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New Faces
Peter Hirschberg
Over 100,000 foreign workers are in Israel legally, 100,000 more illegally.
They're having children, using medical services, organizing. A time bomb waiting to explode.
Come November, Margarita will have been in Israel four years. In that time she has brought 21 family members - cousins, nieces, nephews and four of her seven children - from the Philippines and engineered work permits for them.
"Eat this, granny," says Margarita, 50, in broken but understandable Hebrew, tenderly lifting a sandwich to the mouth of an elderly woman she cares for in a seniors complex near Gederah. Old-age care is a Philippine specialty in Israel; Margarita has a daughter and a son looking after elderly people in Jerusalem, another daughter doing the same in Bat Yam, a niece working in an old-age home.
Margarita can earn three times here what she could back home. At the end of each month she sends a portion of her $600 salary back to her three remaining children for their college tuition. Ultimately, she wants to go home to her husband and family. But she's less sure about her children here: "For now they just want to work in Israel. I don't know what will be in the future."
Margarita may be unusually resourceful. But chain migration - Margarita brings Maria brings Juan - is common in Israel's Philippine community, which numbers anywhere from 6,000 up. And it's just one of many signs that the country's foreign workers are acting less like short-term guests - and more like people who have moved in.
And the government is spooked. In mid July, Labor Minister Eli Yishai announced that as the government began letting Palestinians enter Israel again to work, he intended to "quickly remove 100,000 foreign workers from the country." Yishai was apparently speaking of those legally in Israel on short-term permits, whose presence requires his ministry's OK - mostly Filipinos, Rumanian construction workers and Thai farm workers.
But at least 100,000 or more foreign workers are here illegally, from many other countries. And the line between the two groups is blurred: Many foreigners who come with work permits become illegal when their visas expire - and more are likely to do so if the government starts canceling permits wholesale.
A special joint Interior-Labor Ministry committee, hurriedly set up by the government in July, is supposed to recommend a policy, any policy, by this month on dealing with foreign workers. Meanwhile, the numbers climb, and officials warn of a growth industry in false papers. Aided by Israeli manpower agencies, the Interior Ministry reports, workers are procuring documents from rings here and abroad showing they are Jewish so they can stay as immigrants, or arranging convenience marriages to secure Israeli citizenship.
Numbers alone don't explain the panic. What scares cabinet ministers and top bureaucrats is that foreign workers are settling in, building communities, having children - acting as if they have no intention of going home because home is here. That includes many who came illegally, along with a growing number who arrived with permits but have no intention of leaving on the expiration date. A whole class of phantom Israelis could well be forming: People who have lived here for years, speak Hebrew, have families, and yet have no legal status and no chance of getting it. The phantom Israel will be non-Jewish. Its children may lack even basic inoculations. And it could, eventually, become very angry about its status.
Today's anxiety is a world away from the applause that greeted the Rabin government's stop-gap decision three years ago to import foreign workers. Responding to terror attacks, the government had closed the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Palestinians who had picked Israel's cucumbers and built its apartment towers weren't allowed in. For farmers and contractors, planeloads of Romanians and Thais, carrying year-long work permits, were workers they could count on regardless of terror attacks and closures. For the public, they represented disengagement from the Palestinians, an end to fear.
At first, the workers, mostly young men, were invisible. Few Israelis noticed when they were housed in subhuman conditions, or when their rights under labor law were violated (The Jerusalem Report, August 25, 1994). They did not speak Hebrew and rarely complained. After all, they were earning up to eight times what they could back home.
But at the same time, others were entering Israel illegally, from Ghana, Nigeria, Colombia and, most recently, Egypt and Jordan, getting jobs in homes, restaurants, and on building sites. Now foreigners make up nearly 5 percent of Israel's population and are emerging from the shadows.
In Jerusalem, Romanian workers sip beer at downtown kiosks or on the lawns around the Old City walls. Toward closing time on Friday afternoons, they swamp the city's Mahaneh Yehudah market, buying marked-down vegetables. City welfare officials woke up to the existence of the capital's foreign worker contingent - they estimate its size at 20,000 - after five Romanian workers were among the dead in the March 3 suicide bus-bombing.
In Tel Aviv, Allenby Street's sidewalks are filled with Philippine domestic workers on Sundays, their day off. At night Allenby becomes Little Romania, as workers sit outside kiosks drinking beer, smoking and watching TV.
The largest community of foreign workers, most of them illegal, is in South Tel Aviv. A swath of rundown neighborhoods has been transformed into a multi-ethnic crazy quilt of Romanians, Poles, Turks, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Sierra Leonians, Filipinos, Colombians and Indians. City officials estimate that the foreigners numbers 60,000, in a city of 360,000.
