Built to exclude

Three moments from this campaign tell us something uncomfortable about the country we are choosing to be.

The first: At the university debate hosted by MUDU and KSU, Robert Abela and Alex Borg agreed without hesitation that there should be no second mosque in Malta and no place for the Quran in our schools. Days earlier, Islamic Solidarity Malta had quietly withdrawn its Luqa application after the local council, led by the economy minister’s father, voted unanimously against it. The reasoning offered by the two leaders was disarmingly simple—there is already a mosque in the centre of Malta. That mosque, in Paola, has a capacity of 500. Its community leaders say Friday worshippers spill onto the surrounding streets.

The second: When Omar Rababah, a Maltese citizen, social worker, and equality activist, announced he would contest the election, a wave of racial and religious abuse followed online. Robert Abela defended him, but the defence was questionable. The prime minister did not say that a Maltese citizen has every right to stand for office and that his religion is no one’s business. He said that Rababah was born in a Maltese hospital, that his grandfather was Frans il-Bloqq, that his wife is the daughter of Pawlu taż-Żebgħa, that his three children are baptised Catholics. The bigots had set the test that to be acceptable in Maltese public life you must look and worship a certain way and the defence accepted the test. It only argued that Rababah passes it.

The third: The proposed €1,000 annual workers’ bonus, presented as a flagship policy by the Labour Party, was carefully drawn to exclude anyone who has not lived in Malta for five years. The prime minister has been candid about the legal architecture that makes this exclusion possible. The bonus is not means-tested. It is residence-tested. A Maltese millionaire qualifies; a Filipino care worker who has paid tax here for four years does not.

Each of these can perhaps be defended on its own narrow terms. A planning objection here, a sloppy comment thread there, a perfectly legal eligibility rule somewhere else. But the pattern is clear. We are watching two major parties converge not on a vision of fairness, but on the principle that the majority gets to dictate the terms of belonging for everyone else.

This is not how stable, decent societies are built. It is, in fact, exactly how every European country now wrestling with entrenched ethnic and religious fault lines began. The lesson from France, from the Netherlands, from parts of Germany and Britain is not that “multiculturalism doesn’t work”. It is that multiculturalism cannot work when it is broken by design and when one community is told, repeatedly and through both word and policy, that its presence is conditional, its worship fallacious, and its representation in public life is an imposition.

And here is where the empirical question matters, because the standard reply is that none of this is permanent since foreign workers come and go. Malta has just lived through the most dramatic demographic shift of any country in the European Union. The share of non-nationals in our population rose from 7% in 2014 to 28% in 2024 and yet the consoling story is that this is a passing phase. There is something to that story. Research by the Central Bank of Malta has consistently shown that the average length of stay of a foreign worker is around three and a half years, and that only about 30% are still engaged in the Maltese labour market more than six years after they first arrive. The system is designed for transience.

But the same data tells a quieter, more important story. At the 2021 Census, more than 25,000 people born outside the EU had already been resident in Malta for seven years or more. Over 14,000 had been here for twelve years or more. The much larger cohort that arrived between 2015 and 2019, standing at almost 45,000 people on Census night, has by now also crossed the five-year mark. Many will have left; many have not. They are care workers and bus drivers, mechanics and nurses, parents of children who have only ever known Malta as home.

And what has the state offered them, in legal terms, after years of work and tax contributions? To be recognised by Malta as a long-term resident a third-country national must clear several bars. They must show stable income, hold sickness insurance, secure appropriate accommodation, complete a 100-hour ‘I Belong’ course on Maltese society and history, and pass a Maltese language exam. At the end of 2024, the number of third-country nationals in Malta who had cleared all of this stood at 1,567.

And even when they do pass the test they cannot vote at all. A Romanian who arrived last month can vote on parking and waste collection in the town they live in. An Albanian nurse who has paid tax here for 15 years cannot. In 2018, a Cabinet position paper merely proposing to study giving long-term third-country residents the right to vote in local council elections was, Malta Today reported at the time, shot down by a majority of ministers. One reportedly asked whether “we wanted an African mayor in Marsa.”

There is a humanist case for getting this right, and there is a self-interested one, and they happen to agree. Societies that exclude do not become more cohesive; they become more brittle and turbulent. They generate exactly the resentment, withdrawal, and parallel communities that the exclusion was supposedly meant to prevent. We have decades of European evidence on this, and we are choosing not to learn from it.

A second mosque will not unmake Malta. A bonus paid to a four-year resident will not unmake Malta. A Muslim candidate on a ballot sheet, defended robustly not reluctantly will not unmake Malta.

What might unmake it is the slow accumulation of small refusals agreed across the aisle, until a generation of our neighbours quietly concludes that the country will never really be the safe home, they believed it would, and should, be.