Malta, Italy, and Mediterranean Migration: A Long History and an Ongoing Issue

In July 2013, the Sunday Telegraph issued a report on the escalating refugee crisis in Malta. In the previous decade, Malta had seen thousands of Africans make their way to the tiny island nation, which lies just over a hundred miles from the Tunisian coast. The newspaper wanted to get some reactions from Maltese citizens on the way they were coping with this influx of desperate, often sick and traumatized, and almost uniformly poor North and Sub-Saharan Africans. Some Maltese told the Sunday Telegraph ’s reporters that they had experienced no problems with their new neighbors, but others accused the Africans of being dirty, unruly, and possibly dangerous. “Every night you see them around here, drinking and making a mess,” claimed Raymond Zammit, while Gerard Camelleri said “the kids feel afraid to play in the parks” and warned that “in another few years, Malta is going to be African.” In September 2014, an anti-immigration rally in Malta saw its participants claim that the “real Maltese” were at risk of extermination due to the refugee crisis, with one saying that Malta must be “cleared of African invaders, who want to destroy Maltese culture and civilisation.” Although cross-Mediterranean migration has slowed since its height between 2014 and 2016, the situation remains sensitive. This is even more the case as the COVID-19 pandemic has imbued all patterns, events, and decisions related to European immigration with additional gravity. In many ways, though, the tone of the recent past has set the parameters of the response in the present. An examination of that history in this article, the first of a three-part series that reflects on the past, present, and future Mediterranean migration, shows us that any immediacy related to the pandemic must be understood as an outgrowth of a feeling of seemingly continuous crisis over immigration that has featured in European discourse for years. Indeed, Malta’s prime minister Joseph Muscat, who stepped down amid a corruption scandal at the beginning of 2020, told the European Parliament in 2017 that the influx of refugees is “unsustainable” given Malta’s resources—ancient history in terms of the quotidian reassessment of statuses and options elicited by the ebbing and flowing of COVID-19 outbreaks. Only two years ago, in 2018, over 100,000 made the perilous journey by sea to Europe, with 2,262 recorded by the UN as having died trying. In 2019, a ship carrying 49 refugees was finally accepted after being kept bobbing at sea for two weeks upon entering Maltese waters, as Muscat cajoled his fellow European Union leaders to help redistribute the refugees across Europe to spread the burden around. The EU’s migration chief at the time, Dimitris Avramopoulos, admitted that the agreement between Malta and the EU was not a cause for celebration but for somber reflection, saying “The past weeks have not been Europe’s finest hour…If human values and solidarity are not upheld, then it is not Europe.”