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Transnational Migration to Israel in GlobalComparative Context
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TransnationalMigration to Israel in GlobalComparative Context
Sarah S. Willen
L E X I N GTO N B O O K S
A d i v i s i o n o fROW M A N & L I T T L E F I E L D P U B L I S H E R S , I N C .
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
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LEXINGTON BOOKS
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1 Introduction 1Sarah Willen
Part I: Transnational Migration and the Israeli State in Flux: National-Level Perspectives
2 Labor Migration, Managing the Ethno-National Conflict, and Client Politics in Israel 31Rebeca Raijman and Adriana Kemp
3 Litigating Citizenship Beyond the Law of Return 51Guy Mundlak
Part II: Tel Aviv as Global City: Local and Municipal Perspectives on Transnational Migration
4 Municipal Policies in Comparative Perspective: Understanding Tel Aviv’s Policy Response to the Labor Migrant Phenomenon 73Michael Alexander
5 Transnational Migration in the Context of Tel Aviv’s Changing Urban Environment 87Itzhak Schnell
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Table of Contents
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Part III: Irregular Migration and Health
6 Rights, Citizenship and the National State: Migrant Worker Health Policies in Comparative Perspective 103Nadav Davidovitch and Dani Filc
7 Citizenship, Rights, and Ambiguity: Undocumented Migrant Workers and Access to Health Services in Berlin and Tel Aviv 123Heide Castañeda
8 Trafficked Women and Political Asylum Seekers 139Rami Adout
Part IV: Seeking Inhabitable Spaces of Welcome: Ethnographic Perspectives on Undocumented Migrants’ Everyday Lives
9 “Flesh of Our Flesh”? Undocumented Migrant Workers’ Search for Meaning in the Wake of a Suicide Bombing 159Sarah S. Willen
10 The Rise and Fall of African Independent Christianity in Israel, 1990–2004 185Galia Sabar
11 Terms of Endearment: Undocumented Domestic Workers and their Israeli Employers 203Anat Rosenthal
12 Conclusion: Challenging Exclusionary Migration Regimes: Labor Migration in Israel in Comparative Perspective 217Zeev Rosenhek
Bibliography 233
Index 255
About the Contributors 000
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FIGURES
Figure 2.1 Percent of Labor Migrants and Palestinians in the Israeli Labor Force, 1990–2000 40
Figure 2.2 Trends in Work Permits, 1993–2004 45
Figure 5.1 Migrant Workers by Residential Segregation 93
Figure 5.2 Migrant Workers by Territorial Segregation 93
Figure 5.3 Migrant Workers by Interactive Segregation 94
TABLES
Table 5.1 Segregation Model 91
Table 5.2 Ethnic groups’ Dissimilarity Indices (DI) 92
Table 5.3 Contributions of the various components of segregation 95
Table 5.4 Distribution of income by years in Israel 97
vii
List of Images
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Table 8.1 Asylum Seekers’ Health Care Entitlements in Israel, the United Kingdom, and Egypt 147
Table 8.2 Trafficked Women’s Health Care Entitlements in Israel and the United Kingdom 149
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Norma, a 32-year-old woman from the Philippines, works twenty-four hours a day,six days each week caring for Shoshana, an elderly mother and grandmother whoimmigrated to Israel decades earlier from her native Libya. Norma’s elderly ward,whom she affectionately calls “Ima” (Hebrew for mother), came to Israel underthe country’s Law of Return, which grants preferential—and virtually exclusive—immigration rights to individuals of Jewish descent. Norma, in contrast, arrived inthe country as a documented transnational migrant worker. According to her em-ployment contract and related government policies, the total amount of timeNorma can legally live and work in Israel is restricted, and if she were married,she would not be permitted to bring her spouse or children to Israel to join her.
For six days each week, Norma and her ward live together in Shoshana’s apart-ment in the central Israeli city of Petach Tikva. On her weekly twenty-four-hourholiday, Norma travels to the crowded, ramshackle South Tel Aviv neighborhoodwhere she shares a small apartment with ten other Filipina women who also workin Israel as caregivers. One of the tenants, a Filipina woman who overstayed herwork visa and thereby lost her documentation status, lives in the apartment allweek, while the others join her each Saturday night and return to work on Sun-day afternoons. During these weekly holidays Norma and her fellow flatmates eatlarge communal meals, attend mass at the Catholic church in the nearby city ofJaffa (home to a substantial community of Palestinian Israeli Christians), and onoccasion hold parties replete with loud music, enthusiastic dancing, and the po-tential for romantic excitements and entanglements.
In the past decade and a half, four of the six children in Norma’s family haveleft the Philippines to work overseas in either the Middle East or East Asia. Norma
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1IntroductionSarah S. Willen
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herself decided to leave high school and travel abroad shortly after her older sistertook a position in the United Arab Emirates. Given her country’s weak economyand her family’s difficult financial situation, economic motives were central toNorma’s decision; she could earn exponentially higher wages as a domestic workeroverseas than she might even as a university-educated professional in the Philip-pines. Her first job took her to Kuwait, followed by a stint in Saudi Arabia—fromwhich she and thousands of other overseas workers were evacuated with the out-break of the first Gulf War in 1991—and then another in Taiwan.
Partway through her contract in Taiwan, Norma learned that employment op-portunities existed in Israel—which she thought of as the “Holy Land”—and sheheard that jobs there were less demanding and better paid. Inspired by the storiesand rumors she heard circulating within the Filipino community in Taiwan, she setabout arranging her current job as a full-time caregiver for Shoshana. Although herwork is both physically and, at times, emotionally draining, Norma has warm feel-ings toward her ward, with whom she communicates in a mixture of English (whichshe speaks fluently), simple Hebrew, and the Arabic phrases she picked up duringher years in the Persian Gulf. She is happy with her job in Israel and hopes to con-tinue working there for another four years and then return to the Philippines to reapthe material and social benefits of her hard work overseas. With her earnings, shehas built a house for her mother and siblings, and she purchased a car that her rel-atives currently use and that she has almost finished paying off. Norma speaks of-ten about her desire to travel home and enjoy her hard-earned material possessions.In the same conversations, however, she also mentions Shoshana’s son, who lives inCanada and who she hopes will decide one day to bring his mother—accompaniedby Norma to take care of her—to Canada to live with him and his family.
Norma’s experiences in Israel offer a fruitful point of entry into the presentvolume, whose central objective is to examine the recent phenomenon oftransnational migration to Israel in global comparative context through a va-riety of disciplinary lenses. Her story is illustrative for two key reasons. First,Norma’s circuitous migration trajectory—though Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Tai-wan, and eventually to Israel—highlights Israel’s newfound embeddednessin a much broader set of political and economic processes associated withthe globalization of labor markets. In Israel, as in other countries in the Mid-dle East, East Asia, Western Europe, and North America, the need for work-ers in specific employment sectors (frequently but not exclusively low-statusand low-skilled employment sectors) has stimulated citizens of poor coun-tries to migrate abroad in search of economic opportunities that might en-able them to better their own lives and the lives of their families. With theseglobalizing trends as backdrop, scholarship on transnational migration to Is-rael must address a crucial set of comparative questions: What political, eco-nomic, and cultural factors have contributed to Israel’s rapidly growing ap-petite for transnational labor, and how are these factors similar to or
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different from those at play in other states attracting transnational migrants?Via what migration pathways do transnational migrants come to Israel, andhow do these pathways compare with those leading to other host countries?Where do transnational migrants fit into existing local “ethnoscapes” (Ap-padurai 1996) and social hierarchies? What sorts of rights, privileges, andentitlements are afforded transnational migrants by the various branches ofIsraeli state power, and how do these arrangements compare with parallelcircumstances in other host countries? Do these new processes of transna-tional migration to Israel appear to be temporary or enduring phenomena?How has Israeli civil society responded to the arrival of these new migrantgroups, and how do these local responses compare with those of civil soci-ety organizations elsewhere? In the broadest terms, Norma’s story highlightsthe need to analyze Israel’s role as both migration destination and host so-ciety in juxtaposition with other locations in global space. As such, compar-ative questions like these are central to the present volume.
