Race to the bottom

Speaking at the sixth Mediterranean Tourism Forum on Thursday, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat talked about Malta attracting a better class of tourists.

IHe almost fooled me there. Over the last years, certainly during this two terms, but maybe before too, it has been a race to the bottom. We can see the results all around us today.

Malta has and continues to attract the dregs of other societies who see Malta as an easy touch.

I am speaking about the boat people, those who fled poverty and ill-treatment in Libyan prisons and faced the danger of the seas to get anywhere – it hardly matters where – and hopefully build a new future for themselves and their children. But not just them. There is a YouTube recording of a programme on a local television channel, which says it was banned from being aired by the Broadcasting Authority, in which Simon Debono from a real estate group, claims there are not just a few Serbs living in Malta as the National Statistics Office said, but far, far more.

Mr Debono refers to the many graffiti on walls in tourism areas and says these are references to Serbian paramilitary organisations high on violence and mayhem and delineate the area where they appear as ‘belonging’ to one group and warning off the others. refer to the trucks and concrete mixers which have suddenly appeared at Marsa with Turkish names on them, and to press reports that up to 5,000 Turkish workers are being brought to Malta to work on construction projects such as the Spaghetti Junction at Marsa. According to Net News, these Turkish workers will be housed in containers placed in a disused quarry. I refer to the hundreds, nay thousands of people of African origin who have colonized and changed the appearance of Marsa and Hamrun. I would not know about the Serbs and the Turks that still have to come anyway, but I know that most of them in Hamrun are law-abiding and even respectful of the residents. Let us not turn them into ogres even before they land. The fact is, however, that this internationalization, this pluralistic, multinational society the Prime Minister is fond of praising in his Sunday speeches does not consist solely of the Russians one finds in Mellieha or Sliema but also, and increasingly it would seem, of people fleeing war or poverty. They are ready to live in sub-human environments and take any job that’s going, to live in crammed apartments and for wages you would not get any Maltese to take up. A few Sundays ago, the Prime Minister even said that if people wanted to continue receiving their pensions (even the meagre pensions we get), they have to accept more and more foreigners. The economic model he seems to be referring to is one based on low wages and more and more people in this small country. The Maltese seem to have agreed to this kind of life, as seen in the result of the 2017 election, as long as pensions keep increasing and as long as healthcare is free, as is education… But people are not fools – they look around them and they are not happy with what they see. You can call it racism or xenophobia, and this emerges in so many instances, like the soldier who allegedly wanted to kick all coloured students out of the school in which his nephew was beaten up. We, the people of Malta, have lost control of our borders: we can no longer control who comes in. And, as in the case of the Serbians mentioned earlier, our official statistics no longer reflect the true reality. People come in supposedly on short visits and they stay on. Then their families come over too and suddenly they develop roots.