Israel ... Can a Jewish State Welcome Foreign Workers?

Abstracted from the Tablet

Arizona’s controversial Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act echoes as similar debate surrounding some 1,200 children of illegal migrant workers in Israel . Israel’s long-standing policy against the deportation of minors provides protection to parents who lack legal status.

Interior Minister Eliyahu 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.

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. Unlike children born on U.S. soil, who automatically become U.S. citizens, children born in Israel are granted neither citizenship nor permanent residency. And although many children of foreign parents would like to serve in the Israeli army, service does not make soldiers eligible for citizenship in Israel, as it can in the United States.

Migrant laborers who enter into romantic relationships in Israel are likely to lose their residency permits if the Interior Ministry gets wind of the bond. 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 1,200 children’s mothers have had to make.

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 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 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 1,200 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.” Indeed, her dress, cadence, and mannerisms lend Michelle the air of an Israeli.

But during Christmas, Judith was afraid to put a tree in the window. “We’re afraid to walk on the street,” she says. “We live like criminals.”

Critics have slammed the move as inhumane. They point out that the children attend local schools, speak Hebrew, and celebrate Jewish holidays.