Readers surely remember the famous Mastercard ad, which begins with a series of priceless worthwhile experiences, then adds, ‘for all the rest there’s Mastercard’.
Over the past days we have reflected on the many ways in which we somehow conspired to bring shame to Malta’s name.
Items that crossed my mind:
? being beaten 12-1 by Spain when Spain needed just that amount of goals to overtake Holland and access the World Cup
? making fools of ourselves any time groups of us are taken to Brussels (Read Guze Stagno’s hilarious book on the matter – What happens in Brussels stays in Brussels). We have not improved much from the times of Ulied in-Nanna Venut fl-Amerika.
? treating the visitors to our country in such a manner as to ensure they will not come again
? being so obnoxious on the asylum seekers issue as to overtake the Lega Nord in xenophobic sentiments
? the police, wardens etc especially, allowing fellow-Maltese to get away with murder but then piling on the law to its nth degree on any foreigner who gets caught
? ditto ensuring that law processes are heavy on any foreigner but light on the Maltese.
And many, many more.
I am not including the parochial mindset of most of our politicians and the way parish-pump politics rule many of our decisions because this happens elsewhere too.
Nor the troglodytes, the people with extremist views, because, again, such people are to be found everywhere. Even Germany, even Britain have theirs.
People have come to admire our courage in persisting to be a nation state considering our small size, our sheer guts in tackling issues and standards that not even countries far bigger than us succeed at. We cannot not be a state because we have been a state de facto for 500 years or more, even under the British. But we are far too small to take up the onus of statehood and to attempt to swim in the very rough seas of an open economy, and yet we do it and yet we seem to thrive.
But then we had to create this IIP issue (the cash for passports issue) to suddenly have the whole world commenting and ridiculing us.
The tidal wave of comments on the international news websites was so great it had people in the Labour core go back to the famous Brussels file of the 1970s to believe it was all the Nationalists’ doing – they and their friends. As if today’s news stories are still driven by fax machines or teleprinters.
Instead, it was all true, all the news items, all the posts on Google News, multiplied themselves exponentially until, coming back and dredged up by the local media and revealed with all their hidden and not so hidden agendas, each one of them hurt and collectively they hurt even more.
We didn’t need all that negative publicity and probably we could have attained the same results with a much better honed approach.
There is one thing I have not so far succeeded in understanding: why this abnormal and undue haste? It would seem the government needs some ready cash to make up the figures in the deficit table but this beats, though not by far, the Nationalist government’s acceptance of Lm23 million for the development of Fort Cambridge so that Malta could enter the euro. Some whiz kid somewhere found this IIP concept and persuaded the government here was a sure-fire way to bring down the deficit. But like all sudden bursts of genius, the proposal was not carefully examined to see what its reverberations would be like. The government has been caught out without an all-important filter between concept and realization. Once again, what someone dreamt about at night was implemented first thing the next morning and we all ended with egg on our faces.
Other countries do their thing differently, unobtrusively, without blaring trumpets, without giving out this hype of a poverty-stricken country trying to attract high-end citizens.
One also needs to ask whether anybody asked whether a simplified easier residents’ scheme would have attracted people without all this negative publicity. Residence is one thing and citizenship another. David Cameron famously promised to lay down the red carpet for any French millionaire fleeing from Hollande’s taxes and no one batted an eyelid.
Tonio Fenech flipped when he totted up the cost of one man’s hospital bill and blocked the residents’ scheme on Christmas Eve, leaving it suspended for months, negatively affecting all those who had signed promises of sale that did not materialize, and then coming up with a substitute scheme that attracted no one. Sensibly, this government amended it within weeks of being elected. Why did it not give it time to see how it would work out before latching on to a new scheme that took things on to a new and more exposed level?
What do those people who want a way into the EU really want? Do they really want to become citizens of Malta with all the burdens of citizenship or do they just want the freedom to travel in the EU, to set up businesses, to invest money?
Then again, by setting a price, even if pricey, we underestimated the value of citizenship. We have been very lax and disorganized over the past years on this matter. As a result we first gave out citizenship to all those who married a Maltese, thus encouraging marriages of convenience, and then, when we realized many were jumping through this loophole, we introduced the five-year wait. Even so, there have been cases where people abused this, or tried to.
Other countries have a far stricter citizenship process – you have to show you know the language or can get by, you know and subscribe to the country’s main principles. I have in mind the US citizenship process which is no walk in the park.
Instead, we simplified matters – people could send the application without even coming here, and we even tried to keep their names secret – which was ludicrous seeing they would become voters and thus listed on the electoral rolls. This is the only concession that has been made – and it was after the Bill had passed through the Third Reading and even after the President had signed the Bill, thus ensuring that the U-turn was a slap in the face – had the government had its change of heart just three hours before, the President would have avoided this embarrassment.
The urgency of rushing this bill through Parliament also created suspicions that the government had some commitments to keep that did not brook delays. So too the manner of choosing the agency that is to handle the process and vet it.
What about the United States? Under one programme, foreigners can get investor visas for a “$1 million investment in a US business employing at least 10 people or $500,000 in designated economically depressed areas”, but it takes at least two years to obtain permanent residence and at least five to get citizenship.
The economist Gary Becker has suggested that more countries should sell immigrant visas. The Economist explains: “Adjusting the price from year to year would allow governments to retain control over how many immigrants came while responding to changing labour-market conditions. And the revenue raised might go some way to assuaging the concerns of those who oppose immigration, especially now when clever thinking is needed about ways to improve public finances.
“Charging $50,000 for the right to immigrate would net America $50 billion if it lets in one million immigrants, roughly as many as it currently admits legally.
“More importantly, the immigrants most tempted by such a fee-based system would be those who would garner the biggest economic benefit from migrating, such as those whose wages would increase by the largest amount. They would be the kind of innovative, hard-working go-getters countries want to attract…”
In Malta’s case, its attractiveness lies mainly with its being in the EU, the eurozone and Schengen, mostly in reverse order. Even so, it is the US people want to go to, rather than small Malta with its dicey connectivity to the rest of the world.
That’s where the haste with which this was launched, and the shortcuts in the process that were introduced made many, here and abroad, suspicious that there was something murky behind this.
For all our outsourcing the process to an agency, countries like the US and Israel, for instance, would be very keen to ensure that no al Qaeda operative or Gaddafi henchman gets in. There is probably the same alarm with regard to people from mainland China.
Did we need all this? We sure look like we need the money, if the Commission’s moderately negative view on the Budget proposals are anything to go by, but did we have to put everything in the mix – our international name, the perception that we are skint, and that our only solution is the super-rich, at a time when we are hard-pressed by asylum seekers? Did we really have to give the impression that with us money opens all doors?
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