The last article in this series dealt with the single permit: the system that ties a foreign worker's right to live and work in Malta to one employer, and the EU Directive that Malta must transpose to change important parts of that system. This article deals with the other side of that labour-market model: poverty.

Malta measures poverty through a national survey of household incomes, carried out by the National Statistics Office every year under EU rules. It is the survey behind every headline about how many people are at risk of poverty.  For years, that survey had a blind spot. Foreign residents were included in it, but it was not designed to represent Maltese and foreign residents each in their proper proportion. The published figures described the population as a whole, and nobody could say with confidence how the Maltese were doing compared to the foreigners living and working among us.

In a country where roughly three residents in ten are now foreign, that is no small blind spot. After the 2021 Census, the NSO fixed it.  From the 2024 survey onwards, Maltese and foreign residents are weighted separately, and in April 2026, for the first time, the NSO published poverty figures for Maltese citizens alongside the national ones.

Read the two together, because the gap between them is the point.

Across the whole population, 16.9% of people live below the poverty line - 95,157 in all.  The line now stands at about €13,220 a year, roughly €1,100 a month.  Among Maltese citizens, the figure is 14.4% - 57,253 people.

The NSO does not publish a poverty rate for foreigners. It says the survey sample is not yet strong enough, and the caution is fair.  But its own published figures allow the broad picture to be worked out with simple arithmetic, and I will do the sums in the open.  If 95,157 people are below the line and 57,253 of them are Maltese, then around 38,000 of Malta's poor are foreign residents - out of a foreign population of about 166,000. These worked-out figures are indicative, not official. But the scale is unmistakable.

Put simply: about one in seven Maltese citizens is at risk of poverty. Among foreign residents, it is close to one in four.  Or this way: foreigners are three in every ten residents - and four in every ten of the poor.

The pattern does not stop at the income line.  On the wider measure of poverty and social exclusion - which also counts people who cannot afford basic necessities, or who live in households where almost nobody works - the same gap appears, with foreign residents again at roughly one in four against about one in six among the Maltese.

And the poverty is not only more widespread.  It is deeper.  The NSO measures how far below the line the typical poor person falls.  For Maltese citizens, the shortfall is about a sixth of the poverty line.  For the population as a whole, it is over a fifth - which means the foreign poor must be falling considerably further still.  Foreign residents are not just more likely to be poor.  Their poor are poorer.

These differences are too large to be brushed aside as statistical detail.

They also need to be read fairly.  The survey measures income relative to the rest of the country.  It does not say that every foreign worker is poor, and it does not prove that migration causes poverty.  What it shows is that the risk of poverty falls very unevenly between the Maltese and the people who came here to work.

That should concern policy makers.

It matters because Malta's economic model now depends on foreign labour on a large scale.  At the start of 2024, according to Eurostat, around 132,700 non-EU citizens lived in Malta - nearly a quarter of the population - along with some 41,000 EU citizens. And in 2024, Malta took in more immigrants relative to its size than any other country in the EU.

Poverty among foreign residents is therefore no longer a side issue.  It sits at the centre of both our labour policy and our social policy.

One more finding in the new figures deserves a pause.  Among Maltese citizens of working age, fewer than one in ten is at risk of poverty - 9.5%.  Among Maltese pensioners, it is nearly one in four.  And on both counts the Maltese do better than the population as a whole.  The gap between Maltese and foreigners, in other words, shows up most strongly among people of working age - which is to say, among workers.

That takes us straight back to the labour market.

A labour migration system cannot be judged only by the vacancies it fills, the permits it processes or its contribution to GDP.  If Malta imports workers on this scale, policy must also ask what incomes, housing and living conditions those workers actually end up with.

The single permit discussed in the previous article belongs in that assessment.  So do wage levels, the enforcement of employment conditions, housing costs and overcrowding, access to services, and how freely a worker can move to a better employer.  The poverty figures do not prove which of these is doing the damage.  They do establish a gap large enough to oblige us to find out.

Three things should follow. First, better numbers. The NSO's change of method is real progress and should be recognised as such.  But "we cannot yet publish reliable figures for foreigners" should be treated as a gap to close, not a place to rest.  Malta needs data strong enough to publish poverty figures for Maltese, EU and non-EU residents as a matter of routine.  The national Poverty Strategy for 2025-2035 cannot steer properly if it cannot see the group carrying the highest risk - and its targets should name that group and report on it every year.

Second, join up the files.  Transposing the new EU Directive on the single permit should not be treated as a piece of immigration paperwork. A worker who can change employer can bargain.  A worker who can bargain earns more. A worker who earns more is less likely to be poor.  Migration policy and poverty policy are the same policy, seen from two desks - and the link between them should be measured.

Third, send the inspectors where the evidence points. Foreign workers cluster in particular sectors - care, cleaning, hospitality, construction, delivery.  If underpaid wages and abusive hours cluster there too, that is where enforcement belongs. Not inspection by nationality; inspection by risk.

There is a final reason the April figures matter. The national poverty rate has been remarkably steady - 16.9% in each of the last two surveys. Look only at that number, and nothing seems to have changed.  Look underneath it, and the picture is different: 14.4% for the Maltese, and close to 23% for the foreigners. The steady national average was hiding two very different stories.

For years we could not see this.  Now we can, even if only in outline.  The estimates for foreigners are not yet firm enough for the NSO to publish on their own - but that is a reason to sharpen the data, not to look away from what it already shows.

Malta's dependence on foreign labour is a settled fact.  The open question is whether the people this model depends on will get the same attention as the growth they produce.

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