Just as Malta is in the throes of a bigger bout of anti-African angst than usual (the internet comments boards and social media are alight with what appear to be contenders for membership of the Ku Klux Klan), something happens in Australia which helps give us a better sense of perspective. That country, with its increasingly rabid approach to pushing immigrants back and deporting them without due process – being Australia, it is not a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and not subject to the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights – has revoked the residence visa of a Maltese man who has been there for 47 years.

Alex Vella emigrated to Australia with his parents and siblings in 1967, when he was 16. Though he came to Malta frequently for visits, Australia has been his permanent home since then. But strangely, he never became an Australian citizen, though he says he applied twice. For the first 25 years of his life there, this might have been a conscious choice, because obtaining Australian citizenship would have meant giving up his Maltese citizenship. Malta did not allow dual citizenship until the 1990s. And that in turn might have placed restrictions on whatever Vella wanted to do in Malta, especially in the 1970s and 1980s when immigration controls here were extremely strict even through the normal channels of arrival and departure by plane.

You had to fill in those little white cards on the plane, the immigration police monitored the arrival of tourists (anybody without a Maltese passport) and their timely departure, and even if you were born Maltese and raised Maltese and had been Maltese for the first 40 years of your life, the minute you gave up your Maltese passport you were classed as a foreigner who could not outstay his three-month tourist visa and who could most certainly not work in Malta or operate financially and commercially without permission and jumping through some pretty restrictive hoops.

So let’s say Alex Vella chose not to apply for Australian citizenship until the 1990s, when Malta changed its legislation and allowed dual citizenship. But then why did his two applications fail after that? He hasn’t bothered to tell us. Or maybe he wasn’t told. The odd thing is that he lived in Australia as securely and self-assuredly as if he were a proper citizen, and not a Maltese man with a Maltese passport living as a guest of the Australian state. He runs a business which he describes as ‘property dealing and selling cars and motorbikes’, he heads the MC Rebels Australia biker gang and he has had a fort built as their headquarters on his land, which must be pretty extensive. While he was on one of his many trips back to Malta – and shouldn’t the police here be looking at why somebody like that is making this many trips? – Australia’s immigration minister, acting on the advice of the police there, summarily revoked Vella’s Australian visa.

When Vella landed in Sydney, the immigration police informed him that he was persona non grata, and he was to return immediately to his country – Malta. He has made his home and operated his business (whatever that might really be) in Australia from the age of 16 to 62, and but he failed to clock the fact that, without Australian citizenship and with a Maltese passport, he was there at the sufferance of the Australian government and he belonged fairly and squarely to Malta. He is here now and it looks like we are lumped with him.

 

So why did the Australian immigration minister revoke his visa in consultation with the police? Alex Vella says he was convicted of no crime, that he has a clean criminal record. That is hardly the point though. Everywhere in the world, a visa is not a right but something given to you on sufferance. No state requires justification for revoking a visa or removing a person from its territory. In practice, though, democratic states will always have justification even if this is not communicated publicly. No democratic state is prepared to risk a diplomatic incident by throwing out or revoking the visa of a citizen of another state with which it has good relations, unless there is strong justification for doing that. The press has not been told why Alex Vella’s Australian visa has been revoked, but I think we safely assume that the Australian government will have communicated the reasons why to the Maltese High Commissioner, even if it has to track him down at his menswear hire shop in Melbourne for the purpose.

The Australian press made much of the story over the last few days. If Alex Vella were just an ordinary Maltese citizen who had had his visa revoked, they wouldn’t have bothered. The reason this story was big in the news there is because the MC Rebels biker gang is notorious, and Vella heads it. Its members are suspected of links to gangland killings, drug-running and prostitution. Scott Morrison, the immigration minister who pulled Vella’s visa, told the Australian press on Tuesday that the Australian government would use intelligence from the police and the Australian Crime Commission in any court challenge that Vella chose to put up against the revocation of his visa. “This government is not going to shirk its responsibilities when it comes to making decisions about these very serious character matters,” he said.

This might be a sort of karma: with what seems to be the whole of Malta ranting and raving against the filthy and dangerous Africans we don’t want, who are causing all the crime, raping our daughters, spreading disease and behaving badly when they are here on sufferance, the Australian press is dominated by big news stories of a Maltese man thrown out of his host country for abusing of its tolerance and hospitality quite conspicuously. The thing that struck me most about this story is that Alex Vella clearly didn’t understand the word ‘visa’, for he behaved as though he were a citizen. I suppose that after 47 years you do tend to get rather comfortable.