As I was reading an interview with Angelina Jolie that appeared in a local newspaper last Sunday, I couldn’t help thinking of the bigger picture. The day before, Saturday afternoon, we were walking through Albert Town, taking a short cut from Paola to Hamrun. We saw a now defunct Malta Shipbuilding edifice being used to store Arriva buses. We saw a shanty town scenario such as Albert Town typically possesses, highlighted by a small roadside chapel standing smack in front of the town’s ‘kazin’ with a group of men sitting outside drinking and smoking dejectedly.

We passed the abattoir and then approached the Marsa quarters of hundreds of men most people refer to as “illegal immigrants”|. Again, the scenario is surreal. First of all, you see the load of floating rubbish that is left lying on the filthy water – for what reason and why? What is the point of keeping rusting ships, boats and submarines in limited water space, allowing them to further pollute the already fetid water, stinks of rubbish and human excrement?

The smell hits you metres away – which doesn’t bode well. And sitting around on the water’s edge are dozens of men going about their daily lives – talking, smoking, staring at us. We are walking through a ghetto and I am not in the least concerned about them. I am concerned about the mosquitoes, which are a health threat to them and to anybody walking past during the day or night: to the prostitutes who will be lining the streets as the sun sets on the day; to the other men who are as Maltese as you and I but who will nonetheless still roam these streets later at night seeking sexual solace from the very same women who bed with the ‘residents’ of this town that has been left to its own devices.

I still remember when, many years ago, I visited the building that houses these immigrants back when it was still a boys’ school run by a valiant man, the late Frans Sammut. He had called me at the newsroom in which I then worked and asked me to kindly visit the school – his words still sharp in my memory – ‘our’ boys, as he called them, had an art exhibition on and as nobody ever visited the school, he wondered if I would be interested in visiting and writing about what I saw at the exhibition. I did, I did and I did – visit, write and like what I saw. He sent me a thank you memento, which I cherish with pride and honour. Now, this same building has become the glorified part of the ghetto.

And I think of the €500 increase per week that Cabinet ministers have been kindly and generously allowed to enjoy by Parliament. And I wonder where social justice stands. Right, so the political powers of this country don’t want to turn Albert Town into a haven for the asylum seekers living there. They want to let it become barely sustainable and just about manageable for these men to exist in, so that with all their heart they want to run away to somewhere better. But where? And in the meantime, the people of Albert Town and the neighbouring towns are bearing the brunt of the situation. It is not because of the immigrants who live in their midst – it is because of the lack of infrastructure, the lack of social ease, the lack of cleanliness – the area is a dump of all that should be invisible on a island which has now accumulated too many skeletons in its closets. When the area housed a boys’ school, conditions were already barely sustainable and hardly fit for boys to be educated in. Now it is far, far, worse.

I calculated, perhaps erroneously, because maths was never my forte, that €500 a week will turn into €26,000 in one year. Of course, tax will be deducted, of course it will… I certainly hope so. But in the meantime, people out there are working for less than €5 an hour and we call this progress? To me it sounds gross. Tell Angelina… Tell her to visit Albert Town and see for herself. It is not only the asylum seekers who are suffering.