At the same time, Norma’s temporary migration to care for a Jewish-Israeliwoman who herself immigrated to Israel—in this case from Libya—remindsus that Israel is characterized by a distinctive “migration regime” (Freeman1992; Rosenhek 2000) rooted in a particular national history and ideologi-cal agenda. This history and this ideological agenda merge in the country’sgoal of holding fast to its self-defined role as a Jewish national homeland.More specifically, they are encapsulated in its Law of Return, which providesvirtually automatic citizenship to all individuals of Jewish descent and theirrelatives while excluding virtually all others. By telegraphing the vast differ-ences between Norma’s own migration experience and that of her JewishLibyan-Israeli employer decades earlier, her story highlights the need to ex-amine the laws as well as the policies, practices, and cultural values that im-mediately draw some migrants into the country’s embrace while denyingothers the possibility of citizenship, residency status, or family reunification.It is necessary, therefore, not only to compare Israel with other destinationcountries, but also to explore the specific nature and dynamics of Israel’s mi-gration regime and, crucially, how it has shaped, constrained and at timesbeen challenged by these recent, and in many ways unanticipated, processesof large-scale, non-Jewish immigration. As Norma’s story and the chapters inthis volume illustrate, Israel’s exclusivist migration regime occludes the pos-sibility of transforming non-Jewish “migrants” into permanent “immi-grants” and, as a result, exerts pressure upon migrants to maintain transna-tional relationships, involvements, and aspirations.
As Levitt, DeWind, and Vertovec (2003) point out in their introduction toan important special issue of International Migration Review, transnationalmigration is a complex and variable phenomenon demanding the attentionof scholars in multiple fields. In striving to clarify the meaning and potentialcontributions of a specifically “transnational” perspective on contemporary
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migration processes, the authors identify a number of themes demandingfurther investigation (ibid. 567–71). These include similarities and differ-ences between contemporary and earlier waves of migration; the embedded-ness of transnational migration processes in multiple social fields; and thequestion of who benefits from transnational migration and why. Other im-portant considerations include an emphasis on subjective as well as objec-tive dimensions of transnational migration and, on a related note, attentionto the fullness of migrants’ lives including, for instance, changing gender dy-namics and the role of religion in shaping migration experiences. In additionto engaging this array of themes, the chapters included here also grapplewith one of the most important issues these authors identify: the strong andcontinuing influence of state power, policy, and practice on transnationalmigration processes. Despite earlier speculation to the contrary, it is nowclear that “the state is here to stay,” and the Israeli case offers a particularlystrong illustration of this point. Overall, the present volume thus constitutesone geographically anchored response to Levitt et al.’s call for multidiscipli-nary research on transnational migration.
The remainder of this introductory chapter is organized as follows. Thecoming section outlines the aims of the volume, followed by a brief theo-retical detour to reflect upon the politics and problematics of language inengaging issues of transnational migration. The next section provides anoverview of Israel’s recent encounter with contemporary patterns oftransnational migration which subsequent chapters flesh out in greater de-tail. This is followed by a brief description of the highly “successful” massdeportation campaign initiated by the Israeli government in mid-2002,which has constituted one of the most striking aspects both of Israel’s en-counter with transnational migration and of transnational migrants’ expe-riences in Israel. An outline of the chapters follows, and the chapter con-cludes with a discussion of the volume’s key themes as well as its broaderempirical and theoretical contributions to the multidisciplinary study oftransnational migration patterns and processes across countries and worldregions.
AIMS OF THE VOLUME
As Norma’s story suggests, transnational migration to Israel requires inves-tigation from both sides of the globalization coin. On one hand, the Israelicase offers an important point of comparison and contrast to parallelprocesses in other world regions.1 On the other hand, examining Israelthrough the prism of this transnational phenomenon yields vivid illustra-tions of local specificity. In particular, it highlights important implicationsof the Israeli migration regime and citizenship regime that remains ob-
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scured within a good deal of scholarship on Israel, largely because they ap-pear to be separate from the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Oneunique contribution of the present volume is its effort to link these com-plementary analytic perspectives.
Although the Israeli case has rarely been included in comparative analy-ses of transnational migration processes and their consequences, we con-tend in this volume that it constitutes an important node of comparisonand contrast for a wide variety of reasons. Four are particularly noteworthy.First, given the country’s explicit commitment to serving as a “Jewish home-land”—and suggested by Norma’s story—Israel both is and is not an “im-migration country” (cf. Rosenhek 2000: 60). As a result, aspiring immi-grants may find Israel to be either very welcoming or deeply exclusionarydepending upon their personal characteristics. As subsequent chapters inthis volume analyze in depth, the rigidity and exclusivity of the country’scitizenship regime have had profound consequences in many domains ofIsraeli social and political life including not only the legal field, but also thefields of health, education, social welfare and social policy, and national cri-sis management. Comparative and multidisciplinary analysis of transna-tional migration to Israel thus has much to contribute to the increasinglyimportant field of citizenship studies. Particularly noteworthy are the simi-larities between Israel and Germany (see Filc and Davidovitch this volume;Castañeda this volume; Levy and Weiss 2002).
A second point that deserves comparative reflection is the compressed timescale characterizing Israel’s encounter with recent patterns of transnationalmigration. Importantly, the migration pathways analyzed here emerged in anextremely brief period of time. Once the numbers of transnational migrantswere judged by government officials to be problematic, the state response wasswift as well. As elaborated below, the number of non-Jewish, non-Arabtransnational migrants in Israel grew exponentially between the early 1990sand the latter part of the same decade. Then in 2002, high unemploymentrates in Israel, in combination with other factors, led to a costly, resource-in-tensive mass deportation campaign that radically reduced the number oftransnational migrants in the country and destroyed the community infra-structures that had sprung up around them. Whether these aggressive mea-sures have had a significant economic impact remains an open question, al-though preliminary evidence suggests that the answer would be a provisionalno. For individual migrants and migrant communities, however, the impacthas been profound (see Sabar this volume; Willen this volume). The rapiditywith which this dramatic influx and then equally dramatic expulsion havetaken place—all occurring within the span of about one decade—merit com-parison with parallel situations in other ambivalent host states.
Third, despite recent government claims that, “Israel is not an immigrationcountry” (see Rosenhek 2000: 60)—claims issued, to be sure, in response to
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these dramatic recent migration trends—it is virtually impossible to speak ofthe modern Israeli state without addressing issues of migration, immigration,and immigrant absorption.2 From the late 1800s until the formal establish-ment of the Israeli state in 1948, small waves of ideologically motivated Jew-ish immigration from Eastern Europe led to the creation of the pre-state yishuv(organized Jewish communal presence) in Palestine, which was then underBritish control. In subsequent decades, they were joined by large numbers ofJews fleeing anti-Semitism, and later Nazi genocide, in Europe as well as Jew-ish immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East.3 While all of these im-migrants shared a common religious heritage as Jews, vast cultural, linguistic,educational, political and, indeed, religious differences divided them. Rela-tions between these different immigrant groups and their descendants havebeen further complicated as a result of the social and ethnic hierarchy thatemerged within the fledgling state and by the influx of large numbers of Jew-ish immigrants from the Soviet Union4 and Ethiopia in the 1990s.5
Until the 1990s, the majority of social scientific research on immigrationto Israel concentrated on patterns of immigration that are consistent withwhat Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport characterize as the “Zionist-nationalethos,” which places three moral demands upon Jewish immigrants. Theyare expected first, to settle (permanently) in Israel; second, to adopt an Is-raeli identity and shed all others; and third, to be committed both ideolog-ically and pragmatically to both the Jewish-Israeli collective and to the Landof Israel (2001: 3).6 The moral weight of these “tests” is implicit in the verylanguage used to describe Jews who immigrate to Israel—described as olimor, literally, “ascenders”—as well as those who leave, who are often dispar-aged as yordim or “descenders.”7 To be sure, the “Zionist-national ethos”and its implications, limitations, and various interpretations have been thetopic of vigorous and at times acrimonious debate both inside and outsideof the modern-day state of Israel.8 Despite these myriad, frequently impas-sioned debates, the notion that modern Israel is and should remain a “Jew-ish state”—in some form or another—nonetheless remains the undisputedmajority position among the country’s Jewish citizens. Even among JewishIsraelis who share this fundamental commitment, there is considerable dis-agreement regarding whether, how, and to what extent it is important toprotect the geographic, social, and/or biogenetic (Kahn 2000; Teman 2003)boundaries of the nation-state. Indeed, the waves of migration central to thepresent volume—i.e., the influx of hundreds of thousands of non-Jewishtransnational migrants, some of whom have created families and givenbirth to children in Israel (cf. Filc and Davidovitch this volume, Willen2005)—have provided considerable grist for this rapidly churning mill. Athird goal of this book, therefore, is to facilitate detailed, historically andethnographically rich comparisons of the politics of inclusion and exclu-sion associated with differently marked migrant or immigrant groups.
