One does not have to go far: Even a ride on any bus will tell you how Malta’s population has changed.

There are, of course, bus routes and bus routes. Some are still solidly Maltese. But others are mixed. On some routes along the tourist areas, there can be times when there are more non-Maltese than Maltese.

That is also due to tourists visiting our islands, but it would be very short-sighted to think the foreigners around are all tourists, as we used to think some years ago. The fact is there are increased numbers of foreigners living among us.

Again, another popular misconception is that apart from the tourists and the asylum seekers, recognisable mostly from their skin colour, there are no other foreigners in Malta. That’s not true – there are countless others.

Hopefully, the results of the recent national census will provide us with more precise figures. Of course, since joining the EU, citizens from other EU states can relocate to Malta. We still have some of the ‘sixpenny settlers’ from a long time ago. There are then pockets of people who relocated to Malta to escape from the ravages of the Bosnian wars and who have grown roots here.

But there are others and others. There is, for instance, a growing Chinese community living here. There is also a Nigerian network.

Apart from the boat people, there are other refugees from poverty-stricken countries, or economic refugees, as they are called. Heaven knows how they ended here. Each is a person, but equally each represents a family, a community, and is a bridge to them.

Even in this, Malta is rapidly becoming a ‘normal’ European country, though, whether we like it or not, we still have a long way to go. A ride on the Brussels metro, for instance, shows more non-Belgians than Belgians. Parts of Rome are inundated with foreigners. Italy has taken in huge amounts of Albanians and Romanians, legally or otherwise. The banlieues of Paris are choc-a-bloc with people of North African descent. And Marseille is the largest North African city in the Med.

All this huge influx creates reactions. One can only look at the results that Marine Le Pen obtained in the first round of the French presidential election to see how this reaction can be channelled along political lines. So too Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. We too had an incipient reaction at the time when the boat people looked like swamping our meagre resources.

Since then, the reaction has mostly died down (though it never lies far below the surface) and the boat people have decreased. But the number of non-Maltese people flooding in has increased.

We used to have a huge influx of Libyans when the two countries had different regimes and, again, this was an invasion that the Maltese people never liked. Yet some Libyans have settled here, with families, and they have become integrated into our society.

Integration is the only solution to multi-ethnicity. But there must also be graduality in the process. In other words, no sudden invasion, no swamping. Malta is a small enough country and numbers that can be absorbed in a bigger country would create a shock wave here.

The primary school in St Paul’s Bay is said to be the most multicultural school on the island, with something like 30 different nationalities, with children mixing with each other, playing with each other, and learning multiculturalism without so many top-heavy concepts.

We cannot of course foresee what will happen in the coming years. So far, despite the numbers, multiculturalism seems to be working: There are no divides along ethnic lines in our society. There is also, to be sure, positive values to be learned from multiculturalism – the values of tolerance, of seeing the beauty in the other person, of climbing down from our high horse that Malta is the best, the highest, the most pure of countries. Long may this positive trend continue.