Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the development of Maltese laws, policies and attitudes towards irregular immigrants, particularly vernacular ways of interpreting international refugee law. It explores the way the state tries to legitimise itself both locally and internationally in the process.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore the role played by legal and political culture in shaping certain distinctive features of Maltese laws, policies and attitudes towards irregular immigrants and to explore the reciprocal interaction between government laws and policies in this field and social attitudes towards the state and its laws. In particular it will question whether the "legitimisation of law" (Suarez-Navaz: 2004) is happening in Malta and explore how vernacular interpretations of international refugee law and the selective, changeable and arbitrary policy stances adopted by official authorities intersect with and influence prevalent ways of constructing and imagining the national community, the government, its laws and the human subject.

Central to this approach is the hypothesis that the common thread which runs through the various laws, policies and discourses towards irregular migrants is an institutionally embedded disposition to treat them as collectivised objects of policy and/or charity and not as individual subjects of legal rights. More than being simply a straightforward reflection of Maltese legal and political culture, official attitudes to irregular migrants play an important role in defining and reproducing particular Maltese "social imaginaries". Examining the connections between official and grass roots discourses can inform us as to how the Maltese state attempts to construct its legitimacy by drawing upon the same moral codes and rhetorical tropes which guide the behaviour of people at the grass-roots level.