Tablet, June 11, 2010
A small country intent on preserving its demographic balance, Israel is a Petri dish for globalization’s conflicts, including those being fought in Arizona.
Arizona’s controversial Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, also referred to as SB1070, takes effect in July. Proposed by Republican State Senator Russell Pearce, a staunch conservative, and ratified by Republican Governor Jan Brewer, the new legislation allows law enforcement to ask anyone for documentation of their legal status when “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien.”
Last month, Pearce announced plans to promote legislation that would strip American citizenship from the children of illegal immigrants. Speaking to Reuters, Pearce referred to the kids as “jackpot” or “anchor babies.” These children, English speakers born on US soil, “are not citizens,” he added.
Pearce’s words echo one side of Israel’s raging debate surrounding some 1200 children of illegal migrant workers. Here, cynics call them “visa babies” because Israel’s long-standing policy against the deportation of minors provides protection to parents who lack legal status. Interior Minister Eli Yishai sees these Israeli-born children as a threat to the character of the Jewish state, and hopes to expel them this summer, along with their parents.
Critics have slammed the move as inhumane. They point out that the children attend local schools, speak Hebrew, and celebrate Jewish holidays.
Two weeks ago, some 8000 protestors gathered in the courtyard of the Tel Aviv Museum in a last-ditch effort to prevent the deportation. Although there were many migrant laborers in the crowd, it was mostly Israeli. Classmates stood in support of the friends they might see expelled. Mothers could be overheard explaining to their children, in the gentlest way possible, why the deportation might happen.
Organized by the grassroots movement Israeli Children, UNICEF Israel, and Israel’s National Student Union, the protest was an emotional appeal to the government. Under the banner “We don’t have another country,” the 1200 kids and their supporters raised signs that read “Don’t deport us,” and “Children of Israel.” Two young Filipino girls held a heart-rending message, written in Hebrew: “Israel is my home. Here I learned to read Hebrew. All my friends are here. I am an Israeli child.”
Dozens of the 1200 kids slated for deportation took to the stage as their parents, most of whom are Filipino, looked on. In fluent Hebrew, the children sang “I don’t have another country”, a patriotic song every Israeli knows.
Speaking to Tablet, Rotem Ilan, co-founder of Israeli Children commented, “They are absorbed into Israeli society. They go to scouts. They go to [Zionist] youth movements.”
“They don’t even speak Tagalog,” Ilan remarked.
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The event came in the wake of the news that a governmental committee, convened to determine the children’s fate, recommended permanent residency. A final decision from Interior Minister Eli Yishai could come any day now.
Israel is home to approximately 300,000 migrant laborers, most of who come from Asia. Filipinos, Indians, Sri Lankans and Nepalese are usually caregivers to the elderly; Chinese are generally employed in construction; Thai are found in agriculture. The Interior Ministry estimates that 250,000 of these workers are illegal.
Israel began replacing Palestinian laborers with foreign workers in the late 1980s, during the First Intifada. The foreign population grew steadily from there, ballooning during the early days of the Second Intifada.
A growing community meant babies. While these children are allowed to attend Israeli schools, they receive few state benefits. And although many kids of foreign parents would like to serve in the army, service does not confer citizenship in Israel as it does in America.
The current attempt to deport the children is part of a larger campaign to clear the country of illegal migrant laborers by 2013. The state also aims to gradually reduce dependency on legal foreign workers, as well. But in 2009 alone, the Ministry of Interior issued 120,000 work permits to foreigners.
While some do overstay their visas, migrant laborers can lose their legal status for a variety of reasons. The binding arrangement ties a caregiver to one employer, leaving a worker illegal if he quits, is fired, or if his employer dies.
Both legal and illegal workers are protected under Israel’s labor laws. But abuses often go unreported as most migrant laborers are frightened by the threat of losing their visa.
Some migrant laborers lose their legal status, and thousands of dollars, to the flying visa scam. For a large fee, employment agencies arrange a job in Israel. The worker flies here, enters the country, and finds that he has been “fired” or has “quit.” His visa is canceled. The agency pockets the money and brings another worker, creating a revolving door of exploitation.
Since 2004, the Israeli government has shut down over 200 such agencies. But the problem remains difficult to control. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a former government official posed the rhetorical question, “Why does the sky remain open?”
He shrugged. “I am too small to know.”
Similarly, interviewees in Israeli Channel One’s 2008 documentary, “Foreign labor, Hebrew exploitation,” intimated that government corruption could be the answer.
One of the biggest difficulties facing migrant laborers and their advocates is that there are no laws to battle. All of Israel’s policies regarding foreign workers are just that—policies, set by the Ministry of the Interior.
