By Matthew Vella

The Church’s Emigrants Commission has been involved in the resettlement of asylum seekers for half a century. Yet last week, it issued a statement that sounded almost like a right wing political pamphlet. Mgr Philip Calleja defends the work of his Commission in the face of media criticism

Denzel lies asleep in his baby carrier while I speak to his mother, a Somali woman who is waiting to speak to Mgr Philip Calleja, the head of the Church’s Emigrants Commission. She will be off to New Jersey this week, she tells me. I smile back, saying she couldn’t have chosen a better name for her son than his Hollywood namesake. It’s American through and through.
“Malta is too poor,” she huffs... a statement which I take with some mirth, obviously being aware that, firstly America is an option that few people would turn down, and secondly, that the Maltese reception to migrants doesn’t exactly feel anybody welcome. I’m sure Africans have another four-letter word with which to describe life over here.
So to make matters seemingly worse, earlier this week the Emigrants Commission issued a statement that caught the public’s imagination over the weekend. Arrivals of asylum seekers and irregular migrants from Africa had, up to September, practically reached the number of births in Malta. With such a small surface area, Malta should not take in so many irregular migrants, the statement went on, in its topsy-turvy message that European member states had to take note of Malta’s situation.
I meet Mgr Calleja, a man whose office in Valletta has been an important centre for migrants for 50 years, aimed at facilitating their transfers abroad and their remittances. We instantly start talking about the Commission’s latest statement.
The argument Calleja says he wanted to advance was that Europe had to take note of the situation in Malta, and that the rate of landings of irregular migrants had increased to unprecedented levels, such that they had equalled the number of births by September 2008.
“I felt it was time for the rest of the member states to take a share of the responsibility of Malta’s irregular migrant population,” Calleja says.
Ostensibly, Calleja’s intention was not meant to be harmful, as can only be said of somebody who has worked with migrants of all nationalities for all his life; although, as this newspaper’s editorial stated last Wednesday, certainly misguided on a number of aspects.
Leaving aside the fact that such a statement would do little to change matters: on its own, bereft of context, it looked more like a pamphlet issued by some right-wing firebrand.
First of all, the statistics quoted concern nine months of arrivals and births up to September 2008. It would have been fairer, at least statistically and for comparison’s sake, to consider the total number of arrivals and births over an entire twelve-month period.
That alone would do little to explain the real “seriousness” of migration. It’s debatable as to when a country reaches a situation that can be described as a crisis, and it often depends upon who is making the assertion. A right-wing demagogue would use any convenient statistic to instil xenophobic fear amongst the public. A government minister may look at it from a management point of view, in terms of how much space there is to accommodate irregular migrants, or whether it is possible to mount enough search and rescue missions at sea.
But for an organisation such as the Emigrants Commission to make such statement seemed entirely out of order, considering that there is no real statistical correlation between births and migrant landings to denote when, or if, a crisis occurs.
And as the press latched on to the statement, it seemed the public imagination was once again alive with talk of some sort of impending crisis. Calleja makes clear his distaste for anti-immigrant sentiment, as I remind him about yet another public demonstration against illegal migration organised by the right wing Azzjoni Nazzjonali last Thursday – attended by a measly crowd of 50.
“Malta must do its part,” Calleja says, adding that the country has signed up to international obligations that must be respected.
“I’m sorry if that was the case, but I didn’t want to be misinterpreted,” Calleja says, sticking to his argument that the statistical levelling of irregular migrant arrivals with births was “cause for concern”.
“Europe must show some understanding of Malta’s situation or there will be some serious resentment: people are concerned they might lose their identity or their jobs.”
Secondly, the statistic is a fallacy because, even as Calleja acknowledges, Malta’s births have been falling in the past 10 years. A falling birth rate cannot indicate the level of sustainability of irregular immigration.
