The foreigners Malta needs but won’t embrace

Malta’s political class has long treated foreign labour as both an economic necessity and a political liability. But in the 2026 election campaign, this contradiction has moved to the centre of political debate, even if few politicians are willing to confront it openly.

The scale of Malta’s demographic transformation helps explain why. In 2013 Malta had around 24,980 foreign workers and residents, including roughly 6,410 registered third-country nationals (TCNs). By mid-2025 the number of foreign workers alone had risen to around 130,000, with foreign nationals accounting for nearly 39% of the workforce. TCNs now make up roughly 69% of the foreign workforce. This transformation took place largely under a Labour government whose economic model relied on rapid growth in tourism, construction, gaming, logistics, care work and platform services—all sectors heavily dependent on imported labour.

Labour’s structural dilemma

Yet Labour also faces an uncomfortable political reality. Part of its traditional working-class base remains deeply uneasy about the social consequences of rapid demographic change. Rising rents, overcrowding, pressure on infrastructure and cultural anxieties have all become entangled with perceptions of migration. The result is a governing party caught between economic dependence on foreign workers and electoral pressure to appear tougher on migration.

Abela’s shifting language on identity and exclusion

Robert Abela’s own messaging throughout the campaign encapsulated this tension. At times he adopted an inclusive tone. When Labour candidate of Syrian origins Omar Rababah faced racist attacks, Abela defended him robustly.

Yet even this defence revealed the limits of Labour’s language on integration. Rather than presenting Rababah’s candidature as self-evidently legitimate, Abela emphasised his “Malteseness”: his Maltese family links, Catholic children and integration into local community life. In this way he also sent the message that to stand for an election having a Maltese pedigree matters more than competence, talent and principles. Instead Abela may well have emphasised Rababah’s competence rather than his pedigree.

And while finding himself on the right side of history in pushing for Rababah’s candidature, Abela had himself tapped into anxieties about foreigners and Maltese identity. Months earlier, in October 2025, he had argued that a PN proposal to introduce the right to a healthy environment into the Constitution could allow foreigners or residents to use the courts to challenge traditional fireworks and church bells on environmental grounds. Foreigners were thus presented as potential threats to Malta’s cultural traditions and village life.

Pride in excluding foreigners from super bonus

Just days after standing by Rababah, Robert Abela shifted tone, openly boasting that Labour had found a way to exclude around 100,000 foreign workers from its proposed €1,000 annual “super bonus,” while countering the PN’s tax cut proposal, which foresees a minimum €1,200 rebate for low-income earners.

In doing so, Abela took the cue from his predecessor Joseph Muscat, who has increasingly weaponised the eligibility of foreign workers for such benefits. After singling out the presence of 92,000 non-EU workers, Muscat described the PN proposal as a “€1,200 annual gift” to these workers, warning it would make Malta “even more attractive” for foreign labour inflows. He also framed what he called PN rhetoric as “almost racist,” while praising Labour’s super bonus for being limited to Maltese, EU citizens and long-term residents.

Abela quickly followed this line, arguing that the PN plan would amount to “sending Maltese money to foreigners.” Labour introduced a five-year residency requirement to ensure the benefit primarily reaches long-term residents, marking a shift from earlier, more universal tax rebate schemes that included all workers in Malta.

The approach is also politically calculated, with Labour contrasting its scheme with the PN’s proposed tax cuts, which it argues risk “leakage” to foreign workers, while framing its own proposal as protecting taxpayers and rewarding rootedness.

Still, the issue exposes tensions within Labour between electoral strategy and ideological discomfort. Critics include former minister Evarist Bartolo, who called the approach “shameful” and warned of “second-class workers”; former MEP Cyrus Engerer, who said it departs from socialist principles; and commentator Jeremy Camilleri, who argued that workers contributing taxes and national insurance should not be excluded on the basis of nationality.

Managing contradictions

This dual strategy—symbolic inclusion alongside coded exclusion—reflects Labour’s broader attempt to manage a contradiction it cannot resolve. Malta’s economic model still requires large inflows of foreign labour. Yet politically, Labour increasingly speaks as though this same labour force is something to be contained, filtered or selectively excluded from the benefits of growth. The contribution of this workforce is rarely recognised or congratulated. 

The party’s concrete proposals —some of which very sensible—reflect this balancing act. Labour is promising to double recruitment fees for foreign workers, impose stricter rules on employers who dismiss third-country nationals unfairly, and require pre-departure training and certification for incoming workers. These measures are presented not as a reduction in foreign labour per se, but as a shift toward “managed growth” and better regulation.

