Immigration mess

109 immigrants were brought ashore last night. Ann at Refugee Settlement Watch takes a critical look from a North American perspective:

Here is a fairly lengthy discussion of the increasing illegal immigration to Mediterranean islands Malta and Cyprus. We’ve written on previous occasions how those entering Europe illegally seek asylum and end up as refugees to the US. Today I attended a meeting in Annapolis on immigration and a topic of discussion was that all immigration (legal and illegal) must be reformed in the US.

As I have also said previously, critics of illegal immigration in the past have been careful to separate criticism of illegal from legal, that distinction is fading fast. When the US takes illegal aliens from Malta, as we did recently, and transforms them into ‘legal’ refugees we encourage more “boat people” to try to reach island nations like Malta, and the State Department further blurs the line between legal and illegal.

"In Malta, between 2001 and 2002 the figure of asylum seekers shot up from some 50 to nearly 2,000, and continued at a steady pace averaging some 1,500 every year since then, with a total of some 9,000 “boat people” alone so far until 2008. Most of these arrived illegally and undocumented from Libya, although very few of them were actually Libyans. For the most part, they came from sub-Saharan Africa, transiting through Libya, where several would have lived and worked sometimes for years before taking the boat to Europe."

See earlier posts on Malta here.