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Tuesday, Feb 22, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Israel migrant workers' raw deal

By Rachel Shabi

Each year thousands of foreign workers are invited to Israel, lured by the promise of good jobs and a new life. The reality is grimly different.

CHEN AND Wang sit in their solicitor's office in Ramat Gan, Israel. They are dressed in their best clothes but look worn and crumpled. The two Chinese men are used to sitting indoors, waiting and hiding. They are each in debt to the tune of $10,000, the money they paid for a permit for manual work in the Israeli construction industry.

They came to Israel in July 2004, but there was nobody waiting for them at the airport as had been promised. Their permits, made out for the catering industry, did not allow them to work. Chen, 51, and Wang, 44, both support wives and children in China, as well as parents, parents-in-law, brothers and sisters. "I am missing my family. I don't know when I will see them again," says Wang. "I can't go home because I don't have money. It's a mess, a mess. I want a job, that's all."

Those words could have been spoken by many thousands of people in Israel, and in several different tongues. The country is now home to an estimated 250,000 "foreign" workers — they are never referred to as "migrants" — because only Jews can officially immigrate to Israel. These workers come mainly from China, Thailand, the Philippines, Romania and Turkey. They arrive on legal work permits, for which they incur vast debts on the promise of making good money (relatively speaking) in Israel. And then their lives turn to hell. Either the promised work is a complete fiction, or their employment could be more accurately described as indentured slavery. And always hanging over them is the threat of deportation.

"They live like animals," says Limor Chitiat, a solicitor with the Hotline for Migrant Workers (HMW), which offers legal support and promotes civil rights for foreign workers and victims of trafficking in Israel.The two survive on odd, illegal jobs and the charity of friends. They are able to stay in the country on a month-by-month basis, while the police investigate the people that sold them fraudulent permits — but such protection is almost unheard of and, as a result, Wang and Chen fear they could be deported at any time.

That there are migrant workers in Israel at all is a direct consequence of the country's relationship with Palestine. In 1993, the then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, citing security reasons, legislated that the 100,000 or so Palestinians working in Israel would no longer be allowed to do so. The Israeli construction, agriculture and catering industries lost a ready source of cheap labour, so the Government agreed that 5,000 workers from Romania could enter Israel and fill the gap. Employed mostly in construction, they were initially considered inferior to their Palestinian predecessors. But their advantages quickly became apparent. "When Palestinian workers came to us, we thought their situation couldn't be worse," says Hanna Zohar, director of Kav La'Oved (the worker's line), which provides legal aid to disadvantaged workers. "Then we realised that people could be exploited much, much more." Unlike Palestinians, migrant workers do not know their rights and have incurred heavy debts to reach Israel. They can be made to work under any terms.

The number of work permits issued by the Government has now reached around 100,000 a year. And as more workers arrive in Israel, advocacy groups hear case after case of migrants working too long, too hard, for too little or no pay and in dangerous environments. "The policy in Israel in regards to migrant workers encourages abuse," says Shevy Korzen, director of the HMW. "But the most exploited workers can be found in the construction sector, followed by agriculture. In the care-giving sector, there may be less cases of abuse but the cases are often very severe."

What makes this situation so bad is that workers are "bound" by their permits to their employers: they are not allowed to work for anyone else and the minute they leave the employer — for whatever reason — they are considered illegal. "If he is fired, becomes ill, resigns, is mistreated, finds other work, or is transferred to another place of employment, he becomes an illegal worker, liable to arrest, imprisonment and deportation," says Sigal Rozen, spokeswoman for the HMW.

But while thousands of new workers are legally invited into Israel each year, equal numbers are being thrown out. Employers will try to deport a "runaway" worker, since they use up one of the company's allocated permits.

What the plight of this particular migrant group exposes is the relationship Israel has with its non-Jewish inhabitants, for whom there is no possibility of full citizenship. Israeli-born children of long-term migrants are a conundrum — some have been deported; others remain and are known as "invisible children."

There are several hundred such children in Israel. Many are now teenagers, and have grown up absorbing Israeli culture, speak only Hebrew and want to serve in the Israeli army. But the state does not recognise these children; they are not entitled to ID cards, medical cover, access to universities or work permits. —

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