With Matteo Salvini, deputy prime minister and Minister for the Interior, it is an outrage a day.

After ordering Italy’s ports to remain shut in the face of 669 asylum seekers plucked from the sea, and after demanding, nay ordering, Malta to take in some of them, he has now turned his gaze on the Roma, the gypsies.

Speaking to TeleLombarda yesterday he proposed to carry out a census of the Roma, find those who can stay in Italy and more those who have no permit to stay in Italy and throw the latter out.

Predictably, an uproar ensued, especially from the Left who say such a census is illegal and would amount to the preliminary of ethnic cleansing.

Those of us who visit Italy know that the Roma can be pests, they try to steal from anyone and everyone and they speak an unintelligible language. Had we been living in Italy our complaints would be far wider.

This is just one aspect of what the migrant issue in Italy entails. It also explains what led the two parties at present governing Italy to have such an election victory, an upsurge in support where just a few years ago they were almost marginal in the votes they obtained. The migrant issue had grown so big it could not be contained or relegated to a side-issue. It was not the League that made the issue a central plank in its approach to the electorate but on the contrary it was the situation in itself that became so unbearable to ordinary citizens. Add to that the austerity brought about by Italy’s weak economy and you have the makings of an explosion, which the election certainly was.

The conclusion to which many other governments have come to is that Italy and its people must be allowed to face up to the problem facing them in full independence. Europe must be there to help in solidarity.

Back to the migrants and to Malta. Even Malta must learn in these present circumstances.

It is undoubted that the migrants deserve help and support. The genuine among them come from war-torn countries, or countries ravaged by poverty and sickness, where children face a lifetime of suffering without ever realizing what potential they carry.

It is also clear that when this trickle became a flood, the genuine cases were lost among the not genuine, the opportunists, maybe even the hidden terrorists.

That is why it is essential that the flood be managed, curtailed, brought under control. That is where Malta, though it does so in a limited and imperfect manner, can teach its European counterparts and maybe too Italy and Salvini himself.

The asylum problem can never be solved by a laissez-faire attitude. The law is there and must be respected. There can be no progress where people feel free to roam about and shirk school and work – as the Roma tend to do.

Those who would portray any sort of control as the resurgence of the Nazi times are misreading the situation. The Jews who were sent to extermination camps were not guilty of the punishment they unluckily had to endure. But there are millions in Italy, and many in Malta, who have paid for the generosity they received with crime and these must face up to the consequences of their actions.