And thirdly, there is a great possibility – something Calleja seems to know about – that many of Malta’s asylum seekers, rejected asylum seekers, and those with temporary humanitarian protection (or subsidiary protection), are leaving Malta, both legally and illegally.
Calleja tells me about the development of refugee protection in Malta. For over 50 years, he has led the Catholic Church’s emigrants commission, started in 1950 as an agency to aid

the emigration of thousands of Maltese to countries such as Canada, the UK, America and Australia, as post-war conditions and unemployment in Malta made living hard. After the 1980s, coinciding with the end of the Cold War and the end of Soviet aid to its satellite countries, the commission’s services started to include immigrants and refugees from countries such as Iraq after the first Gulf War, and refugees from the Balkan states.
“In 1971, when Malta signed the Geneva Convention, the image of a refugee was still that of somebody coming from behind the Iron Curtain,” Calleja says. “It was never expected that, being a small country and isolated from the rest of Europe, it would end up welcoming the scale of migrants and refugees that it has today.”
While the emigrants’ commission had until then been occupied with the resettlement of Maltese migrants abroad, the arrival of asylum seekers from Eastern Europe in the late 1980s prompted a change in its mission. In 1987, the emigrants’ commission entered into an operational partnership with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). That meant it had become primarily responsible for awarding refugee protection to asylum seekers, and arrange for their resettlement elsewhere through the UNHCR. Between 1989 and 1991, there were over 300 asylum seeker arrivals in Malta. A good two-thirds of them were resettled elsewhere.
“Asylum seekers were coming in to Malta with their visas and passports. This was a different sort of migration, primarily a regular sort of migration of people. People with claims would fly in to Malta from Eastern Europe or Iraq. We would process their claims, and send them to Rome, where they would then be resettled elsewhere. Hundreds were resettled: they would literally come, and go,” Calleja says.
Between 1983 and 2001, some 3,100 asylum seekers came to Malta. Figures peaked in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and the first Gulf War in Iraq – with 927 arrivals. A good chunk settled in Malta, although there was never any outcry against the arrival of white Europeans to Malta. The Iraqi refugees, if anything, enjoyed the blessing of being in a televised war mandated by the Americans against a dictator. Of those 3,100 asylum seekers, the commission resettled 2,271 of them to Canada (1,050), the USA (700), Australia (400), the UK, Germany, Sweden (six cases), Belgium, France, Ireland, Switzerland, Denmark, and Holland.
“Then in 2002, Malta passed the Refugee Act, which meant the government was now responsible for the processing of asylum claims, and had to set up its own Refugee Commission. That’s when the boat cases started. We saw the first boat arriving in 2002, in St Paul’s Bay,” Calleja says.
As Malta’s adoption of a Refugee Act implied dropping its geographical limitation, a condition it took up upon ratification of the Geneva Convention, more asylum seekers were setting out at sea and being dropped off by smugglers in Malta – a stepping stone towards their intended destination to Italy, mainland Europe.
“It was the first experience we had ever had of boat people,” Calleja says. “Before we had perhaps some stowaways, who had travelled across the sea in a container, and upon arriving in Malta they would emerge with this deathly pallor on their faces, and we would rush them to hospital.”
Did he have any idea of what was yet to come in terms of the wave of irregular immigration to Malta?
“We could have never predicted such an amount of people, least of all the greater numbers of irregular migrants that were yet to come. We were thinking of where we could house them,” Calleja says, whose emigrants’ commission has some 20 permanent and temporary residences which can house just over 300 people.
“And with the arrival of migrants without passports and permits of entry, the government was now putting them in detention, since they had entered Malta illegally; this was a new type of migration altogether.”
Since 2002, arrivals of irregular migrants have fluctuated at just over or below the 1,500 mark, with only one year, 2003, having seen a low number of arrivals (502). Numbers peaked in 2005 with 1,822 arrivals. But by September of this year, an unprecedented 2,439 migrants – a mixed flow of migrants looking for employment, and asylum seekers looking for protection from persecution back home – had reached Maltese shores.
