How many of us recall the E. African Asians who lived amongst us in the 1970s? Evicted from their adopted homes in Africa they found shelter here for several years until their request for immigration to Britain was accepted. They seem to have vanished without trace. The presence of many Chinese workers here in the 70s and 80s has similarly left little or no mark on Maltese society. They join the waves and ripples of migration that reached our shores at some time in history to leave almost no impact at all. Well, we all seem to believe it.
Responding to spikes of hysteria over the current migration issue, Maltese politicians have been heard to declaim on our homogenous culture giving the impression that we are all clones shed from some common ancestor. But in fact we are a wonderful amalgam, a kaleidoscopic cocktail of diverse elements that appears to have preserved some persistent traits throughout a long history even as we become the next thing. We are very much like every other country in the world: the product of our turbulent past.
Glancing backward we tend to combine the contributions of countless arrivals into one unchanging reality identical to the present we prefer to perceive. The illusion is just too seductive.
Had it just been an illusion without practical effect, we could afford to be silly about it. Unfortunately we apply it in our daily lives in the way we treat people: the foreigners who live amongst us.
Tourists we tend to ignore. They’re here today and gone tomorrow. However we tend to treat them, decently or abominably, most of us feel that they’re not worth investing the smallest part of ourselves in them. And that is not altogether unreasonable: there are millions of them, they’re the crowd rushing past in the Paris metro.
Just as they tend to assume that we are the ones with dark eyes and a swarthy complexion, all others being tourists like themselves, we are lured into thinking that all non-Maltese are tourists.
There are many thousands of non-Maltese who live in Malta permanently. Because they look and sound foreign, they are usually exposed to the Paris metro treatment. I seriously suspect that they never quite get used to it.
To stack the odds against them, they are made up of a huge variety of little bits. We may never quite get our heads around it all even if were to bother to try. The greatest chunk are Arab speaking but they too are a whole world to themselves. The become Arabs whether or not they hail from Lebanon or Morocco. They are all assumed to Muslim although a significant segment are Christian or agnostic.
Next in order of weight of numbers come the British, swamped under the tsunami of tourists from Britain they tend to pass unnoticed except by those who have come to know them socially. They have the oldest residents’ association but there also exists a thriving German community with members who have been around for 40 years or more. With the establishment of new embassies, we have had the opportunity to discover that we are blessed with a Dutch community, a Greek Community and a Spanish Community. In fact we probably have a group of persons from every nation in the world from Congo to Brazil. There are Danes, Japanese and Turks who have made there homes here. To think of them all as ‘Ingliżi’ and dismiss them all as near tourists is a serious mistake.
Whether they have retired here in the past couple of years or married here to become grandmothers and grandfathers of very Maltese people, they have invested their lives in this country. They are not tourists.
Unlike tourists who buy a package, like it or complain, permanent residents have to deal with the Maltese system, a strange beast at best. Take the case of the grocery store in a Gozitan village that never set up a shop sign. Why bother? Everybody knows where Karmni sells her stuff. It takes a while for the new arrivals to acclimatise.
If you have to deal with a government department you fill in the forms and pay the fee and then ask around to see how things get done, who to speak to and whose cousin is the deciding factor. The poor bloody foreigners just wait.
It’s worse when things go seriously wrong. We use the cousin’s cousin’s clout, plead and beg and finally have one of those raging scenes which anybody from north of Naples presumes to be the prelude to a bloodbath. The foreigners are not expected to raise their voices. When they complain and hit home we often tell them to buzz off where they came from, as though we were entitled to do so. If they behave like we do, they’re arrogant.
Many of them have worked out how our jungle telegraph works, how well it works. Many of us are afraid to make enemies. They have to be scared witless. If they start a feud they don’t even have a family to back them up or at least to tip them off when the knife approaches their back.
When we cut them off privately it’s bad enough. When they are disadvantaged because they have no elaborate network of friends and relatives it’s just unfair. But when the official system lets them down too it becomes unbearable. The recent fiasco over the vote to non-Maltese EU citizens was an extraordinary slap in the face but there have been many more. In this case they have had their rights vindicated because the Greens had championed them very actively but also because they formed a significant category with all the weight of the EU behind them. What if they had been a handful of Montenegrins at a loss or a couple of Turks in a crisis? Would the system have recovered its balance so soon?
There will always be a distinction to be made between citizens and non-citizens in some important matters. Nobody expects it to be otherwise, however it is time for us to begin to think about dealing with non-Maltese people in a decent manner, not to be good or servile to foreigners but for us to get rid of the chip on our shoulder about having been a colony. They are our equals, we should treat them as we would like to be treated, for our own sake.
Look at it this way, if they can secure a reasonable deal for themselves we may get an even better one for ourselves: we may not be forever trading favours to get the simplest little thing done.
They are not ships that pass in the night but the flow of minute influences that have made us who we are and continue to make us whom we are becoming. If thanks to them we get something like a fair deal from our own system, it will be their greatest contribution so far.
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The presence of many Chinese workers here in the 70s and 80s has similarly left little or no mark on Maltese society. They join the waves and ripples of migration that reached our shores at some time in history to leave almost no impact at all. Well, we all seem to believe it.
