5,481 Goodbyes: How Malta’s Migrant Removals Are Quietly Reshaping Island Life

**5,481 Departures: The Human Story Behind Malta’s Migrant Returns**

The figure lands like a slap: 5,481 people escorted off the island since 2021. Enough to fill the City Theatre in Valletta twice over, enough to populate a village the size of Żebbuġ. Yet behind every number is a name someone once whispered on a Sliema bus, a face that once queued for ħobż biż-żejt at a Marsa kiosk, a story that ended not with applause but with the clatter of an airport gate closing for the last time.

Walk down Triq il-Wied in Birkirkara at dusk and you can still feel the echo. Rose’s Mini-Market keeps a shelf of plantain and cassava for the West Africans who no longer come. “I still order it,” shrugs Rose, slicing pastizzi for a teenage customer. “Maybe they’ll be back.” She knows they won’t; the cardboard boxes arrive half-empty now, and the plantain ripens into black silence.

Between 2021 and 2023, Malta conducted 5,481 “removals” – government-speak for charter flights, detention vans and the quiet march of rejected asylum-seekers onto planes whose destinations rarely make the evening news. Home-affairs data show peaks in late 2022, when four repatriation flights left Luqa in a single month. The majority were sent to Nigeria, Bangladesh and Tunisia, countries Malta claims are “safe” under EU readmission deals. NGOs counter that “safe” is a movable feast when your skin is the wrong colour or your papers arrived three minutes after midnight.

The cultural maths is brutal. Each departure erases a barber who learned to say “għandi bżonn naħsel” in perfect Birkirkara dialect, a nanny who taught a Maltese toddler to count in Twi, a mason who repaired the Mdina bastions stone by stone. “We lost our night-shift baker,” sighs Graziella at the Qormi bakery famous for ftira. “Now the bread rises at 3 a.m. instead of 1 a.m.; the crust is never the same.”

Yet the community ledger is more complicated than nostalgia. In Ħamrun, where West African grocery shops once jostled with old-school ironmongers, some residents confess relief. “Football pitches feel ours again,” admits 67-year-old Nenu, watering geraniums outside a bar that banned afro-beat nights after noise complaints. A 2022 survey by the University of Malta found 42 % of locals felt “less anxious” after high-profile removal operations, a sentiment that political billboards translated into votes in last June’s MEP election.

Still, the human residue sticks. At the Ħal Far open centre, emptied from 1,200 residents to barely 300, social worker Maria Pisani scrolls through WhatsApp groups littered with ghosted conversations. “One minute you’re teaching someone to write his name in Maltese, the next the phone just ticks blue,” she says. The government insists removals are voluntary when detainees sign “return agreements” in lieu of longer detention. Pisani snorts: “Choice is a funny word when the alternative is a locked door.”

Economists note a quieter ledger. The 5,481 departures include an estimated 1,800 workers who paid national insurance. Their contributions – €3.7 million in 2022 alone – have evaporated from the social-security pot even as the island advertises for 10,000 new guest workers to fuel the construction boom. “We are rotating people like rental scooters,” remarks sociologist Dr Andrea Dibben. “Use for three years, discard, import fresh battery.”

On the feast of St Paul’s Shipwreck, Reverend Anton D’Amato reminds parishioners that Malta’s patron saint arrived as an irregular migrant on a storm-tossed plank. A few pews away, a Nigerian choir that once sang Kyrie eleison in Igbo is missing three voices. “The church is colder,” whispers 14-year-old altar boy Luke, who taught the tenors to pronounce “Għidli, fejn sejrin?” The answer, it seems, is 30,000 feet above the Mediterranean, circling back to countries whose own stories of hardship rarely reach Maltese headlines.

By the time the 5,481st seat-belt clicked shut last November, Malta had become both smaller and larger: smaller because the streets carry fewer accents, larger because every departure exports a sliver of the island’s newfound cosmopolitan skin. Whether history will tally this as hygiene or haemorrhage depends, perhaps, on who is writing the next census – and who is left to read it aloud in a voice that still trembles with memory.