The Identity Malta Experience: Confessions Of A Third Country National
Identity Malta’s offices from the outside (Photo: Google Maps) and the inside (Photo: Anonymous contributor)
Sitting in a hot dilapidated room. Window slams shut. Plaster falls from the wall. Over the loudspeaker a number is called out. Blank-faced foreigners look at each other in anguish. An officer yells at them to queue up and pushes a woman holding the hand of a child as if she were a cow with calf being corralled or directed to the slaughter.
Welcome to Identity Malta. All Third Country Nationals or TCNs (non-EU expatriates) must go through the Identity Malta experience if they wish to stay and work in Malta. Coincidentally, the building where work authorization applications are made and permits are issued is directly across the street from Malta Experience, a tourist attraction telling the story of how the Knights of St. John repelled the Turkish invasion in the 16th century.
In the 21st century, Malta is still trying to repel the invasion of foreigners, even while the Prime Minister declares that more are needed to address an ongoing labor shortage. Typically the waiting time to see an Identity Malta clerk and submit an application is five to eight hours. The clerks are instructed by their supervisors to reject all applications on the first try. A man laments, “What do you expect when you’re dealing with someone with a checklist?” If they can, the clerks reject an applicant’s paperwork three or four more times based on technicalities (e.g. the applicant brought a copy instead of the original document). Some applicants must make up to a half dozen trips to re-submit paperwork before waiting another 7 to 9 weeks to have the permit issued.
While the Malta Experience is an enlightening tour de force through the violent history of this beautiful little island, the Identity Malta experience is quite different. It’s a grueling and dehumanizing experience that makes even the most worldly traveler question why they would want to live and work on the island. The queues are poorly organized. Large groups of applicants are herded from one corner of the waiting area to the other, not unlike cattle or sheep. There is no way for the public to acquire potable water within the building. Cigarette butts, trash and plaster fallen from the pockmarked walls are strewn along the dirty floors. Identity Malta staff constantly scream at foreign applicants to be patient, wait and queue up.
It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to undergo the Identity Malta experience year after year, as is required for all TCNs. This explains why the average TCN stays in Malta no longer than a year and the iGaming companies complain that turnover is too high.
In a country with so much technical prowess, it’s astounding to see stacks upon stacks of paper application materials on the desks of, as well as in baskets behind, the clerks. Little of their work is automated. It’s as if the immigration bureaucracy were frozen in time, in the 1950s, a relic of a bygone era. The work flow reaches a bottleneck at the biometric station, manned by a single red-faced clerk who does not seem to understand how to operate the only computer in the room. The Identity Malta supervisors make their rounds, handing out chocolates and drinks to the clerks and security officers, while the foreigners look on in wonder, hungry, tired, hot and frustrated.
If you’re Maltese and want to know what it’s like to be a foreigner in Malta, take a trip to Valletta and observe the Identity Malta experience. It’s inhumane. It’s alienating. It’s frustrating. It’s soul crushing. It is no wonder Malta has no Henry Kissingers or Albert Einsteins. They likely left the queue at Identity Malta and boarded a plane for a more welcoming country.
Are you a foreign worker who has passed through similar experiences? Feel free to comment below or email us in confidentiality at [email protected]
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