[WATCH] Youths urge government to grant work to unemployed refugees

The government should provide work to asylum seekers as soon as they pass a medical test, with their salaries coming from either the Treasury or EU Funds, youth in the National Youth Parliament have proposed.

They also called on the government and the Chief Justice to introduce harsh fines for people who employ immigrants off the books and to set up examinations to ascertain whether the asylum seekers are professionals with valid certificates. Nevertheless, those should still be made to spend a period of time studying in Malta, so as to integrate and learn about the Maltese system.

Several proposals centred around education, with one proposing that refugees’ children be granted the same rights to free education as Maltese citizens and another that the government provide them with teachers so as to learn new skills that would help them integrate. They also suggested that the government launch a school campaign about asylum seekers and their voyages, as well as about the legal differences between the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘illegal immigrant’, and that schools clamp down on xenophobia and racism.

Earlier, MPs from both sides of the House appealed to the Maltese public to look at Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis from a humanitarian aspect, with Labour MP Silvio Parnis describing the situation as a “challenge that we must welcome”.

Quoting an Illum survey, he said that 75% of people are against the arrival of further refugees on Malta’s shores.

“This is an issue that Parliament must take very seriously, and one that both sides of the House must take a common stance on,” he said.

Nationalist MP Francis Zammit Dimech went a step further, calling for the debate to be about welcoming an opportunity, rather than tackling a problem.

“There is unity in diversity, when people of different nationalities, races, ideas and religions come together,” he said. “We must never forget the human dimension of the refugee crisis.  We always tend to talk about them in numerical terms as though we were speaking about a stock exchange, but they are human beings too at the end of the day.”