The boats continue to land upon our shores, bringing in an average of two-to-three dozen illegal immigrants per vessel. Our slightly more southerly neighbour, Lampedusa, consistently receives larger consignments of many hundreds of immigrants but as of yet we have been spared shipments in excess of a couple of hundred. Fortunately for them they have the direct support of Italy to help ease the stresses of the situation involved.

Rumours about the organized nature of the trafficking of the immigrants have been going round for ages. Such rumours were based upon the observation that the rate by which illegal immigrants have been entering have been somewhat consistent. Some persons have even coined the term of ‘the magic 27′, referring to the median number of immigrants per boat. One might almost start to picture a bookings agent attending to immigrants queries and taking reservations in a secluded alleyway in some congested North African village. Days ago it was reported by the Times that an improvement in the safety standards on the boats with which immigrants drift northward itself suggests that the traffickers have grown more organized, however that is as far as connections seem to have officially gone.

The people are to believe that all else is merely a coincidence, including the GonziPN campaign’s utter downplay of its relative inaction for as far as the illegal immigration crisis was concerned during the previous administrative term, suspicious considering the uncannily convenient reduction in the inflow of immigrants in 2007 and the similarly uncannily convenient increase in the inflow of immigrants in 2008, already practically confirmed to be a record-breaker with over 2,000 illegal immigrants received so far this year – in the middle of August.

Earlier in this series I had stated that Josie Muscat’s proposal for burden sharing is not the solution to the illegal immigration issue. I made it very clear as to why this is so, but will now add that this does not mean that burden sharing has no place within the tackling of the issue. After all, Lampedusa would likely be in much worse shape were it not for the redistributive efforts of Italy and, while the Maltese Islands have received relatively paltry assistance in redistribution, we could very well do with it, especially when one considers that this year’s tally exceeds 0.5% of the entire population of Malta. Who knows how many were accumulated during the past years following the turn of the millennium.

The concept of redistribution is not to be forgotten. It buys time to properly deal with the masses of illegal immigrants already here. It would be hasty to attempt to push them back south of our respective borders and would likely turn out to be a very painful experience. It makes more sense to tackle such matters in a more organic fashion over the middle-to-long term, relations with our southern nations crucial to mutual benefit and success.