Academic and activist Maria Pisani said something last week that appears to have flown under the radar. It shouldn’t have, because it goes to the heart of a persistent, insidious and cruel current of institutional racism.
Commenting about the eviction of migrants from a building in Buġibba, Pisani called it a clear case of racial profiling.
Hauled off in police vans for interrogation, the migrants had been targeted and criminalised. Besides, she said, the evictions had left many of them effectively homeless. Perversely, the victims of a housing crisis were being topsy-turvied as its perpetrators. I wish I could disagree.
This was the third mass eviction of migrants in a year. A year ago, 120 were thrown out of a cowshed in Mrieħel, where they had each paid €100 a month for space in shared rooms.
In July, 37 migrants were found to be renting space in what had once been horse stables in Marsa. They were ‘arrested and taken in for questioning’. The Buġibba eviction involved 150 people. According to the police, the pretext was a complaint by neighbours of a rat infestation.
There have been many more, smaller, evictions. For the major ones that made the news, there is a fairly staple storyline. Give or take a couple, the migrants targeted were black. In all cases, there were associations with animals: horses, cows, and rats. There was talk of dirt, filth, and squalor – in the Marsa case, it included a report of a “kamra użata għas-sess” (a room set aside for sex – doubtless of the degenerate and ‘dirty’ kind).
All evictions involved a surprise action by the police, usually followed by mass arrests. The word used throughout was, in fact, “raids” – a terminology shared with police action at such places as a potato shed in Marsa, a drug-dealer’s den in San Martin, and so on.
It’s the equivalent of booting beggars off the streets in the hope they will get rich in the process
All of which is ample reason for me to agree with Pisani, in at least three ways. First, in that the raids criminalise the evicted. Doors are kicked down on decent, working men and women at 5a.m. Police presence descends by the squad.
In the Marsa raid, a number of residents were cable-tied and manhandled. The charge? None other than the heinous crime of paying handsome money to live in shabby housing.
The police officers cannot be blamed. They follow orders.
As it happens, orders that come from a government that, even as I write, is busy coming across all virtuous at a press conference on the immorality of treating prostitutes as criminals. No such pangs for people who are said to live in dirty rooms.
The second thing about the evictions is that, intentionally or not, they set up a group of migrants – black Africans, more specifically – as prone to squalor and filth, alien to basic hygiene, and somehow polluting. The cues are many.
For example, at the Buġibba raid some officers wore blue rubber gloves. A necessary precaution, one might think, but then again the people they were tasked to handle spend their days in hotel kitchens, on construction sites, and so on. No rubber gloves or precautions needed there, because black Africans are only polluting when they’re not working.
Rats, too, have certain preferences. One might suppose that the rat infestation in Buġibba (assuming there is one) will have something to do with the construction blitz which has left most of the place dug up and its infrastructure in rubbled tatters. Instead, it turns out it was the black migrants and their missing legal documents whodunit.
It’s of little consolation that none of this is terribly new. Take migrants in the United States a hundred odd years ago.
That US immigration was obsessed with the cleanliness and hygiene of migrants is well documented. What is perhaps less well-known is that black people, including domestic migrants from southern states, had it more difficult than most.
Because black Americans were condemned to live in appalling conditions, any attempt on their part – and there were many, by black ‘reformers’ – to live up to prescribed standards of hygiene was doomed. They were poor and black, and despised for being dirty – except they were dirty because they were poor and black.
I’m not saying that conditions at Mrieħel, Marsa, and Buġibba were ideal. Rather, the points are, one, that black Africans can hardly be blamed for living in substandard places. It’s an open secret that the owners of holes who still fancy themselves as landlords know that, when all else fails, they can always ‘rent out to blacks’ ('tikri lis-suwed'). Black migrants tend to find there’s no room at the inn.
Besides, the televised spectacle of evictions tells the story of a nation struggling to defend its peerless, nay obsessive-compulsive, standards of hygiene against the obduracy of certain kinds (read ‘colours’) of migrants. Thus racial profiling.
There’s another thing. The reasoning behind the evictions is that the wisest way to deal with poor housing conditions is to throw out the housed and all their belongings, effectively making them homeless and likely to move into even poorer housing. It’s the equivalent of booting beggars off the streets, in the hope that they will get rich in the process.
The thought of police squads kicking down doors on sleeping people is disturbing in any circumstances. When those people have done nothing wrong except try to make do with what little they have, it’s unbearable.