Those who write racist letters to the newspapers often try to conceal their primitive feelings behind pseudo-rationality. Malta is too small and overpopulated to accommodate an influx of “outsiders”, they tell us. This appeal to reason is misconceived. Perhaps the people who argue this way have not yet realised that we joined the European Union last year. We now form part of a union of 25 countries with 450 million people. When the seven-year special embargo on the free movement of these people into Malta is up, in less than six years, any one of them will be able to come here to live and work, and no amount of letter-writing to the press is going to stop them. This is what we voted for. Of course, whether they will want to come and live here is an entirely different matter.
So far, because there is no similar temporary embargo on Maltese leaving Malta to go and live in any one of those other 24 member states, the young and the talented are packing their bags and leaving. Even the not-so-young who are fed up with their crummy jobs and a low standard of living are doing it. But that’s beside the point. The point is that we cannot use Malta’s size and over-population as an argument in this basically racist debate, saying that we cannot afford to take in those who are granted refugee status because we’re too small – not when, in less than six years, our borders will be thrown wide open to millions.
The fact that, fairly soon, our borders will be completely open to citizens of EU member states should be borne in mind, too, by those waving the anti-multiculturalism card. They don’t want anyone here who is black or Muslim, Jewish, Indian or anything else that might be a little bit more interestingly different to their beach-barbecuing, Sunday-driving, let’s-talk-about-nothing-but-petty-politics culture. Amazingly, they haven’t yet woken up to the fact that yes, Malta is part of the EU. If a thousand black Muslims, Jews and Sikhs with EU citizenship decide, for some unfathomable reason of their own, that Malta is a happening place in the world of international business and that it’s worth coming here to live and work, there’s nothing to stop them doing so.
The only argument that can logically be used against illegal immigration is the fact that it is illegal. But that does not mean we should object to the immigrants themselves, or treat them as anything less than human.
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There are some individuals who embarrass themselves when they display their ignorance in letters to the newspapers. As I read these missives, I can almost hear them in their kitchens, thumping the table and expounding their views to family members and friends who are forced to listen to them and worse, to agree. The latest is a man from San Gwann who wrote in to The Times to “state” (as he would no doubt put it): “We all know how vulnerable the US has become because of multiculturalism. A typical example is the horrifying Katrina incident. The internet reveals everything. We do not need the local media.” I couldn’t quite get what he meant, but that’s the trouble with these people: the incoherence in their minds spills over onto paper when they try to express themselves. Confused thoughts and confounded logic cannot be coherently explained. So the link between Hurricane Katrina and the multiculturalism of the USA will forever remain a mystery to us.
The greatest irrationality in this man’s arguments, though, lies in his belief that multiculturalism has made the USA vulnerable, rather than the most powerful economy in the world. I am curious to know when, in his view, the USA was not multicultural, given that it is the world’s melting-pot of creeds, colours and races, and has been so from the very beginning. It is precisely because of this mix of people from all over the world, and its success in giving them all an American identity along with the American dream, that the USA became so rich and powerful within just a few decades between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. By the 1950s, the standard of living of the average American was incomparably higher than that of the average European. Americans sent food and clothing parcels to relatives in Europe and felt sorry for them because they had no fridges, showers, fitted kitchens or large cars. Multiculturalism hasn’t made America vulnerable. It has made America, full stop.
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It’s been some time since the leader of the opposition made a whacko announcement, but his latest makes him sound as though he is planning to align himself with Norman Lowell. The national interest comes before human rights, he said, amazing us all except the Norman brigade. There is a credibility gap between the way he presents himself as a well-read intellectual and the surprising statements that so often pop from his mouth. Let’s put it this way, we are unsurprised when Norman Lowell and his band of poorly educated bigots say or write something off-the-wall. But the leader of the opposition never fails to make us raise our eyebrows when he says such odd things, undoing at a stroke the credibility he has built up on the backs of the out-of-favour Nationalists.
The essential point of the Declaration of Human Rights – the very one that underpins all the different points – is that human rights are supreme and come before the national interest. This does not mean that a country has a duty to safeguard the human rights of its citizens only, but that it has the duty to safeguard the human rights of anyone within its territory. Internationally, countries have a duty to band together in order to sanction other countries where human rights are not safeguarded. This is why we had sanctions against South Africa during apartheid.
The leader of the opposition’s statement is not just very weird, it also betrays a dangerous lack of respect for individual rights and liberty. As more than one commentator has pointed out since, it is but a reflection of all that made the Labour Party the ugly mess it was in the 1970s and 1980s, under Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. The national interest came before human rights, and the national interest was defined as any particular bee that Mintoff and KMB might have woken up with in their
bonnets that morning.
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They say that Malta is similar to Ireland in many ways. I don’t know because I have never been there, though my great-great-grandmother was a Dubliner, and her Irish eyes still twinkle in my sons’ faces, five generations down the line – so perhaps I should take a trip at least once to have a look. The similarities between Maltese and Irish social culture seemed all too apparent, though, when I read what the Irish novelist John McGahern said on BBC Radio Three about life in Ireland in the 1960s: “I think that the place was a kind of crazy place – it was childish; anything foreign was resented. Irish was compulsory in all the schools and you couldn’t get into university without Irish at that time. It has always amused me that one of the reasons that learning Irish was advocated was that it would keep out foreign corrupting influences. Well, of course, we were anxious to get as much foreign corrupting influences as possible.” Mr McGahern reminded his British listeners that (like Malta) the state tried to control what its people read. He described how, in 1926, a committee of five – called the Committee on Evil Literature – was brought together in Dublin to seek out and eliminate objectionable books. The committee operated until the end of the century, still banning books in the 1990s. In all, around 12,000 titles were banned, causing wonder as to whether the censors read them all, or whether they went on reputation alone. Thank God those days are over, though it was in His name that Ireland and Malta prevented their people from reading what they wished.
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A friend called the other day, to tell me that she had never regretted her lack of a picture-taking mobile phone so much as when she drove past the new horse-shelter in Valletta’s Palace Square. There beneath the shelter was a cab-driver, fast asleep in his karozzin in the shade, while his horse stood outside in the sun. It would have made a very publishable picture.