Migration is, and always has been a fact of life. Therefore, by definition, so too is emigration and immigration. Malta more than many other societies knows this. No amount of argument, hype or hysteria can change that reality.
Malta and all things Maltese are the result of migration. We are a migrant people, all of us.
A cursory ramble around any community in Malta will graphically illustrate just how fundamentally migration has shaped these islands. Our language, our culture, our surnames and placenames, our food, and the very images carved on our buildings both public and private attest to this existential reality.
In such a context, the bile, prejudice and sheer ugliness that characterises much of the commentary on the issue across social media (and even here in this newspaper) are wholly unworthy of us.
This is especially so from a society that has expected other countries across the world to accept our migrants, often in large numbers.
According to many (especially the ‘experts’ of social media), we now live in times of unprecedented mass migration. We are regularly assailed with tropes about ‘invasion’, ‘hordes’, about being ‘swamped’ in our own countries and, that old hoary classic ‘our culture and way of life’ is being ‘replaced’ (as if it was unchanging and frozen in a particular time warp).
Images regularly appear on our screens of African people crammed into dinghies and boats in a desperate attempt to cross the Mediterranean, of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel, or ‘caravans’ of migrants trying to reach the Mexico-US border. Little if anything is heard or seen of the majority of the world’s migrants and refugees outside these three stories.
As a result of this selective storytelling, the dominant popular view is of a ‘western’ migration crisis that demands robust or drastic action to stall waves of people arriving, now and in the future.
As is so often the case, there is very little evidence to support the claim that international migration is accelerating. Currently, international migrants account for about 3.6% of the world population, up from 2.6% in 1970, a percentage that has been essentially stable over the past 50 years.
Similarly, refugee migration is far more limited than political and right-wing rhetoric and many media views imply. Roughly 10% of all international migrants are refugees, representing 0.3% of the world population with little evidence of an upward long-term trend. The vast majority (80-85%) of refugees remain in their own regions. Inevitably refugee numbers continue to fluctuate reflecting particularly the scale and impact of conflict worldwide.
The phrase most frequently intoned to justify hostility and even hate against migrants and their families is ‘illegal’ – ‘they are here illegally’. Despite this, there is no consistent or robust evidence (social media ‘expertise’ aside) that illegal migration is out of control. The large majority of migrants who move to ‘developed’ countries continue to do so legally. This inconvenient reality is inevitably cast aside to bolster our hostility.
Despite the international evidence that migrant numbers are essentially stable, it is not possible to ignore the reality that legal immigration to the US, Britain and Western Europe (including Malta) has been growing over the past decades. As is obviously the case in Malta, the primary reason for this trend remains, not ‘their needs’ but rather ‘our needs’.
The root cause of migration is the persistent demand for labour.
Migration patterns are not a deus-ex-machina, they are the result of decades of policies geared towards the needs and demands of western economies and societies. As in many other countries, migration to Malta is significantly fuelled by the need for workers to fill tough or precarious jobs locals simply do not want.
In these circumstances, more and more migrants are not just simply ‘allowed’ in but are actively recruited to respond to current labour shortages, a direct and unavoidable consequence of the economic growth model chosen by Malta. Without such labour shortages, most migrants simply would not have come.
Blaming migrants for our growth without development model is wholly dishonest and, of course, dangerous as many migrants become the target of widespread abuse and aggression. In this sense, Malta does not have an ‘overpopulation’ crisis per se but rather a political and a business model crisis.
The damaging consequences of this growth without development model – unsustainable population density, infrastructure collapse, construction and traffic chaos and public dislocation and dismay will continue until that reality is addressed. Political posturing by our political or business class remains just that, posturing – it is not in any way a policy response or even the beginnings of one.
We continue to face fundamental choices about Malta’s future direction. Avoiding those choices by scapegoating migrants is simply an exercise in Titanic deckchair management.