Before I took on the economy and the self-employed as my new portfolio last June I spent a good part of my political career shadowing the interior. It was a micro ministry focusing on the fight against crime and the administration of the Police Corps but it was saddled with one of the country’s major challenges for the last decade or so. Irregular migration into our country has soared to disproportionate levels and peaking to quasi-crises situations in the summer months.

Irregular migration is a thorny subject that brings out conflicting emotions in ordinary people. I have challenged extremes during my ten year long tenure as shadow minister for the interior. Those who fan the flames of xenophobia and racism as well as those who always transmit a too-friendly reception mentality have a common goal. They both want the problem to endure. The former exploit the strains that irregular migration bring upon the human and technical resources of our country to further an extreme right wing political agenda while the latter feel that the problem gives them the legitimacy to profess the virtues of the integration into our country of unsustainable flows of migrants. As far as I’m concerned they are both very wrong and do massive damage to our country’s credibility both locally and abroad.

The racists feed on peoples’ ignorance making them believe that their livelihood is seriously threatened, their jobs are at risk and that their children will be marrying coloured migrants and producing Muslim offspring. On the other hand the reception friendly groups try to make liberal minded folk believe that irregular migrants have a God given right to enter and leave Malta at will and that the State has a permanent obligation to feed, cloth and integrate them irrespective of whether the migrants are economic or political ones. They are the ones who rush to international human rights organisations with accusations of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment allegedly happening on our Islands, unconsciously duping the international community into believing that what Malta needs is shorter detention periods and long term residence permits for migrants when in reality what we need is true European solidarity based on physical burden sharing.

The problem with the European Union is that it still believes that the problem should stay where it arrives. It is more than obvious that it does not wish to go beyond fiscal burden sharing which in essence means that as long as it carries on throwing money at Malta for the improvement of reception and detention centres and for the financing of repatriation flights it will keep the problem away from the continent. It has persevered in this illogic for more than a decade. What I find totally unacceptable from the European Union is that while on the one hand it continues to refuse to share the physical burden of managing and integrating irregular flows of migrants on the continent it has on the other hand the effrontery to meddle into our domestic problems by for instance attempting on more than one occasion to shorten detention periods for migrants. The Labour Opposition’s call to put more pressure on the EU comes as a consequence of the lethargy that has been shown by the EU in developing a fully fledged common migration policy that is not egoistic but that truly regards migration as a European problem as a whole and not as one that concerns only receiving states. This has been the status quo for too long. It is very obvious that the EU is taking Malta for granted because we seem to have been behaving very well in the European classroom. Sometimes it pays when you stand up to be counted.

The European Union’s indifference conflicts starkly with how the USA has looked upon Malta’ predicament for the last couple of years. Without being bound by any principle of solidarity the USA has accepted into its territory more of our migrants than any other EU country has. This is totally unacceptable by all standards especially now that the scenario is changing with irregular migrants flowing into the country in bad weather too. All the stakeholders must get real, come together and start acting in the true national interest. This is what the Labour Opposition wants.

Dr Gulia is the Labour main spokesman on the economy and

the self-employed