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A fourth reason the Israeli case merits comparative attention pertains tothe government’s striking inattention to precedents or parallels in othercountries. By the time the Israeli government approved the recruitment ofdocumented transnational workers in 1993, multiple countries had accu-mulated considerable experience with guest worker systems of their own. InWestern European countries such as Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland,for instance, transnational migrant workers were first recruited after the Sec-ond World War, and the long-term consequences of these governments’policies were already in plain view. While it would not be fair to assumethat parallel policies in another country would necessarily yield identical re-sults, these Western European experiences did provide compelling evidencethat contradicted Israeli officials’ often repeated expectations that transna-tional migrants would come to work on a temporary basis and then departwithout leaving any lingering imprint. Other countries Israeli officialsmight have observed, or consulted, for insight include the United States,with its long history of trans-border labor migration from Mexico; South-east Asian countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan; and otherMiddle Eastern countries including Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. While many of these countries hadaccumulated considerable experience with formal and/or informal (or au-thorized and unauthorized) guest worker systems by the time Israel initi-ated its own, Israeli officials appear not to have looked elsewhere for po-tentially predictive comparative insight.
Although Israeli government officials may not have explored such paral-lels in the early phases of national and local policymaking, they are cer-tainly ripe for scholarly exploration now. To this end, the present volumepresents new work by the scholars who pioneered the study of transna-tional migration to Israel and by a multidisciplinary group of researcherswho have followed their lead. The volume is among the first to explicitlycompare Israel’s recent encounter with contemporary patterns of transna-tional migration to the parallel experiences of other countries in Europe,North America, and elsewhere in the Middle East, and it is distinguished byits effort to achieve both fruitful interdisciplinarity and comparative insight.Rather than hewing to a single disciplinary orientation, each chapter en-gages issues of theoretical and empirical significance within the author’sown field of study while simultaneously contributing to the book’s broadermultidisciplinary agenda. In this respect, we follow anthropologistsMichael Smith and Luis Guarnizo (1998), who contend that research ontransnational migration should consider the dynamic interactions and in-terconnections among three levels of analysis: first, the micro-level of mi-grants’ experience; second, the meso-level of state and institutional policiesand practices; and finally the macro-level of global political economic trendsand processes. As anthropologist Sarah Mahler (1998) points out, such a
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vast and multidimensional research task is inherently collaborative and in-terdisciplinary (see also Brettell and Hollifield 2000; Morawska 2003). Inthe present volume, we build upon earlier efforts to draw scholars inter-ested in these various levels of analysis into a single conversation.
TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION AND THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE
At this point, a few comments are necessary on the matter of language and,more specifically, on the tangle of terminology currently employed byscholars investigating transnational migration processes. As Levitt et al.(2003: 571) point out, the “emigration-immigration-assimilation” para-digm characterizing earlier generations of migration scholarship, and theirassociated terms, are no longer sufficient. Within divergent host societycontexts, individuals whose physical presence exists in tension with varyingdegrees of social and political exclusion from the body politic are classifiedusing a growing international lexicon of human mobility and displace-ment. Transnational migrants with formal status may be characterized asdocumented, authorized, or regularized, among other terms. Individualswithout regularized status may be categorized as undocumented migrants(or migrant workers), irregular migrants, clandestine migrants, illegalizedmigrants, nonstatus migrants, sans papiers, asylum seekers, or refugees. Anassortment of other terms, although judged politically incorrect to varyingdegrees by many rights advocates and researchers, is also in circulation.These include foreign workers, illegal workers, and illegal aliens, amongothers. Both the denotation and the connotation of each term vary acrosshost society contexts, and all are subject to interpretation and contestation;indeed, the differences and boundaries among them are hazy at best. Whatall of these terms share, however, is their common deployment with thegoal of adjudicating matters of inclusion and exclusion. In other words, allare used in the context of localized efforts to define, surveil, and regulate theboundaries of the local body politic. Put differently, they are tools for theproduction and reproduction of what can be described, following Foucault,as local biopolitics of Otherness (cf. Fassin 2001).9
In everyday Israeli discourse, and despite crucial differences among the var-ious groups addressed in this volume, they are often described using a singleHebrew term: “ovdim zarim,” or “foreign workers.”10 In this volume, we avoidthis ideologically loaded term in favor of a term that strives for neutrality: mi-grant workers. Several of the anthropological chapters in this volume, how-ever, take a slightly different tack; they take the notions of “migrant legality”and “illegality” as social constructions that themselves require ethnographicelaboration and analysis (see especially the chapters by Willen and Cas-
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tañeda; cf. Coutin 2003; De Genova 2002; Suárez-Navaz 2004a; Willen forth-coming; Willen in press-a). Put differently, these authors reject any blanket re-fusal to engage terms like “legal” and “illegal” migration, choosing instead toexplore the denotations and connotations of these terms and categories, theways in which they are deployed, and the uses to which they are put, throughthe prism of fine-grained, long-term ethnographic research.
TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION TO ISRAEL: MULTIPLE PATHWAYS
Between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, approximately 200,000 peoplefrom poor countries as diverse as Columbia, Romania, Ghana, China, andThailand, to name but a few, began traveling across continents and oceansto Israel in search of work.11 This rapid and dramatic increase in the num-ber of migrant workers, both documented and undocumented, paralleled amarked decrease in the number of non-citizen Palestinians working in Is-rael.12 As elaborated later in this chapter, and as Raijman and Kemp explainin detail in Chapter 2, a major contributing factor was the wholesale exclu-sion of Palestinian workers from the Israeli labor market in response to thefirst Palestinian popular uprising, or Intifada. The Israeli government’s re-sponse to the uprising included the imposition of hermetic military clo-sures on the West Bank and Gaza as both a defensive tactic and, as Raijmanand Kemp demonstrate, as a form of collective punishment. Following theclosures, the resulting changes in the Israeli labor market were swift anddramatic. Whereas Palestinians constituted 4.5 percent of the Israeli laborforce in 1993 with migrant workers constituting 1.6 percent, by 2000 theproportion of Palestinians had dropped to 3.3 percent of the labor forcewith migrant workers constituting 8.7 percent.13 By 2003, the number ofmigrant workers had further increased to between 10 and 12 percent14 ofthe labor force. At the same time, the Israeli economy was in a deep reces-sion with unemployment at 10.6 percent in November 2003.15
Roughly half of these transnational migrants, including Norma, the Fil-ipina woman introduced earlier, arrived on a government authorized, doc-umented basis, while the other half arrived on an undocumented or “ille-gal” basis. In addition to these groups of both documented andundocumented economic migrants, two other migration pathways also in-tensified during this period. The first pathway involves asylum seekers whofled political or military conflict in countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia,the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. The other path-way involves women, primarily from Eastern Europe and the former SovietUnion, who were trafficked into Israel for purposes of forced employmentin the sex industry on an indentured or slavery-like basis.
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The migration trajectories of these five groups of transnational mi-grants—”legal,” “formerly legal,” and “illegal” migrant workers; asylumseekers; and victims of human trafficking—differ in systematic and impor-tant ways. These important differences notwithstanding, they nonethelessshare one crucial characteristic: virtually categorical exclusion from the Is-raeli social body and body politic. It is on this basis, and on the basis of twoother factors—first, their transnational movement through space, and sec-ond, their cultivation and maintenance of transnational economic, social,and affective ties—that they are grouped together within the present vol-ume. The discussion that follows, like the majority of chapters in the vol-ume, focuses on first three groups identified above. The other two—asylumseekers and victims of trafficking—are addressed in the chapter by Adout(see also (Ben-Dor and Adout 2003; Hotline for Migrant Workers 2002;Levenkron and Dahan 2003)).
