It has been officially confirmed that Malta has received an average of €1 million a month from European Union funds to help the country deal with the influx of illegal migrants into the country – €84.9 million over the 2007-2013 seven-year period.
The fact that Malta receives EU funds to the tune of millions a year is pretty much common knowledge. But that knowledge is being conveniently ignored by those who have a problem, to put it mildly, with the country assisting some of the world’s most unfortunate.
But this week’s official statement by EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, who has been much maligned by the lower echelons of Maltese society in recent weeks, puts it clearly in black and white.
Of course, not all those funds go directly toward sustaining the physical needs of migrants in Malta’s detention and/or open centres. Those funds are derived from the SOLID programme – comprising the EU’s External Borders Fund, the European Return Fund, the European Refugee Fund, and the European Integration Fund.
The European Refugee Fund directly provides funds for increasing the capacity of reception centres, the provision of material aid and medical care in the centres and measures to streamline the treatment of asylum applications. The Return and External Borders Funds, meanwhile, provide funds for voluntary return programmes, forced return activities and investments in infrastructure and equipment to ensure an efficient and secure management of the flow at the country’s external borders.
The problem is that while so many are conveniently overlooking the funds the EU allocated to Malta’s refugee problem, they also overlook the actual numbers that we are dealing with – minimising the former and exaggerating the latter.
The facts: as of last April, out of the 16,390 migrants that found themselves in Malta between 2002 and 2012, there were a total of 2,524 migrants still residing in the country – 276 migrants in Malta’s detention centres, another 1,448 residing in open centres, and not more than 800 who are settled in the community outside the centres – nowhere near the levels of the figures picked seemingly out of the thin air by certain commentators.
Up to the end of July, 1,294 migrants have been brought to or landed in Malta – 984 irregular migrants of whom landed in Malta in July, a record month. Another 197 irregular migrants arrived this month. Add those up and the grand total comes to 4,015 people who have been granted or are seeking one form of humanitarian protection status or another.
This year’s total figure of 1,491 migrants who have landed in Malta is still far lower than last year’s 1,890 and is still far below 2008’s record of 2,195.
4,015 people: is this the great invasion that some, too many, segments of society are speaking of? Is this what constitutes a threat to our way of life? Is this what the country cannot afford to handle, €1 million in EU funds a month or not?
In a column published in last week’s issue, Henry Miller, a fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at the highly respected Stanford University, wrote: “People have a right to be ignorant. Just as we can choose to damage our health by overeating, smoking cigarettes, and neglecting to take prescribed medications, we can also choose to remain uninformed on policy issues.
“Perhaps ignorance makes sense sometimes. According to economists, ‘rational ignorance’ comes into play when the cost of gaining enough understanding of an issue to make an informed decision relating to it outweighs the benefit that one could reasonably expect from doing so. For example, many who are preoccupied with family, school, work, and mortgages may not consider it cost-effective to sift through a mass of often-inconsistent data to understand, say, the risks and benefits of nuclear power, plasticizers in children’s toys, or the Mediterranean diet.”
In this particular case, the concept of ‘rational ignorance’ could perhaps be extended to include the cost-effectiveness of sifting through information that, at the end of the day, will not support your argument one iota.
A million children
Every responsible parent out there strives to give their children the best upbringing possible and a core factor of that is providing stability. And irrespective of anyone’s views on the situation in Syria – who is responsible for the hourly bloodshed or whether chemical weapons are being used and by whom – Friday’s news that the one millionth Syrian child became a refugee is absolutely shocking.
One million children – more than double the population of this country – have been driven from their homes by the violence. Can you imagine even this small country with no children, to paraphrase the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, who compared the figure to the child population of Wales or the combined child population of Boston or Los Angeles on Friday?
Friday’s milestone is a grim one indeed – one million children who have been uprooted from their lives, their homes or families and have wound up in destitution in refugee camps scattered across neighbouring countries. Just over half of the near two million registered Syrian refugees are children and 740,000 of those are under the age of 11.
Not only have those children experienced firsthand what we will hopefully never have to witness, the horrors of war in all their heinous facets, which have left many of them understandably traumatised and haunted for life. Their refugee situation coupled with the atrocities many of them have witnessed, Guterres said, stand to make this a “lost generation”.
The Syrian crisis is also a crisis for the country’s children, who by default have absolutely nothing to do with the country’s upheaval.
It was being reported yesterday that moves are afoot by the United States in possible conjunction with other partners to seek an end to the crisis that has claimed some 100,000 lives since demonstrations began in March 2011, nearly two-and-a-half years ago. The sooner the international community takes concrete action to put an end to the bloodshed and refugee exodus the better.