During the last few years, Malta has witnessed a bewildering array of ethical revolutions, from civil rights to environmentalism to feminism. Often ignored is the rise of massive societal concern regarding animal treatment.

It is easy to demonstrate the degree to which these concerns have seized the public’s imagination. We have legislation in place relating to animal welfare and, hopefully, are at the stage of enacting pragmatic legislation to articulate animal rights and highlight owners’ obligations.

Parallel to this background, we are witnessing a large and persistent influx of both legal and illegal immigrants from outside the EU, contributing to an environment of vulnerability and abuse.

Lately, we have been seeing an increase in the enforcement of animal welfare legislation, while on the other hand, we are seeing ineffective enforcement, sometimes lacking, of legislation regulating the status in all respects of both legal and illegal immigrants.

Of course, in both situations, wherever the law fails to hold people accountable, crime will flourish.

Failure to effectively address the third-country immigrant dilemma is creating and perpetuating an environment in which exploitation runs rampant. Trafficking is the recruitment and possible transport of persons within or across boundaries by force, fraud or deception for the purpose of exploiting them economically.

Victims are lured by false promises of good jobs and better lives and then forced to work under brutal and inhuman conditions.

Victims of trafficking are exploited for purposes of commercial sex, including prostitution, stripping, pornography, live sex shows, and other acts. However, trafficking also takes place as labour exploitation, including domestic servitude, the construction industry, agricultural work, and more.

While anyone can become a victim of trafficking, third-country migrants are highly vulnerable to being trafficked due to a combination of factors, including a lack of legal status and protections, limited language skills and employment options, poverty and migration-related debts, and social isolation. They are often victimised by traffickers with the complicity of locals, on whom they may be dependent for employment or support in the foreign country.

Seeking opportunities far better than those nightmares, they often fall victim to a flawed enforcement system. Human trafficking violates the promise that every person in Malta is guaranteed basic human rights. A critical strategy for ending human trafficking is better enforcement of our immigration and employment laws, and improved cooperation in law enforcement.

While all the above is going on in our country with little public concern, our society’s moral concern has outgrown the traditional ethic of animal cruelty. It has looked to its ethic for humans, appropriately modified, to find moral categories applicable to animals. This concept of legally encoded rights for animals is continually emerging as a plausible vehicle for reform.

We accept or bring them here not to be protected but to exploit them to the fullest

Many animal uses seen as frivolous by the public have been abolished without legislation. Toxicological testing of cosmetics on animals has been truncated. Zoos that are little more than prisons for animals have all but disappeared, and the very existence of zoos is being increasingly challenged, despite the public’s unabashed love of seeing animals. Pet owners are seeing legislation impose even more stringent obligations on them. Inevitably, agriculture has felt the force of social concern with animal treatment.

Indeed, it is arguable that contemporary concern in society with the treatment of farm animals in modern production systems blazed the trail leading to a new ethic for animals.

Questions of animal welfare are at least partly “ought” questions, questions of ethical obligation. The concept of animal welfare is an ethical concept to which, once understood, science brings relevant data. When we ask about an animal’s or a person’s welfare, we ask about what we owe the animal and to what extent.

The only exception in Malta, it seems, is with regard to immigrants hailing from countries outside the EU. We accept or bring them here not to be protected but to exploit them to the fullest.

Immigrant women are very often employed in the area of domestic or care work. In Malta, their presence in this sector is very important, making them particularly susceptible to abuse and exploitation. Domestic and care workers are a gendered segment of labour migration that is still strongly divided along a gender binary through the sexual division of roles and labour, and is directly associated with the sphere of the welfare state. Migrant women in the caregiving and domestic sectors are one of the least protected work groups under our laws.

For a long time, waged domestic work has not been regarded as “actual” work, as it revolves around natural tasks that women perform in the household. The domestic work sector has recently responded to the unions’ call to regulate the presence of immigrant workers in areas where there is an important presence of severe exploitation.

It is imperative that our authorities address the growing undeclared irregular work and the large numbers of undocumented immigrants that can often suffer from severe exploitation, at times brutal. The vulnerability of these people is not a quality that inheres in them but is instead the product of our political, economic and cultural forces acting along a variety of identity axes, including gender, race and nationality, that disempower specific sets of immigrants in particular ways.

We must protect the interests of the individual that we consider essential to being human and to human nature from being submerged, even at a time when animal rights are being rapidly enhanced.