“Legal” Migrant Workers
About half of the transnational migrants who arrived in Israel betweenthe mid-1980s and early 2000s were recruited in their countries of originand brought to Israel via documented, government-approved channels tofill empty niches—or, in some cases, newly created labor niches—in Israel’slabor market. For instance, tens of thousands of “legal” workers, likeNorma, were recruited to provide twenty-four-hour, home-based care to ag-ing Israeli citizens (and younger invalids requiring full-time care) in theirhomes. Their arrival—primarily from the Philippines but also to a lesser ex-tent from Eastern Europe—signaled the emergence of a relatively new labormarket niche in response to a growing societal need, and this change hastaken place with government support. For women like Norma, Israel hasthus become another possible destination within a growing constellation ofpotential transnational destinations.16
A larger proportion of the documented transnational migrants who cameto Israel in this period, however, were recruited to replace the newly excludedpopulation of low-paid, low-skilled workers who had been central to the Is-raeli economy for over two decades: non-citizen Palestinians, most of themmen, from the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. FollowingIsrael’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Palestinians becameimportant participants in the Israeli labor economy as increasing numbersbegan working in, and dominating, crucial labor niches such as constructionand agriculture (Bartram 1998; Semyonov and Lewin-Epstein 1987). Inmany respects, the employment conditions faced by Palestinian workers par-alleled those of transnational migrant workers elsewhere albeit with one keydifference; at the end of each day, most Palestinian workers disappearedfrom Israel and returned to their homes in the Occupied Territories. Through
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its heavy dependence on non-citizen Palestinian labor, as Semyonov andLewin-Epstein note, “Israel manage[d] to reap the benefits of employing for-eign labor without experiencing the full social burden of incorporating themresidentially and institutionally into the society” (1987: 112).
Things changed dramatically in the wake of the first Intifada. In the periodthat followed, Palestinian workers were instantly and collectively judged tobe suspect and, on this basis, denied access to their jobs in Israel throughmilitary closures imposed upon the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli contractors,primarily in the construction and agricultural sectors, immediately beganclamoring for a solution to the resulting labor shortages. In 1993, the gov-ernment reluctantly approved the importation of a small number of docu-mented transnational construction and agricultural workers, ostensibly as atemporary solution to a temporary problem. Over time, however, reluctanceto reintroduce Palestinian workers increased, as did the economy’s overalldependence on foreign labor, and the number of government permits issuedto employ overseas workers jumped from 4,200 in 1990 to 9,600 in 1993,and then tenfold to 103,000 in 1996.17 By 2000, the Israeli economy had be-come heavily dependent upon transnational agricultural workers, mostlyfrom Thailand, and construction workers from a changing array of countriesincluding Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and most recently China.18
Most of these documented transnational workers have paid dearly for theopportunity to work “legally” in Israel. While recruitment agencies (oftencalled “manpower agencies”) are legally permitted to charge aspiring mi-grant workers for travel and administrative costs associated with their relo-cation to Israel, it is against Israeli law to charge any additional recruitmentfees. Nonetheless, Israeli manpower agencies and their counterparts in mi-grants’ countries of origin do charge large sums—ranging from $3,000 (forThai agricultural workers) up to $18,000 (for Chinese construction work-ers)—for the opportunity to come to Israel to work (Kav La’Oved 2002; KavLa’Oved, personal communication).
As Adriana Kemp (2004) has demonstrated, this pattern of transnationallabor recruitment has grown into an explosively lucrative and highly un-regulated industry generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenueper year. It is also a powerful industry whose leading “entrepreneurs” enjoystrong ties not only with the large-scale contractors who may or may not ac-tually need additional workers, but also with well-placed public and polit-ical figures.19
“Illegal” Migrant Workers
As Israel’s appetite for recruited, “legal” workers became increasingly vo-racious, growing streams of undocumented migrants from a different set ofcountries also began arriving in Israel via what can be described as the
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“tourist loophole” (Willen 2003) in the country’s otherwise rigid migrationregime. Given its profound archaeological, biblical, and spiritual signifi-cance for multiple world religions, the “Holy Land” has attracted touristsand religious pilgrims for centuries, and in recent decades tourism has beena basic building block of the Israeli national economy. This reliance ontourism was reflected in a liberal tourist visa policy that became an entrypathway for economic migrants from Western and Southern Africa, SouthAmerica, and the Former Soviet Union (among other locales) who were un-able to access more desirable destinations, especially in North America orWestern Europe. By obtaining individual visas or joining tour or pilgrimagegroups in their home countries, aspiring migrants were able to enter Israelwith short-term visas (between one and three months) and find work in theinformal economy cleaning houses and offices, in restaurants, or performingother low-wage, often physically demanding jobs. The housecleaning sectorwas particularly responsive to this increase in available workers; the in-creased supply of workers, combined with their willingness to work for verylow wages, led to an increase in demand among middle and upper class Is-raelis. Throughout the 1990s, opportunities for employment in the informallabor economy were plentiful, arrests and deportations were infrequent, andundocumented migrants were able to earn, remit, save, and often lend fundsto finance the chain migration of friends or relatives who then joined themin Israel via the same pathway. This “loophole” thus facilitated the entry oftens of thousands of migrants from West Africa, South America, Eastern Eu-rope and elsewhere for whom Israel was a second- or third-tier option (aftercountries in North America and Western Europe). The majority settled inand around Tel Aviv, the country’s largest metropolitan area.
“Formerly Legal” Workers
In addition to those undocumented migrant workers who arrived via thetourist loophole, there is also a second pathway via which many transna-tional migrants have joined the ranks of the undocumented in Israel; manyarrived as documented workers but subsequently lost their legal status.Since these “formerly legal” workers’ loss of status is often a direct result ofsystematic industry-level and state policies and practices, they have alsobeen described as “illegal workers generated by the system” (Hebr: biltihukiim totzeret ha’shita (Kemp and Raijman 2003:7).
The systematic nature of thousands of “legal” workers’ shift into illegal-ity—i.e., their “illegalization”—merits elaboration (see also Kemp 2004).One contributing factor is the modus operandi of the “manpower” agenciesdescribed earlier, which operate as intermediaries between employers inneed of workers, on one hand, and the Ministry of Interior, which grantswork visas, on the other. Working in this intermediate space, some man-
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power agencies have played a game of smoke and mirrors through whichthey have been able to create the perception of demand for migrant laboreven when no such need existed on the ground (see, for instance, Meiri, etal. 2001). One outcome of these tactics has been the deeply exploitative, andhighly lucrative, recruitment of thousands of migrant workers. While nosolid estimates exist, many aspiring migrants have paid manpower agenciesvast sums of money for the opportunity to work in Israel—often by takingout loans at high rates of interest and/or selling personal or family assets—only to find upon or shortly after arrival that no jobs actually exist, or thatthey have been abandoned by those who brought them to the country. Inother words, many “formerly legal” workers arrive in Israel believing theyhave followed all of the proper policies and procedures when in fact theyhave been deceived by profit-oriented recruitment agencies and become vic-tims of a particular form of human trafficking. The widespread patterns of ir-regularity, exploitation, and corruption embedded in this system have beendenounced both by local human rights organizations and by the U.S. De-partment of State as a form of trafficking in human beings (Hotline for Mi-grant Workers 2003; United States State Department 2003). Nonetheless, theIsraeli government has been slow to investigate or take action against the re-sponsible parties (for more on these issues, see Kemp 2004; Wurgaft 2006).
A second factor driving many “legal” workers’ shift into illegality is Israeligovernment policy itself. Until a key decision by the Israeli High Court of Jus-tice in 2006, documented workers were constrained by a government-author-ized policy called the “binding arrangement,” or hesder ha’kvila. This arrange-ment, whereby work permits were issued directly to employers rather than toworkers themselves, was designed to protect the interests of employers bygranting them complete control over their employees for the entire durationof their employment—presumably identical with migrants’ entire period ofresidence—in Israel. As Kemp (2004) points out, the binding system sharesmore with government laws and policies regulating labor migration in thePersian Gulf and in Southeast Asia than in Western Europe or North America(Castles 2000; Cheng 2003; Massey, et al. 1998). Particularly striking (albeitunder-investigated) are the strong parallels between the binding system in Is-rael and the kafala system deployed in the Gulf states (for a description of thekafala system in Bahrain, for instance, see Gardner forthcoming).
