Slowly, the international regulation as regards boat people is being drawn up and clarified by international organisations and countries.

Prime Minister Muscat yesterday announced that all economic migrants who came to Malta on board the Lifeline are to be sent back to their countries of origin.

There is a reason behind this decision. For it is one thing to define and maybe give refuge to people running away from war, persecution and genocide. And quite another thing to consider giving refuge to people fleeing not from war but from hunger and poverty.

In effect, the two categories resemble each other although they are quite different from each other. Both are categories of unfortunate people who have been treated badly by life. One category is fleeing from war, the other from poverty, malnutrition and death. Many times, war invades the people suffering from hunger and poverty.

It is clear that most countries are not in a position to help migrants running away from war, let alone economic migrants. So ultimately it all ends up in a choice, a choice none of us would like to make.

However, as Dr Muscat pointed out yesterday, it has been proven that refugees running away from a war in their country many times return to it once the hostilities have ceased. This happened for example in Lebanon.

But economic migrants many times stay on in their countries of adoption. This is the story, for instance, of the USA which is mostly made up of economic migrants from other countries. In some cases, the new Americans were running away from persecution,  because of their religious belief. But in most other cases they were purely and simply economic migrants. Yet America allowed them in, nay it welcomed them. They made America great.

Today, as already said, the dominant policy is to try and keep all migrants out of Europe and especially the economic migrants. At the same time, demographic analysis shows that Europe is an aging continent and most economies face people reaching pension age in droves. There is simply no way these gaps can be filled by natural means.

It must also be said that countries like Malta are facing a huge influx of people who come by plane and not by boat and who somehow find residence in Malta. Or is the clamour against migrants mainly because of their colour? Nor can it be said that the clamour is religious or ethnic in basis seeing that we have so many new residents from a different religion and/or ethnicity.

There is much to be said in favour of harnessing the migrant flow instead of letting it run amok all over the country. But to do that a country must have educational facilities and training available to people who maybe come from a far different background.

Put like this, a properly organized integration can work, it would avoid tensions rising and populists gaining the upper hand. Past history, especially of the 1930s, shows where this did not work and tensions and war were the result.  But there is still a possibility that with care such an open-minded policy can work.

As long however as we keep kicking out migrants, even economic ones, we do injustice to people who have undertaken great sacrifices to improve the lot of their families and maybe deprive ourselves of much needed manpower and of people who with training could help the economy.