Illegal Immigration in 2006

 

Today's Sunday Times carries a brief but interesting summary of the situation with regard to refugees and illegal immigrants over the past year, which I am reproducing in full:

Twenty-eight illegal immigrants were granted refugee status in 2006, while another 522 were given humanitarian protection, the Commission for Refugees' annual report shows.
A total of 637 requests for refugee status were turned down, however.
In a statement, the Refugee Commission said it had dealt with 4,477 cases since it started to operate in January 2002. Over 1,300 were Somalis.
The Refugee Office started off the year with 849 pending applications, and in the past 12 months determined the cases of 1,210 individuals from 39 countries. They include 887 individuals who arrived in Malta in 2005.
As of the end of this month, the office is still working on 211 cases and has 720 pending cases of foreigners who landed in Malta after June 20. This year a total of 23 people withdrew their application for refugee status.
The refugee office explained that the process of several individuals was prolonged because of complications - such as the lack of a passport or forged documentation. In other cases, the refugee office has to probe individuals to ascertain that they pertain to a particular country or creed.
Delays have also been caused by the shortage of interpreters for the diverse languages spoken by illegal immigrants.

The key figure here is '28'. That's the number of ascertained genuine refugees for 2006 (many of them would have arrived in 2005 or even earlier, while some of those who arrived in the Summer of 2006 are still being processed). These are the people to whom the Geneva Convention on refugees applies. The rest may be repatriated according to our own laws, but in reality they are staying anyway. The 522 granted 'humanitarian protection' have basically not qualified for refugee status under the Geneva Convention, although they come from certain difficult countries (it's probably Somalia for the vast majority of them). For these, and for the 637 whose cases were even weaker and who were refused outright, the only rational solution is humane but indefinite detention until they can be repatriated.

Detention is not meant to deter people from actually arriving in Malta or to punish them for doing so. It's merely part of the administrative process leading to repatriation. That it should be humane is important not just for moral reasons but also for our international image. That it should be indefinite is essential for its effectiveness. If people are in any case released after 18 months, as is happening now, then it all merely becomes a case of an 18-month quarantine period before being definitively admitted to live and work in Malta.

For anyone with any idea of Malta's demographics, it is evident that the annual addition of even around 500 immigrants predominantly from Muslim countries will lead to the creation of a substantial community in a single generation, with a demographic momentum that would be almost impossible to reverse in the long term. As the figure is in fact probably closer to 1000 per annum (as many of those whose application is refused outright are not in fact repatriated, and there are probably many others who arrive in Malta undetected and are not covered by the official statistics), the situation is probably even more dramatic than that. If it were to reach 2000 per annum, the figure assumed by Eurostat in its 2005 projections, the political independence of the Maltese people would be under threat in 2 generations, with Muslim immigrants and their descendants approaching a quarter of the population by 2050 and probably becoming a majority before the century is out.