In Israel, local NGOs have verified numerous instances in which “legal”workers’ rights were regularly and systematically violated with impunity, bothby Israelis who employ individual migrants as caregivers in their homes andby large-scale employers in agriculture and construction (Kav La’Oved andHotline for Migrant Workers 2003). Common violations include the confis-cation of passports; underpayment, denial, and late payment of wages; lack oftimely and adequate medical care; and substandard living conditions, amongothers. Furthermore, language barriers, substantial power differentials between
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Israeli employers and transnational migrants, lack of familiarity with locallaws, and perpetual fear of dismissal obstruct potential avenues of recourse.In some cases—often involving migrants from China who know neither He-brew nor English—workers are traded or “mobilized” to work for employersother than those listed on the work visas pasted into their passports. Unawarethat their work arrangements are illegal, they become vulnerable to arrest anddeportation by the Immigration Police without even knowing that they haveviolated the law. Under conditions like these, thousands of documented mi-grants either lost or left their authorized jobs and, in so doing, lost their legalright to live and work in Israel.
Instead of facilitating regulation and supervision, the binding arrange-ment thus yielded a wide range of problems—including the emergence of alarge population of “formerly legal” workers who arrived with visas butstayed on after the voluntary or involuntary termination of their authorizedwork relationships. In one study, a full 53 percent of illegal workers sur-veyed had arrived, and become illegal, in this manner (Bar-Tzuri 2000, citedin Kemp and Raijman 2003: 14). The binding arrangement has also gener-ated numerous human rights violations, including but not limited to theforms of exploitation and abuse listed above. The most serious cases, whichare often linked to the unregulated and exploitative practices of manpoweragencies mentioned above, have been described in the reports of local hu-man rights organizations as forms of “trafficking in human beings” and em-ployment under “slavery-like conditions.”20 These reports captured the at-tention of the United States Department of State, which noted in its 2002Annual Country Report on Human Rights and Practices that Israeli “civilrights groups charged that unscrupulous employers often took advantage ofillegal workers’ lack of status to hold them in conditions amounting to in-voluntary servitude” (United States State Department 2002; see also UnitedStates State Department 2003). In a landmark March 2006 decision, andfollowing a lengthy battle led by local human rights organizations, the Is-raeli High Court of Justice condemned this arrangement in explicit termsand demanded that an alternative arrangement be found.
Local Israeli civil society organizations have responded vocally and vig-orously to what they construe as human rights violations affecting not onlydocumented and undocumented migrant workers, but also other groups oftransnational migrants including, in particular, asylum seekers and womenvictims of trafficking (see Adout this volume).
DEPORTATION EN MASSE
While all “illegal” and “formerly legal” transnational migrants are vulnera-ble to arrest and deportation in Israel, state policies became considerably
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more aggressive in mid-2002 when the prime minister at the time, ArielSharon, initiated an expensive, resource intensive mass deportation cam-paign targeting unauthorized residents.21 In the media and in governmentdiscourse, the campaign was framed partly as a pro-active response to risingunemployment and partly as a strategy for safeguarding the country’s Jew-ish majority. Although critics have decried the economic logic of the cam-paign as specious,22 it has—from the government’s perspective, and despiteits more than $75 million price tag23—been a great success. By the end of2005, over 140,000 migrants had been “distanced” from Israel—to employthe Immigration Police’s sanitizing euphemism24—including more than50,00025 who were arrested and forcibly deported and many more whowere “encouraged”—i.e., regularly and systematically intimidated—intoleaving “voluntarily.” While undocumented migrants have been the pri-mary targets, other non-Jewish residents including documented migrantworkers, asylum seekers, trafficked women, and even some tourists and vis-iting artists and professionals have been apprehended by the newly createdImmigration Police. In addition to the havoc the campaign has wrought onindividuals and families, its impact on the strongest, most well organizedcommunities has been devastating.26
A brief overview of the campaign’s central techniques is helpful in illus-trating first, its scope and impact; second, the multiple levels—discursive,psychological, and material—at which it operates; and third, its effective-ness in criminalizing transnational migrants’ presence in Israel.27 These in-clude: 1) the establishment of four new detention centers; 2) a propagandacampaign designed to mobilize public support and cooperation in imple-menting the mass deportations through “public service announcements”broadcast in the print and electronic media; 3) an information hotline thatsome citizens have used to “snitch” on undocumented migrants; 4) relianceon police informers, including undocumented migrants as well as Israelis;5) systematic arrest and deportation of known community leaders; 6) a“Voluntary Departure” campaign that provided subsidized plane tickets todeparting migrant families; 7) “biosocial profiling” (Shamir 2005) or racialprofiling; 8) police surveillance of public and private areas; 9) the markingof apartment doors in preparation for late night arrests;28 10) tens of thou-sands of arrests and deportations, some proportion of which involve vari-ous forms of humiliation and psychological violence; 11) use of physical vi-olence and brutality in the course of arrest; and 12) a generalized failure toinvestigate or punish police brutality.
The policy shift represented by the mass deportation campaign—i.e., theshift from a period of relatively limited government involvement in the reg-ulation of transnational migrants’ presence in Israel to a period of intensiveand aggressive surveillance, apprehension, and deportation—is thus adefining feature of contemporary processes of non-Jewish transnational
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migration in Israel. Indeed, the campaign’s impact on the strongest, mostwell-developed migrant communities has been devastating (Sabar, this vol-ume; Willen, this volume, forthcoming, in press-a).
OUTLINE OF THE CHAPTERS
The volume is organized into four parts. The chapters in Part I, “Transna-tional Migration and the Israeli State in Flux: National Perspectives,” ana-lyze transnational labor migration to Israel as both an ostensible solutionto pressing national “problems” and a source of new legal challenges. InChapter 2, sociologists Rebeca Raijman and Adriana Kemp examine hownationalism, geopolitics, and clientelism shaped the Israeli government’sdecision to approve the recruitment of increasing numbers of transnationalworkers beginning in 1993. Through careful historical analysis, the authorshighlight several key consequences of this government decision. First, therecruitment of transnational labor both signaled and, over time, con-tributed to a significant shift in the logic of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Inspecific, the rapid replacement of Palestinian workers—after heavy relianceon their labor market participation for nearly three decades—marked a shiftaway from policies of economic integration between Israel and the Occu-pied Territories and toward a new logic of separation. Thus the ethnic con-flict in the region has served not as a “push” factor driving workers away,but rather as an important “pull” factor that draws them in to fill a sub-stantial gap in the country’s changing labor economy. (Indeed, this contin-ues to be the case even since the initiation of the deportation campaign.)Second, Raijman and Kemp show how increased reliance on transnationallabor has contributed to the erosion of the “old,” collectivist socio-economic regime and the emergence of a neoliberal regime in which labormigrants become “a bargaining chip for the enfeeblement of the local work-ers.” Finally, the chapter contends that the emergence of non-Jewish, non-Palestinian migrant communities stands as “irrefutable proof” that govern-ment officials’ lack of advance planning or foresight notwithstanding, labormigration has yielded significant unintended yet predictable consequences.
In Chapter 3, legal scholar Guy Mundlak analyzes some of these “unin-tended yet expected” consequences within the domain of Israel’s legal sys-tem and, more specifically, in relation to its ethno-national citizenshipregime. By analyzing an illustrative case study, Mundlak shows how the ar-rival of large numbers of migrant workers has undermined the “strong bor-ders—geopolitical, nationalist, cultural and religious—that Israel haserected around itself” while simultaneously leading a growing proportionof the populace to begin rethinking prevailing notions of inclusion, mem-bership, and belonging. Leading the charge are a cadre of human rights
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NGOs that have challenged the status quo via legal and other means.Through these efforts, Israeli civil society organizations strive to refocus at-tention away from the government’s perspective—i.e., on what it describesas “the problem of foreign workers”—onto the “problems of foreign work-ers,” i.e., the trials and tribulations of their everyday lives. Undergirdingthese NGO efforts is a goal the chapter describes as simultaneously laud-able and, paradoxically, potentially harmful: the goal of reforming the Is-raeli citizenship regime to include multiple forms of citizenship. While ac-knowledging the strategic significance of such forms of “flexible,”“disaggregated,” or “postnational” citizenship, Mundlak’s analysis adds adistinct note of caution to comparative and multidisciplinary scholarshipon multiple citizenships.
