Malta is currently at a crossroads when it comes to its labour market situation.

Record employment levels and record economic growth levels for a number of years has powered a job market the likes of which Malta has rarely seen: but some are now arguing that things have gone too far – the country is having to inflate its population in order to keep up with demand.

By the government’s own recent admissions with regards to population, that’s a line of thinking which holds water.  With Malta’s unemployment rate unlikely to ever got lower – as Finance Minister Clyde Caruana said during his Budget speech – it stands to reason that if the country wants to have more and more jobs, then it’s going to need more and more people to fill them.

PN MP and economy spokesperson Ivan Bartolo made a valid point in this regard that Caruana’s aim is for jobs to increase by 4.4%, which means that around 11,500 people are needed to fill these vacancies.

And so the obvious question is, where will they come from?  One must see specifically what type of jobs the government is aiming to create, but the overwhelming likelihood is that the people to fill these vacancies must come from abroad.

That’s something which the government itself has said isn’t sustainable – but that at the same time one cannot simply decide that no more jobs should be created in the country in order to stop people from coming from abroad.

The PN’s presented solution is to restrict the number of third country nationals (TCNs) coming to work in Malta to only those whose skills are needed within the economy.  This is part of the party’s vision for an “economy of excellence” which favours high-value economic sectors over what the party has called the current economy of cheap labour.

But even in this instance: it can be reasoned that many of the TCNs coming to Malta are coming to the country in order to work in lower paying jobs.  Cut them out of the equation, and you have whole industries such as the hospitality and restaurant sectors in a staff crisis.  But keep them coming, and a PN administration would be falling into the same ‘cheap labour’ pit that it’s spoken so much against.

The more obvious solution – which both the PN and PL certainly agree on, even if their way of achieving it is probably different – is to make Malta a more attractive place for the Maltese themselves to live in.

As things stand, the stark majority of Maltese youths want to leave the country to work abroad.  The reasoning varies: poor environment, poor governance, poor working conditions, poor salaries… you name it and you’ll probably find a millennial who wants to leave the country because of one of them.

If it’s the Maltese who are leaving and not coming back, then it’s obvious as to where the workers need to come from.

So therein lies the most obvious and worthwhile solution: beyond fighting over whether Malta should or shouldn’t be allowing third country nationals to come and work, the country’s authorities need to bring about change which will keep young Maltese in Malta in the first place.