On immigration, Joseph Muscat fails the progressive test

For some time now, Labour leader Joseph Muscat has displayed a skill at exploiting political opportunities that catch the government napping. This is something every effective Opposition must do, but Muscat’s skill has recently been overtaken by events. When he thought the Arab spring was an opportunity for Malta to rake in the tourists’ pennies, Libya goes up in flames... and now that he thinks Italy’s repudiation of asylum seekers is a justifiable act of defending the national interest, some junior minister proposes suspending Malta’s interconnector cable to Sicily unless the island comes in line with Italian demands.

It’s a poker game that has seen Muscat go all-in rather too carelessly at times, and on immigration, he enjoys flexing his populist muscles, much to the chagrin of his progressive claims.

Immigration is an acid test for any politician in Europe. It is easy to look ‘strong’ and point fingers at Brussels, because this will always appeal to the raw emotions of a general public. If there’s one thing Muscat is sure about, it’s that being ‘progressive’ on immigration can lose him votes.

So Muscat exploits the European Union’s contradictory immigration policy to both hit out at the government’s own contradictory policy (once a ‘passive’ supporter of Italian pushbacks, it has no choice but to go crying to the EU again) and prop himself up as a strongman on immigration. But this last bit puts paid to his claims of being a newly baptised progressive.

Because being progressive on immigration requires altruism, a fierce sense of internationalist solidarity, and above all a no-compromise position on international human rights. However it also requires the skill to engage with the people who live cheek-by-jowl with immigrants and who seem more concerned about losing jobs and benefits to these new claimants.

Muscat’s first mistake is his flawed sense of ‘national interest’. He thinks that Italy’s bullish tactics at blockading Lampedusa is something that a small country like Malta should do (in the sense that Malta must prioritise its national interest like Italy does). It’s worrisome that when he said this yesterday on One radio, earlier in the morning the Italian under-secretary for economic development said Malta should be placed under Italian submission by threatening to withdraw the interconnector cable to the Italian grid. Had Muscat known this, his jingoist fervour might have been somewhat tempered by the way Italy flaunts its national interest.

Secondly, Muscat fails to address the concerns of the working class as the first group of people who are usually in contact with asylum seekers and refugees, who usually live in working class towns and do mainly unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. It’s the working class that tends to feel threatened by new immigrants who make claims on a country’s limited resources (social benefits and jobs for example) which they feel are theirs by right as citizens. So Muscat must reassure the anxious, not just react to the polls: there is an educative role a leader can play in reconciling people to the reality of immigration in the Mediterranean.

Of course, immigration truly presents a conundrum for many European countries: on one hand, you find right-wing governments like Italy’s putting pressure on small EU member states like ours; on the other, how do politicians respond to the polls and voters’ concern on immigration?

As far as progressives go, the answer surely doesn’t lie in mimicking Italian machismo and conjure up asylum seekers as a burden that is solely the responsibility of ‘those people up in Brussels’. Like Terry Gosden once said, the way we view asylum seekers ultimately reflects the way in which we view ourselves. "By giving respect, we keep ours."

But the more I hear Muscat speak, the more I think that he has problems grappling with immigration (and here he is in tune with the Nationalist government’s konservatizmu lemini to use his buzzwords), or he is not making himself clear enough. I suspect the previous (read here) because if he really believed in a progressive asylum and immigration policy he would have condemned the Italian blockade.

He would have even condemned the Libyan pushbacks before, and now hit out at Italy and the European Commission for not adhering to international search and rescue laws. But I don’t think he has the moral high-ground to hit out at Carm Mifsud Bonnici and Simon Busuttil, who supported the pushbacks orchestrated by the bunga-bunga brotherhood.

The emergency migrant influx from Libya deserves a different outlook, and Malta must keep making its case with the EC for the necessary funds to process all asylum claims as thoroughly and fast as possible; and for a resettlement programme for people awarded protection and whose aspirations to a better life are clearly forged in some European country or even the USA (whose generosity with Malta is well documented).

Crisis or not, the recent influx was bound to resume once the illegal pushbacks stopped. So Muscat must start looking at a platform on which to hammer out a common policy for asylum seekers’ human rights and burden-sharing solidarity mechanism. It’s not an us-versus-Brussels issue. We need a legal system of immigration that guarantees equal rights to migrants seeking a new life inside the EU.

(Muscat must also understand that immigrants - the new working-class - will eventually be critical contributors to the economy in taxes, which already relies on immigrant labour in construction, hotel and service industries. The flipside to immigrant labour is Maltese tax evasion: we have over €1 billion in unpaid income tax and VAT.)

We need leaders to have the moral authority to put Europe to shame, but first they must be able to put countries like Italy, who put their so called ‘national interest’ first, to shame. Muscat cannot pick and choose à la carte from the menu of progressives. So step up to the plate, or drop the label mate.