News | Sunday, 22 March 2009

PRINT THIS ARTICLE

Labouring under the ‘strongman’ delusion

Joseph Muscat’s ‘20-point action plan’ speaks less about Labour’s immigration strategy, than about a misinformed party unsure of its own calculations, and clearly still lost somewhere in the 1970s. Analysis by RAPHAEL VASSALLO

By 2013, there can be little doubt that immigration will be high on the agenda as the country gears itself for its 10th general election since Independence. And if the Labour Party has its way, matters will come to a head far sooner than that. Joseph Muscat, riding high on a tsunami of popular disgruntlement, has even called for a national referendum on his party’s 20-point “action plan”, presented in parliament last Monday. But under scrutiny, it is not at all clear how the Labour Party’s proposals differ in any substance from the government’s current policies; nor whether the PL has even understood the real dynamics of the immigration phenomenon to begin with.

Crisis by numbers
On Tuesday, Labour’s leading immigration spokesman Michael Falzon repeated in parliament the statistics that are supposed to cement his party’s claims that Malta’s “crisis” is far worse than any other in Europe.
Citing a parliamentary question, he revealed how just over 12,000 asylum seekers have alighted upon Malta in the past decade. Today, 5,200 remain: the rest having either been repatriated, or left the country on their own steam. Of these again, 2,000 plus are still encamped in closed detention centres – where, being segregated, they cannot realistically be included in any argument regarding “population density”. This fixes Malta’s current population of released asylum seekers at around 3,000.
This, then, is the “crisis” which seems to have thrown the country (and by extension the Labour Party) into a panic in recent months – a panic which Falzon now tries to justify by arguing that the above figures must be viewed in the context of our country’s notoriously high population density.
But this argument does not stand to scrutiny. For reasons outlined above, the irregular immigrant population (people in detention and applying for asylum) in real terms is less than 1% of the total population. By comparison, in the United Kingdom alone there was an average of 50,000 asylum applications a year between 1993 and 2006: peaking at over 80,000 in 2002. In March 2005 a Home Office study estimated the UK’s “illegal immigrant population” (correctly defined as having entered the country illegally without applying for asylum) at somewhere between 310,000 and 570,000 – in other words, roughly 1% of the total UK population.
But to these must be added the average of 10,000 a year to have successfully applied for asylum in the UK over the past decade (calculated on Britain’s official acceptance rate for asylum seekers, which stands at approximately 20%); and also those failed asylum seekers who cannot be repatriated; not to mention the families of refugees, which may be invited to legally join the asylum seeker in his or her country of residence; as well as live births to immigrant families in the UK.
Evidently, then, Michael Falzon’s “international perspective” argument turns up an altogether different and unexpected result, whereby our national immigration figures, calculated proportionately to our population, actually work out far lower than the UK’s.
Viewed from this angle, it is difficult to understand the Labour Party’s apparent position, presented in its “action plan” last Monday, that Malta should threaten to suspend its international obligations, and even blackmail the European Union with its right of veto.

Action and counter-action
Leaving aside these considerations, many of the PL’s individual proposals may themselves run counter to the national interest.
For instance, Joseph Muscat argues that Malta was “weak” when accepting the Immigration and Asylum Pact last year, which stopped short of establishing a mandatory mechanism for responsibility sharing. However, we are not told how many immigrants a Labour government would be willing to accept from other European countries as a result of this arrangement: unless, of course, Muscat seriously believes he can single-handedly negotiate a pact which would force Europe to take on Malta’s immigrants, but not vice-versa.
Meanwhile, it emerged that the European Parliament has since agreed upon precisely such a mechanism – and the details were made public just last Tuesday, on the same day as Michael Falzon’s speech. One can only wonder how the Labour Party (which incidentally has three MEPs to the PN’s two) could fail to pick up on detail so relevant to its own arguments.
As for Muscat’s point that Malta should not hesitate to use its veto “even in areas which had nothing to do with illegal immigration”, this will undeniably be welcomed by hard-liners with little experience in practical politics. But it is hardly likely to work in practice, for two reasons: one, Europe will find it difficult to take Malta’s “crisis” claims seriously, when many other member states are harder hit by immigration than ourselves; two, this sort of brinkmanship invariably cuts both ways, and small countries like Malta always stand to lose far more than they might gain by inviting such draconian strategies to be used against their own interests.
Soft versus hard diplomacy
The dubious wisdom of strong-arm tactics was further thrown into perspective last Thursday, when the EU’s Justice Commissioner Jacques Barrot appealed to the Commission to offer more assistance to Malta.
“The situation of Malta deserves a particular approach considering its small size and the high population density,” Barrot commented. “Thus the island should be given resources which go beyond the allocations granted.”
It is not known what views were exchanged between the Commissioner and the Maltese government for Barrot to come away with such an impression – which, at least with respect to population density, is arguably flawed – but the Home Affairs Ministry certainly does not claim to have “threatened” Barrot with any vetoes.
This should serve as an eye-opener to those who remember with nostalgia the fire and brimstone diplomacy of the Mintoff era: after all, the same results can also be achieved through patient dialogue, without incurring enmities that our small country can ill afford.

Workable policies
On the plus side, a few of the PL’s individual proposals may be worth at least considering. For instance, Joseph Muscat specifically refers to the need for a reform of the Dublin II Convention; and in this he enjoys the support of several other European states, and even humanitarian agencies such as the UNHCR.
It remains to be seen how Labour intends to carry out such a reform – which would invariably entail bargaining with other involved countries – but certainly there is broad consensus that the original aims of the convention are not being met. In this instance, Malta may stand to gain by taking the lead in any proposed revision of the convention.
Meanwhile there are individual aspects of Dublin II which could easily be side-stepped: for instance Eurodac, whereby immigrants are fingerprinted to guarantee traceability to their first country of admission.
Ignoring this obligation is in fact one of Muscat’s few workable proposals, but it would make little sense to advertise the strategy in public. Both Italy and Greece (among the countries routinely accused of suspending Eurodac obligations) have always officially denied such action, to avoid any legal and political consequences.
Elsewhere, the 20-point plan makes a number of welcome noises about the need for an admissions policy in closed detention centres, and to improve the overall conditions. But there is no indication whatsoever of what resources a Labour government would be willing to allocate to this end; just as there is no indication that any of the 20 points presented has been thoroughly costed and scrutinised for potential drawbacks.
All things told, it is surprising that such a belligerent and undiplomatic approach to this sensitive issue had to come, of all people, from Joseph Muscat – who spent four years as an MEP, and is after all among the more seasoned of Malta’s “European” politicians.

Any comments?
If you wish your comments to be published in our Letters pages please click button below.
Please write a contact number and a postal address where you may be contacted.