There is a huge difference between what we in Malta understand when we use certain terms and what other peoples understand by them.

In the end, we all seem to agree we are worried about immigrant but scratch a bit and you find we are talking of very different things.

Take Britain, for instance. Voters regularly list immigration as being one of the most important issues. In May, that concern rose to a three-year high with 57 per cent of respondents ranking it among their top three main worries.

Anyone who visits the UK comes back with a heightened perception of multiculturalism. The last census found that just 45 per cent of Londoners class themselves as “white British”.

That is where the experience of Britain and that of Malta start to diverge. We have very little figures to show us the way, but we can sense that the recent events and talk of pushbacks as well as the arrival of boat after boat of asylum seekers push immigration to the top of our collective worries.

The numbers, however, do not match. Nor the facts.

The numbers first.

Recent journalistic studies in this area have shown that even though the numbers of boat people who arrived on our shores has been considerable given our small size, only a small part of those who came here are still here. The others seem to have disappeared. We would rather not know how this is done.

Yet the perception remains that we are being inundated by asylum seekers. People passing through the Hal Far and Marsa areas exclaim at the continued presence of so many coloured people in one area and it is this that contributes mostly to the public perception of Malta being flooded by immigrants.

Yet this perception only relates to coloured people, known as the boat people or however we term them.

Apart from them, we have a much wider, yet less palpable, flow of immigration we do not seem to notice. Take the huge amount of cars with Italian or Bulgarian number plates that we see on our roads. It is impossible that they are all holidaymakers who came over with their cars to visit such a small island. EU membership means that EU nationals are free to relocate here, free to work here (in normal circumstances), free to open business here. Yet strangely we feel no pressure from this immigrant wave.

Not so in Britain. The UK has a longstanding tradition of tolerance towards immigrants and its economy has benefited from a vibrant and open labour market. The influx of hundreds of thousands of Polish and Lithuanian workers to Britain after their countries joined the EU in 2004 – far in excess of the numbers expected – has created a sense that the UK is no longer in control of its borders.

The British government’s latest attempt to crack down on immigration has been denounced as “stupid and offensive” by one of its own ministers, as the issue again rises to the top of the political agenda.

Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat business secretary, fears that the coalition government’s attempt to reassure public opinion on immigration is damaging community relations as well as the UK’s economy and universities.

Mr Cable’s frustration boiled over after the launch of a mobile poster campaign across six London boroughs telling illegal immigrants to “go home or face arrest”.

“It is designed, apparently, to create a sense of fear in the British population that we have a vast problem of illegal immigration,” he told the BBC. “We have a problem – but not a vast one – and it’s got to be dealt with in a measured way.”

If Britain does have an immigration problem, which is now being turned into a mass fear of mass illegal immigration, we in Malta do not have the problem in the same way Britain has, yet even here it is being turned into a mass psychosis that we are being flooded by illegal immigrants. Only, in our case, when talking of illegal immigration we mean almost exclusively the coloured boat people fleeing from wars. With regard to the ‘other’ immigration, legal or otherwise, we could not care one whit.

When in the past week another newspaper tried to raise consciousness about the case of a man who claimed he is still waiting for his work permit, comment bandied around focused almost exclusively on the colour of his skin and shouted down the small and feeble cries that this man deserves justice. (Actually, for those like this writer who know the facts, the facts as presented in the newspaper report, like so many other attempts before, are simple travesties of the real facts: the man was charged with stealing and acquitted on a technicality, and he came to Malta just to get an entry to Europe; he used to beat his wife many times until she obtained a separation from him. So the police may be right this man should not be given residence rights. Colour just does not come into it).

Whatever, while keeping all our legislative structures in place with regard to the boat people, we may perhaps start to worry more about the ‘other’ immigration, legal or otherwise. Our society is too small to allow it to be swamped by huge waves of immigrants and, fortunately for us, we are still far more homogeneous than, for example, Britain.

The immigration debate in the UK is not just about numbers: it also concerns whether a country with a previously liberal approach to the issue is turning its back on the world.

Mr Cable, whose first wife was Indian, fears the tone of the debate is deterring business people from applying for visas in the UK, even if the government insists its quotas for skilled workers are not being filled.

UK universities have suffered significant declines in the numbers of students from countries such as India, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia; a study found a 32 per cent drop in first-year students from India.

In our case, the trickle may become a flood and there seems to be no way with which we can stem it. In this case, we are maybe more impotent than we are at the arrival of boat people. As is the case with Britain, rather than trying to man the defences on the beaches, our national duty should be to foster integration through such means as the teaching of our language, and setting up a high bar which may include knowledge of Maltese civilization and history and administering to would-be new nationals an oath of allegiance to Malta and its laws.