Machines or immigrants

In the first part of this letter, I am going to talk about a situation where the immigrant population is reasonable. Further down, I shall comment on the extraordinary influx of immigrants.

When there is a scarcity of work opportunities, workers often start fighting among themselves for the little work available. Many start blaming immigrants and other groups and accuse them of stealing their work.

However, the real culprits are the multinationals who make use of machines instead of workers and to defend themselves they present the immigrants etc as the real culprits.

So what have we got to do? Surely not ban the machines. We should make machines our servants and not our competitors. To do this we must force the multinationals to allocate part of the profit generated by a machine to support an unemployed person, a pensioner and so on. This support should be sufficient to supply the individual in question with almost all the current luxuries.

That’s why I suggested in another comment that a common electoral programme subscribed to, by many parties all over the world would have as one of its items the control of the multinationals. Let’s say, this programme could have as its objective a 20-hour week, or the establishment of a basic income for everybody. This could be financed by the multinationals from the profit they make when using machines in their manufacturing process.

Maybe Malta could take the initiative to create such a common electoral programme. Maybe the branch of the Labour Party called IDEAT could take the initiative. Malta could serve as a pressure group in the United Nations to encourage member states to embrace this common electoral programme. Throughout the centuries, the vast majority of aristocrats and some priests had a vast amount of leisure time. Nobody accused them that they were not dignified because they did little or no work at all. Why we keep repeating that work gives dignity to the working class is beyond me.

Going back to the question of immi- grants, we in the Mediterranean are being faced with an impossible situation. We cannot solve the problem alone. The European Union and the United Nations should act right away.

I suggest that the members of the United Nations should contribute generously to a fund, the money of which should be used to buy a large piece of land from some developing country to establish a new country. This new country should be the first refuge for immigrants and should be administered by the United Nations and the immigrants themselves. The country selling the land would be able to use the money received to raise the standard of living of its citizens to a very high standard, so everybody would be happy.

With the present technology, arid land and even desert land can be converted into comfortable living locations.

Let’s hope that the leaders of the world do not force us to choose between our own survival and that of others.