A host of businesses serves the community. Neveh Sha'anan Street, linking the old Central Bus Station with the new one, is lined with peep shows. Brothels cater to construction workers here without their families. On one side street a brothel abuts an old synagogue. Other storefronts offer pay-per-minute international phone service. On the wall of "SuperPhone," a row of clocks displays local time in Romania, Ghana, Thailand and the Philippines.
Longtime residents complain that they feel like outsiders. "I told one Colombian to turn down his radio," complains Ziva Nassimov, who lives in the lower-class Shapirah neighborhood. "You know what he said? `I live here, I can do what I like.'"
While the crime rate among foreign workers is considerably below the national rate, police believe much violence between foreigners is dealt with inside the communities. Still, Israeli neighbors are uneasy. "They stare at the women," says one woman. "I don't go out after eight at night anymore and I don't let my children out. These people have to be removed."
At City Hall, officials say the creation of an immigrant ghetto in South Tel Aviv undermines plans to rehabilitate the poor neighborhoods. "We're investing a lot of resources, and they're going to a population that's not supposed to get them," says Deputy Mayor Eitan Sulami.
The most tight-knit community is made up of Africans. They enter the country as tourists, then stay on. Some have brought their families with them or married here - a few to Israelis. And they have had children. In the evenings, African couples can be seen pushing strollers past the knots of men drinking at kiosks.
George Wilson, like many other Ghanaians, cleans the homes of Israelis for 20 shekels ($6.50) an hour in well-off North Tel Aviv, Herzliyah Pituah and Ra'ananah. Wilson and his wife have been in Israel for three years and have a 1-year-old daughter. With several other families, they pay a woman from the community to care for their children while they work.
Though most Africans still send their children home once they reach school age, there are about 200 children of foreign workers in state-subsidized kindergartens and public elementary schools in South Tel Aviv. Hundreds get checkups and vaccinations at subsidized mother-and-child clinics. That's an increasing burden for the city and the state, especially since illegals don't pay income tax.
For many Africans, their churches - congregations that meet wherever they can - are the center of their community. Wilson, a member of the Watchman Charismatic Renewal Movement, spends several hours a week practicing in the church choir. A passerby hands him a green leaflet advertising an eschatology seminar at the Deeper Life Bible Church Auditorium nearby. "I don't believe in borders," says Wilson, sitting on a street corner with his daughter, Grace. "God brought me here. If I am kicked out, then it will be because that's what God wants."
On Saturday mornings - they work on Sundays - many of the Africans put on their best clothes and head for one of several congregations in the area. Wilson says he and other congregants pay dues to the church. When, for instance, someone needs a costly operation, he says, the church uses the money to help out.
For the less devout there is an organized Saturday soccer league, made up of Ghanaian, Nigerian, Sierra Leonian and South American teams, with matches at a Tel Aviv outdoor sports complex. "It's incredibly organized," says an Israeli who's been accepted as a player for the Ghanaian Mighty Warriors. "We all pay dues, and each team has a coach and manager. Lots of players speak fluent Hebrew."
The next step may be workers' organizations. The Jerusalem Report has learned that groups of legal and illegal workers are forming to demand full social benefits - including health coverage, and schooling for their children.
Despite the internal cohesion, the growth of a permanent community with no legal status poses long-term risks. Take public health. A Ghanaian who has been living in Israel for five years and has had two children here says he takes both to a mother-and-child clinic for the mandatory vaccinations. But other families may be afraid of contact with officials.
There's no way of tracing them - officially, they don't exist.
As the community expands, so will the number of people without medical insurance, warns Nadim Sheiban, a Jerusalem welfare official. Black-market medicine will flourish: "If a woman here illegally is scared to go to the hospital to give birth," he says, "you'll get all types delivering babies."
When George Wilson's wife went into labor, the couple traveled to an East Jerusalem hospital. "It was much cheaper there," explains Wilson. But fear of officialdom may also explain the decision to give birth in East Jerusalem.
Fear of exposure, though, will not last forever - especially when the phantom children of the illegals become young adults. The second generation, warn government officials, will forge Israeli identities and demand the rights afforded native Israelis. "The children learn Hebrew quickly in school," says Batya Carmon, head of the Interior Ministry's visa department. "Within a few months, they are like all the others." Carmon says it's unclear whether the government must accept illegal workers' children into schools.
The children, though, won't be citizens: Being born on Israeli soil grants no legal status. Nor does Israel routinely allow naturalization. Immigration law is designed for Jews and their families. No one ever expected Israel would be wealthy enough to attract economic immigration.
Even without the influx of foreign workers, ethnic and religious status have always been charged issues. "Israel," says labor expert Abraham Friedman, head of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, "is a Jewish state, which means preferential treatment for Jews. We're not ready to deal with whether Israel should be an open or a Jewish society. What will the status of foreign workers be? Can they be elected to neighborhood bodies, never mind the City Council?"