Israel forbids migrant laborers from entering into romantic relationships. If they do, they run the risk of becoming illegal. And a worker who gives birth in Israel is forced to pick between her visa and her baby—keep one, lose the other. This is a choice most of the 1200 children’s mothers have had to make
“These regulations are cruel and shouldn’t exist in any moral country,” Ilan comments. “[Migrant laborers] aren’t machines. They deserve human rights like any other human being.”
Also problematic is the Ministry of the Interior’s tendency to ignore the recommendations of the Israeli Supreme Court. In 2006, justices struck down the binding arrangement and likened it to “modern day slavery.” In 2007, the Supreme Court recommended that the state change the policy that effectively punishes migrant laborers for having families.
To this day, the Ministry of the Interior has not amended either.
Oded Feller, an attorney at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, comments that migrant laborers and their children “should be treated by law, not regulations and policies of the Ministry of the Interior.”
He adds that the state shouldn’t make decisions as crises arrive. “Israel should have [laws] regarding non-Jews,” Feller says. “As long as Israel will have migrant workers, we’ll have children born and raised [here].”
As the foreign population has mushroomed Israel has increasingly relied on aggressive enforcement procedures like those on the horizon in Arizona. A wave of arrests and expulsions battered the foreign community in 2002 and 2003. Families were torn apart as Israel expelled men in hopes that women and children would follow.
A Filipino woman whose husband was not deported during this period confides that, to this day, her husband sleeps in the car at night for fear that immigration police will find them together.
In July 2009, the newly formed Oz Unit took to the streets to crack down on illegal migrant laborers. Oz, Hebrew for strength, also began enforcing the previously ignored “Gedera-Hadera” policy, which forbids African refugees from living in the center of the country. Deportation of the 1200 children and their parents was scheduled for August 1.
South Tel Aviv, home to thousands of migrant laborers and African refugees, was hard hit. The Oz Unit aggressively pursued foreigners, rounding them up by the bus full and taking them to detention centers. Many of those arrested were African refugees or single mothers, two groups ineligible for deportation.
After a public outcry, the “Gedera-Hadera” policy was cancelled. But as July drew to a close, the fate of the children remained undecided.
Massive protests were held. The kids donned shirts with the words “Don’t deport me” hand-written in Hebrew. Israel’s small community of Latin American workers held signs saying, “No hay ninos ilegales,” there are no illegal children—an image we could end up seeing in Arizona.
President Shimon Peres penned an emotional letter to Yishai, asking him to cancel the expulsion. “Who, if not a people who suffered embitterment in the lands of exile, should be sensitive to their fellow man living amongst them?” Peres wrote, according to Haaretz.
Drawing on his visit to a South Tel Aviv school attended by many of the children, Peres continued, “I heard Hebrew ring naturally from their mouths. I felt their connection and their love for Israel and their desire to live in it, to serve in its army and to help to strengthen it.”
In the eleventh hour, the government delayed the deportation for three months. In November, Netanyahu announced that the children could finish out the school year. Still, hundreds of illegal migrant laborers have been deported and thousands have left voluntarily. This once-vibrant neighborhood—filled with impromptu markets, food stands, and the chattering of workers and refugees—is now depressed. The smiles that used to greet Israeli visitors are gone.
In her modest apartment outside of Tel Aviv, Judith, a domestic helper from the Philippines, says she is most worried about her children, aged 8 and 15. “They don’t know how to leave,” she says.
Judith and her husband Eldy, who is also Filipino, have been in Israel for almost two decades. They lost their visas a few years ago, when their employer left the country.
Their Israeli-born and raised kids don’t speak Tagalog. Like most of the 1200 children, they speak English with their parents and Hebrew with each other.
Michelle, Judith and Eldy’s teenage daughter, says, “I want to go to the army, I want to study here… I feel Israeli.” She’s dressed like any other teenager you’d see on the street, she’s got that waist-length hair common to young girls here. But most striking is that indescribable something in her cadence and mannerisms. Michelle’s got the air of an Israeli.
Her brother, Michael, is busy playing a video game with a friend, another Hebrew-speaking Filipino boy. As kids do, they argue about whose turn it is. Michael pauses the game and the discussion just long enough to tell Tablet that his favorite sport is kadoor regel, soccer. His favorite holiday is Purim.
Judith looks on, her face worried. The Oz Unit, their uncertain future, everything has made a tremendous impact on the family. “I’m thinking day and night about what’s going on,” she says.
During Christmas, Judith was afraid to put a tree in the window. “We’re afraid to walk on the street,” she adds. “We live like criminals.”