a few hundreds each year post-pandemic.

Meanwhile, the number of Maltese youths moving to Malta has remained fairly stable over the years.

These figures suggest that despite studies showing widely held feelings of dissatisfaction and unhappiness among Maltese youths, relatively few appear to be taking the plunge and moving abroad.

Verdict

Official statistics suggest that over the past several years, the number of Maltese of all ages returning to Malta has outnumbered those leaving the country.

The opposite was true until 2017 but the trend appears to have been reversed since 2018.

Youths between the ages of 15 and 29 have also been returning to Malta in greater numbers since 2022, with almost 400 more youths returning to Malta in 2022 and 2023 than leaving the country.

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