The ANR and its followers think that everybody in Africa is gagging to come to Malta, the land of opportunity, milk and honey. Yet the truth is that those who seek out a future in Europe would rather risk death than end up here. Some of them are so terrified of finishing up in this dead-end (they might as well have stayed at home), that they will carry on into a storm and take their (slim) chances rather than be rescued by the Armed Forces of Malta. That is what happened with the ones who died on Friday after refusing help when off Gozo because they wanted to head for Italy. Far from word getting around in Africa that Malta is a good place to go because they give you free food and cast-off Nike T-shirts, even if they leave you in a detention camp, the opposite seems to be the case: “Whatever you do, avoid Malta at all costs.” Face it, if you were going to emigrate from Malta, you wouldn’t pick Gibraltar, would you?

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The other day I was reading an autobiographical piece by Ken Hom, the Chinese-American who is the face of Asian cooking in Europe. His own experience of growing up in Chicago was one of racism and ghettoisation, and as he described it to me during an interview when he was here in Malta to promote his new wok, the Chicago of his youth was the most racially divided city in the USA, with no possibility of integration. His mother has lived in Chicago’s Chinatown since the 1950s and still can’t speak any English because it is an entirely Chinese microcosm. He only began to learn English, which he now speaks with great elegance, when he started going to an “American” school, in addition to his Chinese school.

The first Chinese in America went there in the 19th century. Almost all of them were men, in keeping with the “male adventurer” tradition which held that men should emigrate alone and send money back home to their women and children, if women and children they had. It was the same in many parts of Europe, and also in Malta, until the 1960s. As Mr Hom described it, all immigrants suffered discrimination in the US – which, ironically, is a country formed entirely by immigration – except for the so-called “invisible immigrants”, those of British descent. The Maltese suffered a lot of prejudice, too. Yet, as he put it “the Chinese encountered prejudice whose virulence and chronic violence were surpassed only by that inflicted upon African-Americans and American Indians”.

Most of the Chinese immigrants to the USA in the 19th century were from the Cantonese region, an area with a long history of migration, mercantilism and overseas trade. Between 1850 and 1900, literally millions of Cantonese left for Australia, South America, South Africa, and eastern Asia. It was a diaspora, but only a relatively small number of those millions went to North America – mainly to California, where they worked as prospectors for gold and as labourers on the construction of the transcontinental railroad. “As gold miners, the Chinese evoked hostility because they were deemed to be foreigners who had no right to extract wealth from the land belonging to the native-born,” Mr Hom wrote. “As labourers they were blamed for lowering the wage scale of white workers. As laundrymen, restaurant operators, tailors and ‘coolies’, they were cast as stereotypes of all Chinese.”

These restrictions were informal and all down to individual and social prejudice. This informal prejudice was crystallized, however, into the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and by subsequent state and federal laws which sought to prevent the integration of Chinese immigrants into mainstream American life. They had been allowed into the country, but they were not allowed to live as Americans. The Exclusion Act prohibited or penalised the further immigration into the USA of Chinese men, and blocked the immigration of Chinese women entirely (so that they couldn’t breed). Most of these restrictions were not lifted until as late in the day as 1965, when the struggles of the blacks against American apartheid were still ongoing. “The exclusion of Chinese women had an awful effect on Chinese family life throughout America,” Ken Hom wrote. Most Chinese men were forced to remain bachelors. They could not find any Chinese women to marry, and the anti-miscegenation laws, which prevented marriage and breeding between white people and blacks or Asians, made it impossible for them to find a non-Chinese wife. Incidentally, the anti-miscegenation laws were only dissolved after the popular movement against racism, started by Martin Luther King. The family is the strongest institution in Chinese culture, and this deprivation was particularly cruel.

The background to Ken Hom’s American childhood affected him so deeply that, despite his pleasant student days at the University of Berkeley in California, during the hippie heady days of flower-power – where, he says, he formed the social, philosophical and political principles that have stayed with him since, and also where he began to give lessons in Asian cooking to finance his way through college – he later chose to make his home permanently in Europe, returning to America only to visit his mother. I put it to him that perhaps it was the adversity of his circumstances that made him such a tremendous international success. But I thought about this five minutes later and realized that it cannot be true at all – that somebody like Ken Hom became what he is today despite ghettoisation and racism, and not because of it. The truth of the matter is that a lot of possible Ken Homs must have fallen by the wayside, prevented from achieving their full potential because a bunch of white people decided that Chinese people are inferior, different, and somehow sub-human. How good it must feel to be on top of the world while the white people who decided that you are inferior are still driving to and from their hamster-on-a-treadmill jobs, and going back to sleep in their little homes in mind-numbing dormitory towns, while you live in a glorious medieval tower in France and the world is your oyster. The fact remains that brilliance knows no racial boundaries, and neither does ignorance.

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Lorna Vassallo, a Labour Party activist who writes a column in The Times, has become something of a cult figure. Every week, it’s a mad race to see who can delve into her deathless prose and find the biggest gems first. Last week, a friend beat me to it, e-mailing this: “I do admit that the leader of the Opposition is but a genuine man turned unemotional through rubbing in the wrong direction.” I thought he was lying, and immediately logged on to read the original source. And sure enough... who would have believed it? How embarrassing. And then there was another writer, who described a man as being “famed for his notoriety” – oh dear. The same friend e-mailed me a list of precious things culled from the day’s postings on the ANR website, which has also become something of a cult must-see with us, because it is so whacko. Here they are: “Islam is no laughing matter” (and there we were, about to fall off our chairs with the giggles); “Liberalism, with its anti-family and anti-Christian agenda has created an unprecedented vacuum that unless urgently addressed can only be filled by immigrant populations and the islamification of Europe” (careful with those vacuums; try a hoover next time); “Immigrants, thanks to more than generous social welfare procreate at will” (whereas we do so at gunpoint); “More profitable public institutions like BOV are to be privitised” (turned into privies?); “We wait today with baited breath” (how do you bait breath – with a hook and a worm?); “We are eating from within” – nieklu minn gewwa, one assumes – “liquefying the assets, accumulated thanks to the sacrifices of blood, sweat and tears and the deferred gratification of our previous generations” (no comment).” It’s wonderful – just the right thing to cheer me up amid a slew of deadlines.