Two chapters comprise Part II, “Tel Aviv as Global City: Local and Mu-nicipal Perspectives on Transnational Migration.” In Chapter 4, geographerMichael Alexander analyzes transnational migration as a form of “glocal-ization,” which he defines as the interaction between global forces (i.e.,transnational migratory processes) and local environments (i.e., cities).Drawing upon comparative research he conducted in Rome, Paris, and Am-sterdam as well as the Israeli city with the highest concentration of transna-tional residents, Alexander traces the evolution of Tel Aviv municipal poli-cies through three phases: an initial phase of informal and occasionalservice provision; a second phase of limited recognition by municipal offi-cials; and a third phase involving the emergence of a “liberal guestworkerpolicy.” Importantly, the chapter reflects upon the tension between the Is-raeli national government’s aggressive, deportation-oriented stance, on onehand, and the Tel Aviv municipality’s more liberal stance, on the other.While some regard this as a paradoxical discrepancy and a sign that Tel Avivis likely to follow the lead of its progressive European counterparts, Alexan-der argues that any possibility for permanent change in Israel—at both themunicipal and national levels—continues to be constrained by deep-seatedcommitment to the country’s ethno-national self-definition.
In Chapter 5, geographer Izhak Schnell examines transnational migrationinto the Tel Aviv metropolitan area from a markedly different angle. Schnelldraws upon findings of a Tel Aviv-based study of Latin American andAfrican residents and a similar study conducted with Turks in the Germancity of Bremen to contest the often-invoked logic of “ethnic enclaves.” Hecontends that closer attention must be paid to the ways in which migrantworkers’ patterns of residential segregation, on one hand, and patterns ofsocial interaction, on the other, may diverge. More specifically, the chapterdemonstrates that residential segregation may fail to correlate either witheveryday acts of social segregation or with stages of adaptation to the localsociety. In other words, ethnic and class groupings cannot be treated as au-tomatic building blocks of social space. Instead, it is necessary to explore
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individual patterns of segregation in order to determine whether, or when,individuals develop autonomous patterns of behavior independent of theirsupposed ethnic reference groups. Further challenging the “ethnic enclaves”logic, Schnell points out that both migrants’ and host societies’ openness tointerethnic integration can influence patterns of adaptation.
Part III offers three comparative perspectives on one of the most chal-lenging as well as the most urgent dimensions of transnational migration:matters of migration and health. In Chapter 6, physician/social scientistsDani Filc and Nadav Davidovitch examine emerging discourses of migrantworkers’ “right to health” in Israel, Spain, and Germany. As they demon-strate, the development of health-related policies involves an array of con-tradictory trends resulting from the interaction among each country’s con-ception of citizenship and other logics relevant to the health care fieldincluding, in particular, the logics of the labor market, of public health, ofcost containment, and of rights. Moreover, these logics interact within threedifferent spheres: the state, the market, and civil society. In each of the threecountries analyzed, such interactions yield a different array of health carepossibilities for different migrant groups. In Israel, as the authors demon-strate, the country’s deeply rooted citizenship logic continues to carry thegreatest weight. The chapter concludes with a call for a comprehensive so-lution to the challenge of how best to address transnational migrants’health needs. In Israel, the authors suggest, such a solution would require asubstantial reconfiguration of the relationship between the country’s ethno-national conception of citizenship and the logics of human rights and pub-lic health.
In Chapter 7, medical anthropologist Heide Castañeda expands upon theGerman-Israeli comparison by drawing upon ethnographic research sheconducted at a religiously affiliated, NGO-run clinic for undocumented mi-grants in Berlin. The chapter shows how despite important differences be-tween Israel’s and Germany’s “blood-based” citizenship regimes—i.e., citi-zenship regimes grounded in the principle of jus sanguinis (as opposed tobirthright citizenship, or jus soli)—their implications in the arena of mi-grant health are strikingly similar. Castañeda focuses on four distinctive as-pects of the German case that also resonate in Israel: first, divergences be-tween municipal and national-level policies vis à vis transnationalmigrants’ rights, needs and entitlements; second, “systematic ambiguity” oflaws and policies regarding migrants’ access to health care; third, the signif-icant yet complicated role of NGOs in addressing those needs; and fourth,the complexities of pregnancy, reproductive health, and citizenship policiesin relation to transnational migrants’ German-born offspring. In addition,Castañeda notes important similarities between the goals, objectives, andstructural constraints facing the religiously affiliated NGO clinic she studiesin Berlin, on one hand, and the secular Open Clinic in Tel Aviv operated by
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the local NGO Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (henceforth: PHR-I), onthe other.29
Chapter 8, by labor historian and founding Coordinator of PHR-I’s Pro-ject on Migrant Workers and Refugees Rami Adout, examines Israel’s poli-cies toward two groups of transnational migrants: asylum seekers andwomen trafficked into Israel for purposes of employment in the local sextrade. Working against the common practice of lumping together all non-Jewish, non-Arab residents in Israel under the common label “foreign work-ers,” Adout takes pains to illustrate how asylum seekers and traffickedwomen differ from other irregular migrants in Israel including, in particu-lar, undocumented economic migrants. Such differences notwithstanding,state treatment of these groups nonetheless has been influenced by recentdeportation trends. Overall, the chapter traces changing Israeli attitudes to-ward both groups and examines how access to one expensive entitlement,health care, serves as an indicator of both the degree of governmental goodwill and the amount of material protection each group receives. In additionto offering in-depth analysis of the Israeli case, Adout also compares thehealth care entitlements of asylum seekers and trafficked women in Israelwith their counterparts in one European country—the United Kingdom—and another Middle Eastern country—Egypt. In concluding, the chapterproposes a broader analytical framework for thinking about asylum seekers’and trafficked women’s entitlement to health care.
Part IV, “Seeking Inhabitable Spaces of Welcome,” offers three sociocul-tural perspectives on transnational migrants’ individual and communallives in Israel. The chapters in this section are framed by the authors’ sharedcommitment to long-term ethnographic participant-observation as a coreresearch method. Part IV thus explores how undocumented migrant work-ers in Tel Aviv struggle to carve out spaces that feel like “home”—i.e., whatanthropologist Sarah Willen describes in Chapter 9 as “inhabitable spacesof welcome”—in the face of powerful pressures to the contrary. Willen in-troduces the notion of “inhabitable spaces of welcome” as a flexible, open-ended way of thinking about how undocumented migrants actively seekout—and frequently find or create—opportunities to feel existentiallygrounded, comforted, and secure within a fraught and rapidly changinghost society context. In broader theoretical terms, the chapter is part of alarger effort to develop a “critical phenomenological approach” to the studyof “migrant illegality”—i.e., an approach that takes the notion of “illegal-ity” as object of ethnographic study and, in so doing, considers how “ille-gal” status is variably configured and experienced within divergent migrationcontexts (Willen forthcoming). In ethnographic terms, Chapter 9 exploresundocumented migrants’ efforts to find and sustain “inhabitable spaces ofwelcome” in the aftermath of a January 2003 suicide bombing in South TelAviv in which nearly one third of the dead, and many of those injured, were
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transnational migrants. After the bombing, which took place as the massdeportation campaign was gathering steam, a number of prominent Israelileaders issued rhetorical gestures suggesting that undocumented migrantsbe folded under the national wing; for instance, then-Foreign MinisterBinyamin Netanyahu described wounded undocumented migrants to an Is-raeli newspaper as “flesh of our flesh.” By analyzing three memorializingevents held in the bombing’s wake, the chapter shows how both the bomb-ing itself and such fleeting gestures of welcome left undocumented mi-grants struggling to determine how the bombing would affect their lives as“illegal” migrant workers in Israel, if at all.
