They work, because we won’t

Maybe our diminutive size and ongoing struggles with identity have contributed to it, but I have always known there to be racism in this country. Sometimes, it whispers: a bus seat left empty and people preferring to stand, but, other times, it screams. I was only 19 and in my first year of university when cars at St Aloysius’ College were torched in an act of vandalism against the Jesuit community after it had taken a public stand against racism and xenophobia.

At the time, the greatest worry on this island was the few hundreds of asylum seekers seeking refuge on our islands, and the more compassionate pleaded for peace, justice and kindness towards others while racists fumed about the loss of culture and religion. Who could have told them that, less than 20 years later, the country would have a foreign worker population of 158,368? As of May last year, 80,543 of those workers are third-country nationals.

This week, at the second annual conference of the Association of Catering Establishments (ACE), sector representatives did not only say that Malta’s catering industry would not survive without third-country nationals but sector operators complained about long processing times at the Identità agency. Speaking during a panel, ACE member and business owner Alex Aquilina said: “If TCNs pulled out, we wouldn’t have an industry... Our industry is labour-intensive.”

I read this and think of the “native Maltese” man at the shops last week, berating the Asian man he was speaking to and telling him to go back to his country; I think of a bus incident I was present for a few months ago, where another man was calling the people around him ugly.

I then think about the man who told me that he knows for a fact that he is the only “Maltese” person in his street who gets up to go to work every day. Bless him, he didn’t need to tell me how many of my fellow citizens spend their days.

You can’t complain about our country being laid siege to by foreigners while exploiting our over-generous welfare state- Anna Marie Galea

When I was younger, if you went to one of the bigger supermarkets it would only be populated by harrowed-looking mums on a Tuesday at 11 in the morning. I went to one a few weeks ago on a random Thursday morning work day on a quick errand and found scores of able-bodied men and women just sitting in the cafés fringing the car park drinking cappuccinos as if they didn’t have a care in the world. And while I didn’t go up to each table and inquire as to their occupations, there certainly weren’t any of the aforementioned third-country nationals sitting there screaming with laughter with their friends.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t complain about our country being laid siege to by foreigners while exploiting our over-generous welfare state or occupying phantom roles in the public service.

Government after government keeps dragging its feet to call out abuse and means test, and, in the meantime, the country is still in dire need of people who actually want to work. These people are here because we either couldn’t or didn’t want to work certain jobs, and, while a lot of Maltese people complain about the wages in the catering sector (as they should because they are still so disastrously low), it’s not the foreigners’ problem; it’s ours.

Racism is always cheap but it’s particularly cheap when you’re the one who refuses to pick up the tab.