An Island Engulfed by Migrants

"We have never had minorities, and we don't want minorities," he said. "Until just three or four years ago, it was almost impossible to find a black African walking in Maltese streets, but nowadays you just have to walk in our capital city and there are many of them."

Many of the migrants gather near the old stone city gate near the once-grand opera house that was bombed, like so much of the island, in World War II. A British territory until 1964, Malta was a closer target than London for the Nazi Luftwaffe, and many residents interviewed said the relentless boatloads of foreigners made islanders feel as if they were under assault again.

"We need to get extra patrol boats and send them back," said Charlie Bezzina, 47, who was selling local Cisk beer near the opera house steps.

Ruth Spiteri, a mother of three sitting with her children in a perfectly groomed park a few blocks away, said the migrants demanded too much. "They don't like the food we give them. They are aggressive with soldiers. They bring different diseases," she said.

Some Maltese fault the government and a conservative church hierarchy for failing to explain the boat people's plight and to calm unjustified fears. In that vacuum, they say, racist and xenophobic views have flourished. Recently, a Congolese man said a motorist deliberately rammed him, throwing him against a wall and injuring both his legs.

The Rev. Paul Pace, acting director of Jesuit Refugee Service, said his group has been going into high schools asking students to imagine leaving their homes, without taking anything with them, and risking their lives to move to a new country. He said Malta must show the human face of these migrants, who have much to contribute. Pace said he was certain that his group's advocacy for immigrants was the reason arsonists recently torched seven cars belonging to Jesuits and the house and car of Camilleri, the group's assistant director.

Terry Gosden, who runs one of the country's detention centers for migrants, said physicians, lawyers and people with master's degrees were among the people he was sheltering. Some have found jobs in the community, working at building sites, as hotel chambermaids, as laborers in shipyards or as garbage collectors.

Many died at sea trying to get here, he said. "The Mediterranean is a graveyard."

Like many here, Gosden said he felt the answer to the current problem lay in investment in Africa, which is needed to create jobs there: "Turning Europe into a fortress won't work."

Malta, which joined the European Union in 2004, is bound by E.U. rules stating that the country where illegal immigrants first land must take responsibility for them, deciding who can stay on humanitarian grounds and who should be sent home. In practical terms, it has proved difficult for Malta to return people because of the cost and diplomatic complications.

Currently, nearly 1,000 immigrants sit in crowded facilities known as "closed detention centers." Human rights advocates call living conditions there unacceptable. People who are taken from boats must spend 18 months in these locked facilities -- off-limits to the news media -- then may be granted humanitarian status to stay on and move to an "open detention center."

"You can't imagine how difficult I find it here," said Ihaps Norain, 28, a sad-looking Sudanese man standing one recent day near the bus terminal at the entrance to this city of sand-colored buildings built by the famed Knights of St. John in the 16th century.

Norain explained how his Libyan boat ran out of gas, forcing him to land here instead of Italy. Having served his time in the locked detention center, he is now free to come and go. In Sudan, he said, he was studying accounting; here, he builds windows in an aluminum factory. He cannot wait to leave but doesn't know how. "I don't want to be here," he said, "and I know people here don't want me."

Other dejected boat people have taken to calling Malta "midway to nowhere."

Norain hopped on a bus for a five-minute journey to bring a visitor to the open center where he lives with 560 other people, mostly Africans but a few from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and other countries. Norain sleeps on a mattress in a corner.

"I ask myself, 'Why did I risk my life for this?' " Norain said. "I see the way they look at me on the bus. Some people make you feel so sad."

Human rights groups estimate that more than a million sub-Saharan Africans displaced by war and poverty have gathered in Libya, hoping to make a journey similar to Norain's.

Scicluna, the government adviser, said that it was "utterly unrealistic to think you can pull up the drawbridge" and that the country needed time to adjust to immigration.

"We've got to live with it. We've got to adapt to it. We have got to make it work," he said.