Your editorial ‘Worrying indeed’ (TMID, 4 September) made interesting reading. It was based on a story carried on the previous day in which it was held that (as if to coincide with this year’s multi-million euro Frontex operation!) there had been, so far, a 31 per cent increase in illegal immigrant arrivals. A five-column spread headline said 4,509 immigrants were currently living in Malta.

It turns out, however, that this figure was simply an addition of the 2,382 so far housed in open centres and the 2,127 so far housed in closed centres. This figure, the reporter added, came to one per cent of the Maltese population but this year, so far, we have had one illegal immigrant per 184 Maltese nationals amounting to 0.57 per cent of the population. The 2,223 who had arrived by boat until last Tuesday were the equivalent of 324,000 entering Italy or 420,000 entering Spain, both incidentally being also somewhat larger countries than Malta. (Even Cyprus is 30 times larger than Malta.)

These statistics are inaccurate and misleading. From various other sources, including the daily law court reports, it is amply clear that many other immigrants now reside in apartments and houses, which they often share in groups, throughout the Maltese Islands, from Birzebbuga to Bugibba, from Valletta to Mosta, from Zebbug to Swieqi. This is because in all probability only a minority of the 12,000 odd ‘boat people’ have managed or been allowed to leave these shores since they disembarked or were disembarked on them from 2002 onwards. Malta’s repatriation programme, even for continuing arrivals from countries classed as ‘safe’ by the European Union itself and UNHCR no less, remains weak.

Moreover, several immigrants arrived in Malta usually legally already before 2002, and indeed afterwards. These hail from the Middle East and the Near East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the Balkans, the Caucuses, South Asia, China, and elsewhere. It is not at all clear how many of these arrivals in the past decade or so remain residing here on expired tourist or work visas. Does any one really know? Do the airport or customs or police authorities keep regular count, overwhelmed as they seem to be by this new, ever-growing phenomenon? Have they become deaf-mutes, passively resigned to inevitability by some superior diktat or sheer fatalistic lethargy? Is industry an accomplice?

I can well understand why certain vociferous, readily accommodated advocacy agencies may resent the publication of or the reference to such information, including particularly any categorised breakdowns of illegal immigrant profiles. However, it would be in the national interest for the authorities to get their statistics right or approximately right, and for impartial journalists not to rely blindly on partial official figures, such as those concerning asylum-seekers currently housed in the public-funded centres, as if those were the be-all and the end-all of the matter. I found your editorial reference to the European Union “not noticing” such goings-on “as much as it should” to be kind and prudent.

In the past few years I have tried to throw some empirical light on this situation in a number of statistically predicated articles, the latest being a two part series published in this newspaper on 30 December 2007 and 6 January 2008, comparing appellant profiles as these have evolved and changed over the past three years. By the time one mentions a figure, however, it is already wrong. Still, I believe that the serious formulation of policy must be based on clinical empirically guided findings and not on emotionally charged stories intended to appeal sensationally to the wider public graphically and pictorially.

It need hardly be added that only a tiny minority of illegal arrivals in Malta have been judged to be bona fide refugees in international law terms. The problem is what to do with the others, unless these could be somehow integrated, if they even wanted that. There is a huge and ever-growing humanitarian problem. Simplistic generalisations are as misleading as partial statistics. What there should be is a full-time national and professional observatory to monitor and report on what’s going on, without zealous hidden agendae or party political motivations.

Particularly disturbing is the tendency (which one still sometimes comes across today) to equate contemporary mass illegal migration trafficking to an island bursting at the seams, with that of the thousands of Maltese who from the 19th century onwards, and especially in and after the 1950s, and then again for different reasons in the 1970s and later, had applied to emigrate, whether to neighbouring countries or more recently to the far-flung corners of the onetime British Empire, where policy revolved around the principle “populate or perish”. Ask any Maltese migrant settlers around the world how they feel about that.

PROF. HENRY FRENDO

Attard

Editor’s note: The figures in question were supplied by the relevant government ministry, as an official tally. In addition, TMID quoted that 11,303 immigrants arrived in Malta over seven years in a total of 333 boats.