Cosmo-inequalities: Digital nomads good, asylum seekers bad

The same government which announced plans to grant residency permits to ‘digital nomads’ last week, is now denying work permits to asylum seekers hailing from ‘safe countries or origin’. But what does this say about the Labour government’s commitment towards equality?

Last week the government announced a new temporary residency scheme for people who want to move to Malta as a base to work remotely. The programme offers a six-month visa and an option of obtaining a one-year ‘Nomad Residence Permit’ and costs €300. To qualify, applicants must prove they are contracted to work remotely by a company based overseas, show that they run their own business or offer freelance service to clientele based abroad. Already some 1,000 so-called digital nomads have already lived and worked from Malta, with the government hoping to attract between 1,000 to 1,200 applicants a year.

Surely nothing wrong with incentives that tap into a niche which further widens Malta’s talent pool and diversity, attracting people who spend their income here and blend in an increasingly cosmopolitan landscape, albeit one burdened by infrastructural and environmental pressures from an influx of people unseen since the times of the Knights of St John.

And unlike passport buyers, who do not live in the property they rent or buy, digital nomads may actually want to live and enjoy life here, mingling in the Maltese melting pot. But so do thousands of foreign workers and asylum seekers, some of which have done so for decades.

Yet the contrast between our ‘welcome’ to tech-savvy digital nomads associated with the rich part of the globe, and the bureaucratic obstacles faced by other categories of migrants hailing from the global south, flies in the face of a government which on paper is committed to ‘equality.’

More salt was rubbed in the wound a few days later when human rights NGOs lashed out a policy by the home affairs minister to preclude asylum seekers deemed to come from ‘safe’ countries from legal employment for 9 months.

A government source says the ministry is adhering to legal conditions laid down in the minimum standards for asylum, which enforces the ban on employment specifically for so-called ‘Dublin’ migrants – those asylum seekers who applied for asylum in the EU from another point of entry and then travelled onwards – and other migrants with some form of protection or residence from another EU country. Many of these migrants tend to have travelled down from Italy to Malta.

But the policy also makes life more difficult for migrants who are not immediately returnable when these hail from safe countries of origin, and apply for asylum in Malta. Without the immediate return of Dublin migrants, the deterrent might still risk boosting illegal employment and push hundreds others into destitution.

Even although their claims for asylum are often rejected, some immigrants from safe countries do also qualify for protection, such as Kurdish refugees from Turkey, LGBTIQ people hailing from a number of safe countries like Tunisia... yet even if their claims get rejected, such asylum seekers often build meaningful affective relations in Malta, which makes their forced destitution and expulsion painful. Instead of considering an amnesty that normalises the life of people inside a legal limbo and avoid their slippage into an underworld of crime, such policies – even when mandated by European rules – see intent on making these people’s lives hell.

Welcome to Malta

Maria Pisani, a human rights activists and director of the Integra Foundation, recalls that in all the years she has been working on asylum issues, she never recalls any government official saying that refugees and asylum seekers are welcome.

“Any reference to asylum seekers living in Malta consistently comes with some or other condition: ‘you must integrate, you must change, you must respect…’ “

In contrast, those being offered a ‘nomadic residence permit’, are “being made welcome in Malta” as stated by parliamentary secretary for citizenship Alex Muscat. Theirs is the cosmopolitan Malta, embracing change and outward-looking as  glorified in Labour’s imaginary. Charles Mizzi, CEO of Residency Malta, even assures is that the “process is simple”, and that digital nomads can live and work here whilst “enjoying all the perks that Malta offers foreigners”.

And all this fits well in Labour’s embrace of a neoliberal world order where wealth creation is concerned, albeit one which retains the redistribution mechanisms which shelter the native workforce – at least, within the restricted timeframe of electoral cycles before the shit hits the fan with rising property prices and precarious conditions.

But Pisani notes that in the popular imaginary peddled by the government, “the digital nomad is an enigma, embodying the ultimate liberated figure, a consumer in the neoliberal globalised world”. They are celebrated for their “flair for travelling and discovering new countries and cultures” – as recognised by Alex Muscat himself.

But their nomadic lives transcend the boundaries of any nation state and control of state apparatus. Digital nomads get to be “subversive, challenging fixed notions of belonging and identity” – asylum seekers however? No – their claims for security cannot escape their boundaries of poverty and persecution.

In short, there is something zesty and sexy in the term digital nomad, which itself does not even reflect the real-life job conditions of working inside the digital world, where freelances are deprived of basic rights like sick and vacation leave. Some nomad workers end up working long hours in different jobs, simply to pay rent and make ends meet.

A different view of migration from parliamentary secretary Alex Muscat (left) and home affairs minister Byron Camilleri

Go back to your country

In stark contrast, the asylum seeker is immobilized by the State at the borders, in detention centres and in our prisons. The message sent to this category is to go back to their country, even after offering some cheap labour. The onus is always either trying to control the asylum seekers or expelling them.

“Far from liberated, their lives are marked by restrictions, and denied the right to work, they are forced to be outlaws. Paradoxically, asylum seekers serve as the marker of difference, demarcating the ‘other’ in an effort to keep up the premise (or illusion) of belonging and control, and mythical notions of a fixed identity,” Pisani says.

Possibly the asylum seeker provides a counterweight for the digital nomad, a reassurance that government is still excluding these ‘others’ to protect the natives from a conjured invasion, when in reality it is the Maltese government which is opening the floodgates – to high-net-worth individuals, to nomadic digital gurus, to minimum wage workers from outside the EU to work on construction sites.

But Labour in government has chosen to play the bully with the weak in an attempt to forestall a populist revolt against its own brand of cosmopolitanism.

How pushbacks complement cosmopolitanism

This unequal treatment of different categories of migrants has been the hallmark of Labour’s government migration policy, way back to 2013 when just months after being stopped by the courts from effecting an illegal pushback of migrants from Libya, the Muscat government embarked on the citizenship by investment scheme which effectively sold citizenship to the global rich.

“Malta does distinguish between migrants on the basis of their perceived value to us. The treatment received by passport buyers, who in most cases have absolutely no genuine interest in the country’s well-being, is a different universe to the way Malta treats migrants who have dedicated their entire time here trying to making Malta home,” says Neil Falzon, director of the Aditus Foundation.

A recent court judgement slamming the decision to keep six men locked up months after their detention was – on paper – lifted, “is yet another example of how the nation has stopped viewing some migrants as actual human beings”.

Yet despite these differences, categories remain elusive with one common theme running through all interactions with migrant; possibly, everyone is who not Maltese and including EU nationals.

“They are not people with lives, families, friends, dreams, disappointment, joys and pains. They are commodities put to our disposal to do and undo, use and abuse according to our whims,” Falzon says,

“There is no gratitude, no respect, no dignity once we’ve drained them of their energies and humanity. Our approach is markedly selfish and self-centred, possibly fuelled by an inferiority complex that leads us to carve out our own superiority and worth by suppressing the migrant.”