Muscat said, however: “We need non-Maltese workers for the simple reason that some of our sectors and our economy and crucial social sectors such as healthcare would collapse if it wasn’t for these people. So they need to be protected and the government is ensuring that.”
‘Legal migration won’t necessarily solve irregular migration’
Besides Malta, other EU nations like Hungary have also been bringing in migrants through recruitment agencies in recent years.
In July, Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni said she plans to bring in 450,000 non-EU migrant workers in the next two years as she simultaneously announced plans to stop refugee arrivals by sea.
Bram Frouws, head of the Mixed Migration Centre, said countries that quietly welcome foreign workers while adopting far more hostile policies on undocumented people do so “for political gain or to use migrants as a scapegoat”.
“While organising legal migration is exactly what is needed, the way irregular migration is being handled with the push and pullbacks, the abuses and deaths and the undermining of search and rescue at sea is a bigger issue,” he said.
“To a large extent, these European countries are also looking at other countries of origin for labour migrants than the nationalities of those arriving at sea. So the kind of legal migration they’re organising won’t necessarily solve the irregular migration by sea,” he added.
For Mainwaring, the ideal solution is to process asylum claims quickly and integrate refugees into society.
“Then there’s less of a need perhaps to resort to a contracted migration system, which in reality has turned out exploitative and is as harsh as a pushback at sea, ” he said.
Source link : https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/12/4/malta-welcomes-foreign-workers-to-fill-labour-shortage-but-repels-refugees
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Publish date : 2023-12-04 08:00:00
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