Anshel Pfeffer Deporting Africans Isn't Moral or Even Cost-effective. So Why Is Israel Doing
Deporting Africans Isn't Moral or Even Cost-effective. So Why Is Israel Doing
This week's exposure of Israel's agreement with Rwanda’s government means that for $5000 a head,
the Rwandans will accept African migrants deported from Israel.
Reported rather laconically this week by Haaretz and Israeli
television's Channel 10 news, it came on the heels of the news that the
Interior and Internal Security ministers had agreed on the closure of the Holot detention center in the Negev, and that the government is stepping up deportations.
But if you do the math, it’s pretty astonishing.
We
are talking about roughly 40,000 migrants, many of them claiming
political asylum, from Sudan and Eritrea. In addition to the $5000 going
to the coffers of Kigali, each refugee will receive $3,500 in cash, and
Israel will pay the airfare. We’re talking about nearly $400 million,
or 1.4 billion shekels. That sum will be offset a bit by the closure of
Holot but we’re still speaking about at least a billion shekels to
remove 40,000 Africans.
But there’s no hue and cry, except from a tiny handful of left-wing MKs and human-rights NGOs. Even most of the Labor and Yesh Atid representatives are in favor.
I
could make this column about the humanitarian case for allowing these
refugees of genocide and repression to remain in Israel, and the special
duty of a state that was founded for and by such refugees nearly 70
years, to do just that. In fact I have written that column more than
once in the past. But since we began with the financial aspect, let’s
continue with that.
According
to government statistics, there were, in the second quarter of 2017
(the latest available data), 86,000 foreign workers in Israel on work
visas. Add to that 57,000 Palestinians from the West Bank with daily
work-permits and you have 143,000 non-Israelis working here legally,
over a prolonged period when Israel is enjoying its lowest unemployment
rates in its history.
The
numbers of foreign workers are going up continuously, demand for cheap
labor is booming and the Israeli economy could easily absorb these
40,000 Africans, most of whom who have been here for over five years and
already speak Hebrew. Actually, the Israeli economy has already
absorbed them – all the adults (and many of the children) among them are
working, only without legal permits and protections.
So
why spend a billion shekels on deporting them when a similar number of
foreign workers will ultimately arrive to fill their place in
restaurants, hotels and building sites?
One urgent political reason is that their concentration in the working-class neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv has become a rallying cry for far-right racist groups, whipping up the passions of local residents and shaming those who live elsewhere.
But
Israel has contended multiple times in its history with large groups of
disadvantaged immigrants concentrated in poor areas, and has dispersed
them, with varying degrees of success across the country. Dispersing
40,000 peaceful people, prepared and willing to work hard, to smaller
communities, should be relatively easy.
It’s
easy to say that the real reasons behind the refusal of successive
governments to find a better solution for the African migrants are
racist. Yes, they are black and not Jewish. And yes, there is a degree
of racism in the attitude towards them.
But
it’s not that simple. Israel has absorbed a much larger number of black
immigrants from Ethiopia over the last three decades, as well as
300,000 non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who are
eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return due to some
Jewish ancestry or relatives.
Racism
is an exacerbating factor in the attitude towards the Eritreans and
Sudanese, but not the root cause to the blank refusal of the majority of
Israelis to contemplate their remaining in the country. On a purely
economic level, Israel is now in the same category as other developed
countries, with a comparable level of quality of life, and the need for
hundreds of thousands workers from other parts of the world who are
willing to take the low-paid menial jobs that Israelis won’t do.
Israel
currently has 8.7 million citizens and - not including Palestinians -
around 200,000 foreign migrants, legal and illegal. The Africans
constitute only 20 percent of them.
So why can’t they stay?
For
a start, unlike other migrants, the Africans were illegal from the
moment they arrived. Other illegal migrants first landed at Ben Gurion
Airport with valid visas, and then outstayed them. The Africans crossed
Egypt and were smuggled by Bedouin caravans through the Sinai desert,
waiting for nightfall to steal across the border. Since 2013, when the
new border fence with Egypt was completed, that route was rendered
inoperative and they're not arriving any more.
Thus
the migrants here in Israel are an anomalous group that arrived between
2007 and 2012. Not part of an ongoing wave of immigration. In similar
cases in other countries, the classic solution would be a one-time
amnesty, allowing them to remain on long-term visas with a path to
eventual citizenship.
That isn’t going to happen. Israel has one immigration policy, and it’s called the Law of Return.
Calling
the law designed in the aftermath of the Holocaust "racist", is
ridiculous and a perversion of history. In a period when Israel had a
poor, struggling economy, and a majority of the Jews of the world still
lived in precarious situations, in Displaced Persons camps among the
ruins of the Third Reich and as citizens of Arab and Communist regimes
busy intensifying their anti-Jewish persecution, there was no question
the Law of Return was Israel’s raison d’etre.
Whether
or not the law as it stands is still fit for purpose, when Israel has
one of the strongest economies in the world and nearly all the Jews of
the world live in societies where they enjoy equal rights and are
protected by their governments, is not a question anyone with any
significant political standing or ambition is going to start asking in
2017.
There
are much more difficult questions of citizenship, demographics and
identity, arising from Israel’s military control of the Palestinians,
that have to be solved first, and the much awaited Trump Peace Plan is unlikely to bring us any closer to doing so.
The
African migrants should be allowed to stay. It would be the moral and
cost-effective course to take. But as Israel nears its 70th anniversary,
it is still in no place to revisit its immigration policies.
The
Law of Return remains the supreme and monolithic justification of
Israel’s existence and if that means we need to spend a billion shekels
sending 40,000 human beings to Rwanda, then that's a cost Israelis, it
seems, are prepared to absorb.
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