And what, for instance, will happen when the growing non-Jewish community demands that churches be built for it, as synagogues are for Jews? "Then," says Friedman, "the Religious Affairs Ministry will get involved. The decision will be to throw them out and that will create an international problem."
Resistance to letting non-Jews come here for better lives is already obvious, especially in Orthodox parties. Labor Minister Yishai's pronouncement that he'll remove foreigners was reportedly the result of instructions from his Shas party's spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef. Says Knesset Member Avraham Ravitz of the United Torah Jewry party: "We established a Jewish state, not a refuge for Africans and Asians."
In fact, like the Ghanaians who pray on Saturday, most foreign workers live at the edge of Jewish society, and will make cultural compromises to fit in. If the experience of immigrants elsewhere is instructive, their Hebrew-speaking children may well demand to have Hanukkah menorahs at home and wear costumes on Purim.
A potentially greater problem is the growing number of illegals from Jordan and Egypt, who are likely to fade into Israeli Arab society. In Tel Aviv and the Negev, jobs once performed by Palestinians are held by 4,000 Jordanians and 3,000 Egyptians, and there's rising pressure on Israeli consulates in Amman and Cairo for tourist visas.
"At the present rate," says one Middle East expert, "the number of workers from neighboring countries could grow to tens of thousands by next year." He adds: "For years, Israel has pressed for open borders with Egypt. Now we are starting to limit the number of Egyptians coming here." The result could be a diplomatic disaster.
At least some of the Jordanians and Egyptians have settled in the Israeli Arab neighborhoods of Jaffa. If the numbers swell, a host of explosive new problems could arise in relations between Jews and Arabs.
ISRAEL FACES THREE CHOICES: It can continue ignoring the problem - and leave the social time bomb ticking. It can grant legal resident status to non-Jewish foreigners, making them part of society - and attract more. Or it can try to throw out the illegals already here and stop more from coming - and almost certainly fail.
Even workers who do have permits and can be easily traced have begun to show they are here for the long term. While many foreign workers do go home after their contract has expired, an increasing number get new visas and return. At Kibbutz Nahshon, outside Jerusalem, a group of 10 Thais work in the onion fields, faces concealed by ski masks in the midday heat. They've been in Israel two years already and follow a rotation pattern common among Thais. "Soon I go home to see my family for two months," says 34-year-old Artiht. "Then I come back to work."
Meanwhile, a growing number of Romanians have become illegals. That's largely the result of an Interior Ministry regulation that a foreign laborer can only work for the employer who brought him here. Even if he is maltreated or offered a better-paying job, he must stay put. The moment he gets another job, he's illegal. According to the Association of Contractors and Builders in Israel, about 10 percent of the 74,000 construction workers brought here legally - most Romanians - have slipped off the charts.
Few officials suggest rounding up the illegals and shipping them out en masse. Diplomatic fallout aside, the police don't have the personnel or the prison space. Illegals who are caught often remain in jail for months, because they have conveniently lost their passports and won't say what country they're from, or because to fly back to Africa they must pass through European countries. The Europeans, also afraid of illegal immigrants, won't let them through.
For now, locating illegals is up to the Labor Ministry - which has exactly 12 inspectors checking workers across the country for work permits. In the first six months of the year, the inspectors initiated 500 deportations, says Chanan Sela, head of the ministry's foreign worker department, "out of a total of 100,000 illegal workers. It's nothing."
Nor is it easy to seal borders. Most Ghanaians, for instance, are now turned back on arrival at Ben-Gurion Airport. But a number of Ghanaians and Nigerians, says the Interior Ministry's Carmon, have got their hands on a stash of blank South African passports and filled in their names. A group of Filipinos posing as journalists recently tried to slip through passport control. They were caught when one told an official that they planned a photo report on "the holy city of Tel Aviv."
In July, the Interior Ministry instructed Israeli consular officials to closely screen Turkish fans set to invade Israel when their team arrived for a European Cup game against Maccabi Tel Aviv on August 7. Officials feared that many fans would stay on and look for work. Only those who had previously gone abroad to cheer the team were given visas.
Carmon suggests stiff fines for employers who hire illegals. In the long-term, she supports a policy of pushing the construction industry to use more modern building methods. That, she says, would mean higher-paying jobs that Jews would be prepared to take.
This would solve only a piece of the problem. As long as cleaning houses in Tel Aviv looks lucrative to men and women in poor countries, the influx won't stop. And those already here are unlikely to leave.
So the joint ministerial committee assigned to find a solution may well discover it has begun work too late. "Whoever thinks these people will work here, then go back home to unemployment and poverty is making a big mistake," says Communist party MK Tamar Gozansky. Like it or not, the huddled masses are dreaming of making a living and a new life in Israel.
1996
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© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2000 |  |