Plenty has been happening since mid-November of last year -the year which every single person on Earth save Republicans would like to forget- and none of it bodes well on a local scale for the "most progressive government this country has ever seen." I'm not going to go into bashing one particular government, but when it comes to the issue of migration and repatriation, both sides of the Maltese political sphere have cocked everything up for years on end.
Before I delve into opinionated drivel, let's look at some facts as presented on the website of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Malta. Up until the aforementioned November, there were 1,619 asylum applications on the island, out of which only 9.2%, or 159, were actually granted refugee status. This should serve as a basic indication of how difficult it is to actually get refugee status in Malta, despite the daily videos from those dirty liberal Facebook pages showing us all of those wars going on everywhere. Even less than that number, we have 8.5%, or 147, getting Temporary Human Protection, which is what concerns us considering it is these people only who are being rounded up during a reform of legislation which the government is currently doing and, as of yet, hasn't actually finished.
Now, when people say that more and more are coming to Malta every day, that's actually not true. There was a significant spike in irregular migration in 2008 but a steady decrease by 2009 and a huge dip in 2010. Granted it is higher this year than it was in 2010, but it's also lower than 2008 - 2009 and 2011 all the way through to 2013. That whole coming in by boat thing, also utter nonsense because, as it turns out, arrivals by boat in 2016 is actually the lowest it's been as far back as records on the website show (2003), even lower than they were during the previously mentioned dip in 2010. The whole argument that open centres are jam packed with people on top of each other is also farcical with 2016 having the lowest number of people held in the open centres in years, this apart from it being the year only beaten by the previous two years, for the number of migrants resettled to the US; so when it comes to all these migrants staying on the island, bear in mind that just under 2,000 migrants were resettled in the US in the last four years.
OK let's focus a bit more on 2016 then. It is common to hear pundits harping on and on about how all these Africans just come to Malta and are given a place to stay etc etc. Wrong. In all of 2016, only 160 foreigners were officially resettled in Malta; out of those 80 were actually Greek and Italian and for all those saying, "Yes but what about all the Syrians free flowing onto the island bringing in ISIS and the bombs and the ISIS and OMG THE ISIS!" ... Yeah, there are 27 of those. I've met a couple, they're nice people, many of them excellent plasterers and manual labourers actually, you know, because that's the only job they can find that although still gives them a ridiculously low-pay, they work their ass off to be able to live in this country. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out how to get out of it myself.
When it comes to all these filthy foreigners living in Malta, it's true. There are thousands of foreigners living on this island; although most of them are actually British. Up until the 2011 census there were 6,615 British people living here while Libyans, who if you listen to anyone on the bus clearly outnumber the Maltese at least 500 to one with the absolutely staggering population of 403. There's a reason why it seems like migrants have "taken over" certain areas like Bugibba, Swieqi, St Paul's Bay and a veritable number of areas like Marsa in the south and that's because they're the only places someone with a docked manual labourer's pension can afford to live in.
In the end however, it seems that the only people who know less than the whiners and complainers about how to deal with the issue have been the elected governments both of the current administration and the previous one. Wouldn't it be rather intelligent that in a country where the children per family has gone from a cosy 4-8 per family to a spacious one child per family, if Malta actually invests in educating a migrant workforce that will readily contribute to the state in terms of taxes and living costs? You know, as a 24 year-old I sometimes dream of having a pension when I'm at that healthy retirement age of 95.
This whole rounding up Malians, who by the way are such a low number that are never actually mentioned in nationality statistics except in the "Other" category, and then letting them all go one by one after having traumatised whole families looks like one big panic-stricken move to appeal to the stupid, bigoted, racist, inhuman "patriot" groups speaking loud and proud at their 12-people-strong demonstrations in front of Parliament. Oh and sending letters to 4 Nigerian children aged a year and eight months, three, five and eight asking for their employment and residence papers in order to renew their Temporary Protection Status on a holiday? Class.
As a closing attempt to analogise this whole mess, I'm going to look back at a conversation I had with a good friend of mine who was struggling to come to terms with what is happening. Imagine the previous administration being a child who doesn't like vegetables so manages to sneak them into his room after dinner. After years and years of doing this, this vegetable hoarding starts to get out of hand so imagine the child's relief when the issue is solved as they find out they can forget all about it when a new family with a new child is moving in. Here comes another child whose parents don't forcefeed him quite as many vegetables, but just enough that he still needs to smuggle a few up to his bedroom. Upon locating the perfect place under the country's largest rug, what does he find? A massive lump of rotten legisla- I mean, vegetables. Of course, now his parents, let's call them EUgine and EUvonne, are annoyed to say the least, so the new child tries and tries to get rid of the rotten mess by throwing them out of the window as fast as possible only to realise he can't actually open the rain shutters and thus, the vegetables bounce off and fall right back in his sad lap.
The moral of this is that, the system wasn't exactly working for the first kid because he kind of lacked foresight. The same system, no matter how much smaller the problem is, won't actually work for the new kid either.
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