The increase in population that Malta experienced between the censuses of 2011 and 2021, according to figures published on August 1, is of 102,130. With an impressive drop in fertility, that increase is almost all a result of the never-promised and never-discussed precise Labour policy of huge immigration, which is, in fact, a very definite policy of cheap labour.

The census figures show that we now have 115,449 foreigners living on our islands, an increase of no less than 95,160 over just 20,289 who were living here at the end of 2011.

To put this 102,130 population increase in context, the previous similar increase of slightly over 100,000 had taken no less than 63 years to happen, from 1948 to 2011, a period coinciding with the post-war baby boom and the mini-baby boom of the 1970s and 1980s.

The average yearly population increase published by the National Statistics Office was a naive division by 10, for a linear 10,213 a year. But the NSO knows full well that the population increase in the last 10 years was far from linear.

The NSO publishes a yearly estimate of the population on World Population Day, every July 11, and from those official figures we know that there was a huge acceleration in the population increase in the three years before COVID: our population increased by 15,404 in 2017, by 17,858 in 2018 and by a full 21,005 in 2019. This shows that Labour’s yearly immigration plans are at least double the linear average quoted by the NSO.

This was the real Labour road map; all secret, of course, never promised in any of its three electoral manifestos since 2013, never discussed as to its huge consequences on all sectors.

It was Labour selling off its soul to the highest bidders in the construction industry, those very same people who any politician with the faintest idea of the good of Malta would clearly tell to diversify and would certainly not let ruin the country.

But for Labour, at least those we’ve now had in power since 2013, politics is not a serious endeavour for the good of Malta or the Maltese; for Labour, politics is simply an auction. In selling their souls, they have also sold down the river the very people they purport to represent.

There will be those who argue that we do need immigration and I actually agree. But the type of immigration we need is smart immigration: high-skilled foreigners, working in new industries – as Malta actually did pre-2013 with financial services, gaming and aviation, to mention just three – thus seeing highly paid expats transferring their skills to Maltese workers.

While immigrants are treated as modern slaves, Maltese workers are left to suffer depressed wages- Eddie Aquilina

But Labour had no plans for any new industries. Happily, it failed to create bitcoin Malta as it promised, as, otherwise, we would by now be suffering bitcoin’s collapse, that Ponzi scheme on which only someone hugely corrupt could base Malta’s future.

It was another Ponzi scheme that led Labour to cheap labour: old-fashioned property. With no ambition for Malta or any fresh ideas, the only industry Labour seems to know is the very industry off which we need to wean Malta.

But unimaginative property magnates who don’t want to diversify for their very own good seek cheap labour to keep churning out holes in the air which they fill with the very cheap labour the Labour government is letting them import from non-EU countries, in a vicious cycle that’s ruining Malta. Labour can’t tell them to diversify because when you sell your soul, it’s forever.

In the process, Labour has destroyed the wage-increase rationale of any truly growing economy: when an economy grows with its own population plus intelligent immigration and the labour supply gets tighter, employers will have to up wages, improve working conditions and invest in higher productivity.

On the other hand, with Labour’s cheap labour policy, employers just lodge thousands of work permits for some minister to sign. Labour boasts of a growing economy but not because wages are growing; it’s because 102,130 will increase the totals, though not the averages.

While immigrants are treated as modern slaves, Maltese workers are left to suffer depressed wages or, once every five years, threaten their way into government underemployment, which is another loss for our economy. And our best brains, our best-skilled people, just pack their bags and leave.

This will sometime have to stop. By then, Labour will have imported another 100,000 or 200,000 foreign workers, using foreign cheap labour heartlessly and unfairly. By then, the consequences will be very clear for those who are still short-sighted now. By then, I hope it will not be too late.