In Chapter 10, historian Galia Sabar explores another angle on undocu-mented migrants’ quest to find “inhabitable spaces of welcome” in Israel.Drawing upon qualitative interviews and related ethnographic findings,Sabar’s chapter provides a social history of the West African community thatemerged in Tel Aviv in the 1990s with emphasis on its core communal in-stitution: grassroots, “African initiated” churches. In Israel, Christiantransnational migrants lack one of the primary mechanisms for assimila-tion and adjustment open to migrants in other countries; given the major-ity Jewish culture, upon arrival they found few local churches they couldjoin. Acutely aware of the impossibility of gaining citizenship in Israel, andpainfully aware of their “otherness” in almost every respect, African mi-grants thus established their own churches—not as a bridge to the host so-ciety or as a way of gaining legitimacy or residency (cf. Glick Schiller, et al.2006), but rather as a means of cultivating first, an arena of self-definitionand self-expression in a foreign land, and second, transnational ties toAfrica and other parts of the African diaspora. In these unique spaces, mi-grants were able to worship in a familiar idiom in a way that helped themcreate a sense of connectedness both to “home” and to other Africans in TelAviv. These communal institutions, however, were ultimately unable to sur-vive the mass deportation campaign. Sabar’s description of their rise andfall thus constitutes an important contribution not only to the ethnographyof Israel’s transnational migrant communities, but also to the study ofAfrican Christianity, West African transnational migration and diaspora,and the role of religion in transnational migration processes.
In Chapter 11, anthropologist Anat Rosenthal employs a gender-sensitivelens to explore a substantially different social domain in which transnationalmigrants struggle to feel welcome and secure: the zone of interaction betweenundocumented African “domestic workers” and their (typically female) Jew-ish-Israeli employers in Tel Aviv. Drawing upon her ethnographic study of un-documented African women living with HIV as well as anthropological andsociological literature on the feminization of transnational migration and the“stratification” of reproductive labor along lines of gender, race/ethnicity, andclass, Rosenthal explores how domestic labor relationships blur the bound-
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aries between the “private” and the “public” domains. More specifically, shecontends that when economic relationships transpire within homes, theytake on characteristics of social relationships, thereby generating forms of eco-nomic, “public” association bearing distinctly “private” qualities. These rela-tionships, Rosenthal demonstrates, thus hinge on a paradoxical tension be-tween forms of intimacy and familiarity related to the “private” nature ofdomestic work, on one hand, and attitudes of objectification and exclusionderiving from the “public” realm of government bureaucracy, the media, andpopular discourse, on the other. Tension between these paradoxical, compet-ing tendencies thus leaves many undocumented migrants—especially mi-grant women employed as domestic workers—torn between a sense of feel-ing provisionally welcomed and appreciated at their workplaces, on onehand, and objectified and replaceable, on the other.
In the concluding chapter, sociologist Zeev Rosenhek (who, like many ofthe volume’s other contributors, is among the pioneering researchers of Is-rael’s encounter with contemporary processes of transnational migration) re-flects upon the volume’s broader contribution to the multidisciplinary studyof contemporary processes of transnational migration. In particular, Rosen-hek highlights the implications of the Israeli case for research on the politicsof migrant exclusion and inclusion in host states with exclusionary citizen-ship regimes. To this end, he elaborates upon the political dynamics shapinglocal exclusionary and inclusionary trends, which include the Palestinian-Is-raeli conflict; the Israeli state’s strategy for managing the occupation regime;the extreme exclusionary nature of the Israeli migration regime; and the ex-treme xenophobic politics conducted by a wide array of mainstream politi-cal actors. Overall, he suggests that the chapters included here offer clear il-lustrations of how even states with hegemonic, exclusivist ethnonationalconceptions of membership can nonetheless be vulnerable to fissures. Whilecalling attention to the possibility that inclusionary policies and practicescan emerge even within exclusionary states, Rosenhek nonetheless observesthat the permanence of such changes cannot be assured.
CENTRAL THEMES AND BROADER CONTRIBUTION OF THE VOLUME
In the third edition of their now-classic volume The Age of Migration,Stephen Castles and Mark Miller identify five trends characterizing contem-porary patterns of transnational migration, each of which is addressed inthe Israeli case by the chapters in this volume. These include first, the glob-alization of migration; second, the acceleration of migration, or the in-crease in overall numbers of migrants; third, the differentiation of migra-tion into multiple migration pathways; fourth, the feminization of
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migration; and finally, the growing politicization of migration in both na-tional and international discourse (2003: 7–9). In addition to engagingthese themes, the present volume also addresses a range of more specificquestions animating current scholarly research on transnational migrationprocesses that include, but are no means limited to, the following.
Citizenship, Sovereignty, and the Changing Nature of the State
One hallmark of multidisciplinary scholarship on globalization andtransnationalism is its expanded attention to issues of citizenship, sover-eignty, and processes of statecraft. Given the dynamic nature of these threedomains, as well as their reverberating impact within the lives of migrantgroups and individuals, anthropologists, sociologists, and others have foundit necessary to join political scientists and international legal scholars in pay-ing attention to these issues. The present volume contributes to this conver-sation by highlighting the embeddedness of migration processes to Israelwithin larger struggles over the meaning and implications of citizenship andstate sovereignty.30 It also offers an array of Israeli perspectives on associatedtransformations at multiple levels of state governance and social process.31
Intra-State Tensions Regarding Migration Law, Policy, and Practice
States’ responses to transnational migration tend not to be monolithic;indeed different government ministries and different levels of state power—i.e., national, regional, and local—may understand the causes and conse-quences of such processes differently and, as a result, may respond in sub-stantially different ways. Such responses may diverge along explicitpolitical, ideological, or economic fault lines, or they may contain inten-tional contradictions or ambiguity. In exploring the diversity and complex-ity of state responses to transnational migration, the divergences betweenmunicipal and national-level responses to transnational migrationprocesses merit careful consideration.32 As the chapters included heredemonstrate, these sorts of tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities areparticularly striking in Israel, and they bear powerful impact upon the livedexperience of individual migrants and migrant communities.
Variability in Local Configurations and Experiences of Migrant “Illegality”
In light of the Israeli government’s decisive shift toward a deportation-oriented agenda in mid-2002, the chapters included here offer a particularlyimportant contribution to the study of “illegal” migration dynamics as wellas the impact of deportation regimes and local conditions of “deportabil-
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ity” on individual migrants and migrant communities.33 The ethnographicchapters also contribute to emerging discussions of how the condition ofmigrant “illegality” is variably configured and, crucially, experienced by in-dividual migrants and migrant communities.34
Articulating and Advocating for Migrants’ Needs and Rights
Whether or not transnational migrants are welcome in their new countriesof residence, host states are increasingly being pushed—by a combination oflocal and national government officials, human rights and migrant advocacyorganizations, and migrants themselves—to address these new residents’ ba-sic needs in the realms of health, education, and social welfare as well astheir civil, political, and human rights.35 By providing fine-grained analysesof such claims-making processes within the Israeli context, this volume con-tributes to research on these issues by highlighting some of the specificstrategies that have been employed in Israel with varying degrees of success.36
Social and Cultural Dimensions of Transnational Migration
Transnational migration contributes to the emergence of new zones ofsocial and cultural interface both between migrants and host society actorsand between members of different migrant groups. So, too, do the new de-mands, challenges, and pressures encountered in their new countries ofresidence affect migrants’ experience of culture and community. The pres-ent volume makes significant contributions to the investigation of such dy-namic zones of social interaction and emergent forms of cultural experi-ence. In particular, it contributes to research on 1) the role of religion inmigrants’ individual and collective experience;37 2) diaspora experience—especially in the Filipino and West African diasporas;38 3) challenges asso-ciated with migrants’ ongoing membership in transnational social networksand communities;39 and 4) the complex interrelationships among gender,race/ethnicity, class, and migration status in the field of domestic work.40 Italso sheds light on a distinctive facet of the Israeli migration setting: theshifting and dynamic politics of Otherness in Israel, according to whichnon-Jewish transnational migrants are constructed as a particular kind ofOther situated precariously between the country’s ratified citizens and its“real Others”—i.e., Palestinians (Willen under review).
