In the previous article, I described two deliberate transformations that succeeded together. Malta educated a generation upward, from fewer than 1,500 university students in 1987 to near-universal aspiration to a degree today, and it rebuilt its economy upward, into financial services, iGaming, aviation and the rest. I ended on the difficulty their success created. A country that moves four-fifths of its economy into services and half its young into universities still needs people to clean its hospitals, drive its buses, wait its tables and care for its old. The Maltese climbed past those jobs. Someone had to fill them. This article is about who did it and why it was not us.

The figures are now unambiguous. Foreign nationals make up 38.6% of everyone working in Malta - about 87,600 third-country nationals and 41,000 EU citizens, against some 333,000 Maltese, on the government's own mid-2025 figures. A decade earlier, the share was around one in ten. Foreigners are 29% of residents but 39% of workers: they are here, overwhelmingly, to work. And the work sits exactly where the Maltese withdrew. Accommodation and food services hold one of the largest concentrations of non-Maltese workers; administrative and support services - cleaning, security, the temping agencies - form another. The Central Bank records that the probability of a third-country national holding an elementary occupation rose to 34%by 2018, more than four times its 2002 level, even as Maltese nationals moved the other way, into professional and administrative roles. The two movements are mirror images. We went up; they came in below.

There is a sharp irony here, and it ties these articles to the first in the series. The 2010 Strategic Pensions Review did not merely warn of demographic decline. It recommended that immigration be reoriented towards the skills the country lacked, observing that human capital cannot be conjured overnight - a first degree takes three or four years, a master's longer. Malta did import high skills; professional-services and high-value firms employ EU and third-country nationals precisely because the domestic labour supply does not meet their demand. But that is not the migration that dominates the numbers. The migration that dominates is low-wage migration into the floor the climb left empty - the opposite of the high-skill reorientation the Review urged. We were advised to import the top. We imported, in far greater numbers, the bottom. Foreseen, recommended, and inverted: the same governance pattern, in a different costume.

I want to resist the comfortable version of this story, because it is the version that will be quoted, and it is only half true. The comfortable version says the Maltese will not do these jobs any more - that prosperity has made us choosy. There is something in it. But it omits the part that matters for policy. These jobs not only lose their appeal; they lose their viability for anyone with alternatives, because a cheaper and more precarious labour supply became available to fill them. On official figures, average basic pay in 2025 ranged from about €1,336 a month in elementary occupations to about €3,467 among managers, and it is in the lower-paid occupations that non-Maltese workers are concentrated. The single-permit system ties a third-country worker's right to remain to one named employer - a tie that sharply weakens a worker's bargaining power. Aspiration emptied these jobs from above; economics sealed them shut from below. Both are true, and saying only the first is how analysis curdles into grievance.

None of this is the third-country national worker's doing, and I will say it plainly: the worker is not the problem. They are third-country nationals here on lawful permits - the carer holding the hand of a Maltese pensioner, the driver on the early bus, the porter at the back of the kitchen - and they keep the daily life of the country in motion. The problem is a model. The move to a knowledge economy and advanced manufacturing, and the reopening of education that made it possible, were deliberate strategic choices; what was never debated was their demographic logic - that a growth strategy of this kind would come to depend, structurally and permanently, on importing people at both ends of the skill ladder: EU professionals at the top, third-country nationals at the base. That is the choice no public conversation has honestly admitted we made.

A society that has educated itself out of caring for its own old age has made a profound choice about the kind of place it wishes to be. It made that choice without ever debating it. And the choice was foreseeable. Parts of it, as I argued at the start of this series, were foreseen. How that choice is now being turned against the very people who answered the call - and what honesty would require of us - is the subject of the two articles that follow.

To be continued.

David Spiteri Gingell is a Governance, Institutional, and Digital Transformation Consultant