“You can see that the number of arrivals represents over 85% of births in Malta, both foreign and Maltese,” Calleja says. “And you can see why, seeing these two statistics level, this is serious.”
Calleja starts explaining me to the conditions of the Maltese when they started to emigrate back in the 1950s.
“The population gain after the war created emigration. It was essentially a safety valve without which the island would have probably exploded. As more men started emigrating in their search for work, thousands of girls actually started finding it difficult to find somebody to marry over here in Malta. By 1957, the number of women of marriageable age had increased by 9,309 over that of men,” Calleja says, pointing at a book of emigration statistics he compiled in honour of his 50th anniversary as an ordained priest.
An interesting snippet I find on page 17 is the following, in the section which concerns the surplus of unmarried women in the 1950s. Quote: “There were and are serious situations for our country’s social and moral life. It was even more alarming since within a few years we would have had a number of Maltese children, born and brought up by women who were not Maltese and probably not Catholics.”
This catches my attention, and is probably the biggest giveaway of all. Underlying the whole notion of Catholic charity, is that veneer of Maltese nativism – the belief that being white, Maltese and Catholic should be a perennial aspiration for our country.
“When we saw this situation,” Calleja tells me, “we organised the Single Young Women Migrants Scheme, to allow these women to emigrate to Australia. By 1978, things had totally changed, and there were 892 more young men than women of marriageable age. We started balancing out the situation.”
I ask Calleja if he thinks that African migration should controlled to the extent that it should never be allowed to exceed the Maltese number of births in a year.
“What I want to say is that the influx of irregular immigration is so big, it has increased to a level that is worrying people, a headache. If you had to take Malta’s density, you would see there are more than 40 immigrants for every square mile. As you can see from the statistics, we have as much refugees and irregular immigrants as Finland per square mile. Malta is still the small country it was, and irregular immigration is increasing. Europe must take note,” Calleja says.
But your comparison with Malta’s births does not make sense, I say, pointing at the same statistics he is showing me. Since 1946, the fertile Maltese family has (thankfully) shed its tenacious prowess for procreation, with births decreasing from over 11,000 down to 5,000 in 1992, and down to 3,536 births in 2007. In fact, quoting Calleja’s own statistics, the number of migrant arrivals in 2007 was 48% of births that year, even less than in 2006.
Going by the rate of migration, it stands to reason that any number of landings in a year is going to appear large when compared to births, because they are constantly in decline. I wonder if Calleja is more concerned about the smaller number of Maltese babies being delivered at Mater Dei.
“But even if the landings had to stop now, we already know that the numbers are too high. We want to make people aware, rightly because of our population density, and make it possible for migrants to be resettled.”
How desirable is it for African migrants to leave Malta?
“All of them,” Calleja says most emphatically. “All of them want to be resettled. I assure you. In their mind, they crave for stability, and they are right to demand it. They have left entire families, and unless they are refugees, they will never manage to get their families here. So they need a land of resettlement that will allow them to reunite with their families. The US programme for example allows them to become citizens, which means they can get their family there. That’s what they dream about.”
And indeed, there’s just one thing that Calleja’s statistics don’t show, or cannot show: the sheer number of migrants who are leaving Malta every year, partly by escaping once again with the help of smugglers, but also because they manage to be flown out of Malta in a bureaucratic loophole of sorts. Non-refugees, who are given a Convention Travel Document or other sort of passport by the government, often secure a temporary permit to enter another country where a relative resides, usually on grounds of having to care for them or visit them. Many of them don’t return to Malta.
Calleja gives me a knowing smile. “Of course, some of them go there for a week to tend to a sick relative, and they stay there, never to come back again.”
So if all the migrants are leaving Malta, resettled through the US programme which will be taking some 700 cases next year; or being repatriated to their countries of origin; or now even being given a travel document to leave Malta: where is the crisis?

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