The PN’s cautious repositioning

The Nationalist Party has approached the issue more cautiously. Unlike in previous electoral cycles, officially the PN has largely avoided dramatic and divisive rhetoric on migration or explicit numerical targets for reducing foreign workers.  

This restraint likely reflects two realities. First, the PN’s own economic proposals still assume continued high rates of growth and therefore continued labour demand. Second, the party is actively courting business sectors that remain heavily dependent on foreign workers.

Instead of foregrounding migration directly, the PN has framed the issue through economic restructuring and labour-market incentives. For example, it proposes higher stipends for healthcare students, tax incentives for Maltese professionals returning from abroad, and tax exemptions on overtime and part-time work to encourage locals to fill labour gaps.

The underlying message is subtle but clear: Malta should reduce dependence on imported labour not through confrontation, but through productivity, retention of local talent and a more innovation-based economy.

At the same time, the PN has attempted to exploit Labour’s contradictions by remaining silent. When asked, Alex Borg condemned racism directed at Rababah but avoided directly confronting the broader anti-foreigner discourse surrounding the controversy.

Moreover, party figures such as MEP candidate Peter Agius, in an interview with MaltaToday on Monday, continued to resort to populist rhetoric, referring to “waiting rooms in public hospitals being mifqugħa (packed) with foreigners brought here by Labour who benefit from the same access to healthcare as Maltese citizens who have been paying taxes for more than 20 years.”

The PN has also supported measures that distinguish between long-term residents and newer arrivals, including a proposal granting a €5,000 investment fund to children born in Malta to foreign parents only if those parents have lived in Malta for at least five years. 

This reflects a broader consensus emerging between the two major parties: acceptance of foreign labour as economically necessary, combined with increasing emphasis on deservingness, integration and residency thresholds. 

The policies that are not being discussed

Yet what is perhaps most striking in this election is not what parties are proposing, but what they are avoiding.

No major party has proposed a serious reform of Malta’s opaque and restrictive citizenship through the naturalisation system. Neither is there any discussion on citizenship for children of foreigners who have completed a full school cycle in Malta.

No major party talks about voting rights at local level (as is already the case for migrants from the EU) for TCNs who have been here for a number of years. Equally absent are discussions about compulsory trade unionisation once championed by Labour in a bid to address abuse, stronger regulation of the parallel economy, or structural reforms aimed at integrating a growing migrant underclass into Maltese social and political life.

Even on a symbolic level throughout the campaign we have not seen any politician shaking hands with immigrant workers. And with the exception of Rababah we have seen little ethnic diversity in the candidate lists.

Progressive third parties: Blame employers not foreign workers

In this vacuum, smaller parties have been freer to articulate more coherent—if politically marginal—critiques.

Unlike bigger parties Momentum has adopted the hardest line towards businesses employing and potentially exploiting foreign workers, proposing explicit restrictions on unskilled foreign labour, salary thresholds for work permits, and infrastructure fees on companies employing high proportions of foreigners. Its argument is essentially that employers should bear the social costs generated by mass labour importation. In this way the party does not put the blame on foreigners but on those who are exploiting them.

ADPD has been the only party to challenge the underlying economic model itself. Rather than framing migrants as the problem, the Greens argue that Malta’s dependence on cheap labour stems from a low-wage, volume-driven economy centred on construction, speculation and precarious work. Their answer is a living wage, stronger workers’ rights, rent controls and economic diversification away from sectors dependent on constant labour inflows.  But the party has still to translate this approach in concrete proposals.

A vacuum for the far right

It remains to be seen whether the lack of political leadership and clarity on this issue, in a period of widespread disillusionment with politics, could open the way for the far right, which so far has never made any inroads in national elections.

Aħwa Maltin is proposing a discriminatory system where Maltese citizens are given absolute priority in hospitals and public services, while brutally ending free healthcare and subsidies for non-EU immigrants.

The party advocates for "real control" on immigration to preserve Maltese identity and traditions, claiming the current demographic shifts are "replacing" the native population, thus echoing the ‘great replacement theory’ of the international far right.  

Further to the right Imperium Europa will be contesting only two districts but has traditionally tapped into the anti-establishment vote.  But with Norman Lowell not contesting, the party may lack its name recognition.

Still, even among Maltese who voice frustration or resentment towards foreigners, there is often an underlying dependence on their presence, with many indirectly benefiting from their services and, at times, from the very structures of labour exploitation that sustain key sectors of the economy.

An unresolved transformation

In this sense, the election debate on foreigners reveals something deeper about Malta’s political economy. The central dispute is no longer whether foreign labour should exist—that question has effectively been settled by economic reality.

The real question is what kind of society Malta is becoming as a result of this transformation. So far, neither Labour nor the PN appears fully willing to answer it.

On this issue, both major parties are simultaneously running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.