Winter is once more upon us, and yet again the cold and rain have had their usual effect on the most vulnerable members of our society.
Irregular immigrants housed in the “open centre” in Hal Far, having already spent months on end in mandatory detention awaiting the outcome of their asylum application, now find themselves accommodated in a veritable ghetto of makeshift tents.
It is difficult to imagine a more literal use of the word “open” than this. At present, some 800 persons – including a number of pregnant women – are expected to sit out the cold and wet of winter in conditions we wouldn’t even associate with the poorest nations in the world. Heating is all but non-existent, and what little there is in the way of electrical appliances is considered too dangerous to even use. The scenario is bad enough in mild weather. In last week’s storm, when tents were all but ripped apart by gale force winds and torrential rain, the situation was nothing less than a national emergency.
Admittedly, it is easy to sermonise from the comfort of a newspaper editor’s chair. Truth be told, the steady influx of migrants continues to pose enormous infrastructural problems, and it would be naïve to expect government (or indeed the European Union, or the United Nations, or anyone else for that matter) to solve every aspect of this complicated issue at the stroke of a pen.
Besides, in this instance, government is limited in its ability to actually intervene. After all we are dealing with immigrants who have already been released from detention; who receive some form of State allowance (which averages at around Lm1.75 a day); and who are theoretically “free” to leave whenever they choose. But even so, the situation facing these people is nonetheless bleak. Their allowance is far from sufficient to afford better accommodation elsewhere. And while many do eventually improve their situation, finding jobs to sustain a reasonable quality of life, the fact is that others are simply condemned by circumstance to eke out what living they can in this squalid and desperate situation.
Given this reality, is it unreasonable to expect that a domestic humanitarian crisis, like the one we are witnessing in Hal Far right now, be given the attention it deserves by the powers that be?
And yet the plight of immigrants housed in the Hal Far tent ghetto remains ignored by all the responsible authorities. The Family and Social Solidarity Ministry has already publicly washed its hands of the affair, claiming somewhat abruptly that there are no plans to build more permanent structures to replace the manifestly substandard, “semi-permanent” accommodation. To be fair, the same ministry is also running a programme of social integration, as well as managing a number of far more decent open centres in other parts of Malta. But nonetheless, it seems that the desperate conditions faced by many released asylum seekers are only visible thanks to the occasional attention given by the media; and even then, the response by the authorities is far from reassuring.
Evidently, it would take nothing short of a human tragedy – of the kind we nearly saw last week, when a number of immigrants were so desperate they almost broke into the nearby Peace Lab to shelter from the elements – to bring us all to our senses.
It may be a trite platitude in times of electoral campaigns, but it remains a fact that irregular immigrants – unlike animal lovers, families with children and middle-income earners, all of whom benefited greatly from the government’s newfound largesse – do not have a vote. There is simply no political advantage to be gained by attempting to alleviate their discomfort in any way.
One sincerely hopes the government will prove this newspaper wrong on all the above points, by taking the long overdue step of transforming the “semi-permanent” tent structures in Hal Far – an indictment of the country’s entire migration policy, if there ever was one – into a decent permanent structure offering at least the minimum conditions so that human dignity may be respected.
Until this happens, the plight of the Hal Far residents will continue to haunt this administration as a visible embodiment of the winter of our national shame.