CONCLUSION
Overall, this volume uses a comparative, multidisciplinary lens to ana-lyze contemporary processes of transnational migration to Israel in
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global context. Following Ewa Morawska, two premises animate thisproject.
First, its purpose is not [the] creation of [a] unidisciplinary study of immigra-tion, but learning from each other discipline-specific ways of conceptualizingproblems and analytic strategies. In other words, the aim is to build up aknowledge of differences so that immigration scholars in different academicfields become interdisciplinary polylogues, conversant in many languages and,thus, capable of “translating” into and in-between disciplines. Second, . . . ac-counting for such founding concepts and epistemological positions does notundermine but, to the contrary, enhances scholarly work by making it moretrustworthy and, of particular concern here, more amenable to accurate inter-disciplinary “translations.” (2003: 612)
As Smith and Guarnizo (1998) contend, scholarly research in this vein can-not restrict itself to “top-down” perspectives; it must also consider perspec-tives “from below”—i.e., from the perspectives of transnational migrantsthemselves. Linking these insights, it becomes clear that we must activelyexplore the interplay among three levels of analysis: first, the micro-level ofmigrants’ experience; second, the meso-level of state and institutional poli-cies and practices; and finally the macro-level of global political economictrends and processes. This inherently collaborative and multidisciplinaryapproach defines the present volume, which attempts to offer insights gen-erated by juxtaposing the Israeli case with an array of similar and dissimilarcases in Western Europe, the Middle East, and other world regions, and bycomparing the experiences of transnational migrants in Israel with those oftheir counterparts elsewhere. Overall,it is our hope that the analyses pre-sented here will prove useful to scholars in a range of disciplines and a va-riety of world regions who share a common interest in this complex andchallenging facet of globalization.
NOTES
1. See, for instance, (Castles and Davidson 2000; Castles and Miller 2003; Chavez1998 (1992); Cornelius, et al. 2004; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Guiraudonand Joppke 2001; Jacobson 1996; Joppke 1999; Soysal 1994).
2. This portion of the chapter is adapted from (Willen 2006b, Chapter 4).Given the centrality of both aliyah, or Jewish immigration, and klitah, or immi-
grant absorption, to the Israeli national project, it should come as no surprise thatthese issues were high on the agenda of social scientists within the country’s newlyestablished universities for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, until the latterparty of the century, many Israeli academics tended to view their scholarly work asan important part of the nation-building enterprise (see, for instance, Yair & Apeloig2006: 56). Without doubt, the arrival of new groups of Jewish migrants from places
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as disparate as Morocco and Uzbekistan, Argentina and Yemen created rich researchopportunities for budding anthropologists and sociologists in the state’s earlydecades. Whether or not their studies were formally designed as “applied research,”multiple, successive generations of Israeli academics studied matters of migrationout of a sense of obligation—i.e., as citizen-scholars—to their state-in-the-making.
3. See, for instance, (Bilu 1980; Deshen and Shokeid 1974; Eisenstadt 1954;Goldberg 1973; Goldberg 1978; Hacohen 1994; Leshem and Shuval 1998; Shuval2006 [1963]).
4. (Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport 2002; Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport 2003; Re-mennick 2002)
5. (Ben-Ezer 2002; Seeman 1997; Shabtay 1995);In the first decades following the establishment of the Israeli state, the central or-
gans of state power, including the centrally important Ministry of Immigration andAbsorption, were dominated by Ashkenazi (European) Jews, many of whom lookedupon North African and Middle Eastern Jews (Mizrahim), as “less civilized” thantheir European brethren. This particular manifestation of Ashkenazi cultural andpolitical hegemony has had powerful consequences for non-European Jewish im-migrants, who have frequently been constructed, and treated, in ways that contem-porary scholars now characterize as authoritarian, patronizing, ethnocentric and/ororientalizing (see, for instance, Davidovitch and Shvarts 2004; Khazzoom 2003; See-man 1999; Shohat 1988). More specifically, the activities of Israel’s Ministry of Im-migration and Absorption, particularly in the realm of health, reveal an ongoingtension between Jewish immigrants’ role as “the most important asset of the na-tion,” on one hand, and as “chomer enoshi [human material]—a term that reflectsboth fear and suspicion of changes such immigrants might cause within veteranJewish Society” (Davidovitch and Shvarts 2004: 3). At different historical momentsand for different reasons, the Ministry has regarded non-European Jewish arrivals asless civilized than their established “brothers” and, to borrow a phrase from Suárez-Navaz’s work with transnational labor migrants in Spain, as “subjects of tutelage”requiring instruction in how to become disciplined, civilized, modern subjects andcitizens (Hirsch 2000; Stoller-Lis 1998). This was certainly true during the 1950swith reference to the waves of North African and Middle Eastern Jews arriving in Is-rael, and it has remained true in certain respects through more recent waves of Jew-ish immigration in the 1990s, especially from Ethiopia (see especially Seeman1997). While the dominant role of Ashkenazi Jews has waned somewhat in subse-quent decades as a result of recent social and political changes, the residual impactof earlier state policies, practices, and attitudes nonetheless persists.
6. As Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport indicate, “To stay or to leave Israel is one of theultimate tests of every Jewish citizen in the Israeli state. The normative belief is thatby staying in the country each citizen, including the newcomer, realizes the Zionistethos. While for immigrants in other societies the question of staying/leaving re-mains a personal-familial consideration, in Israel this question is loaded with strongmoral-collectivist connotations and implications. One’s very act of remainingmakes the questions of where one’s personal home is and where one’s nationalhome is one and the same” (2001: 3).
7. For more on the phenomenon of yordim, see (Fuchs 1989; Shokeid 1988; So-bel 1986).
Introduction 25
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By the same token, many Israelis committed to this ethos apply the same test toJews residing elsewhere in the Jewish diaspora. In particular, diaspora Jews who in-dicate “support for Israel” with their checkbooks rather than by serving in the Israeliarmy, or sending their children to serve in the army, for instance, are commonlydenigrated for their failure to realize the core Zionist dream of bringing all Jews toIsrael and, in so doing, striving for a total “negation of the diaspora.” This Israelicriticism of diaspora Jews may be expressed less frequently now than in previousgenerations, but the ideological position, freighted with moral significance,nonetheless persists for some Israelis.
8. One of the most politicized threads within such debates challenges the no-tion that Jewishness is a form of national identity. Another challenges the legitimacyof Zionist political claims to sovereignty over what is alternatively labeled Palestine,the historic Land of Israel or, by a new branch of contemporary scholars,Israel/Palestine (see, for instance, Dowty 2005; LeVine 2005; LeVine and Sufian inpress; Pappé 1999; Rabinowitz 2000; Stein and Swedenburg 2005).
9. See also (Willen 2006b, Chapter 7; Willen in press-b).10. The discursive power of the term “ovdim zarim”—literally, foreign workers—
is further strengthened by its etymological relationship to the Biblical term “avodahzarah,” or idol worship. Kemp and Raijman elaborate: “Even the term ‘ovdim zarim’,which conjures Biblical associations with the term ‘avodah zarah’ symbolizes mi-grants’ marginal status as those who exist beyond the zones of culture, society, andpolitics of the Israeli society and” (2000b: 88).
11. Estimates vary, with some running as high as 300,000.12. (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics 2001, cited in Kemp and Raijman 2003: 4)13. (ibid: 8)14. Kemp and Raijman cite the lower estimate (ibid: 1), while the higher estimate
was cited by the Deputy Director of the Budgets Division of the Ministry of Finance(see Bassok 2003).
15. (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics 2003)16. The growing Filipino labor diaspora, for instance, spans Persian Gulf
states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates; Southeast Asiancountries like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore; European countries like Italy;and highly desirable North American destinations like the United States andCanada (Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; Constable 1997; Constable 2003; Law 2005;Parreñas 2001)
17. (Israeli Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare, cited in Bartram 1998)18. See (Willen under review) for an discussion of the systematic and deliberate
replacement of Palestinians, who are typically constructed as Israel’s “real Others,”with these new groups of “other Others” on the basis of both a) their presumeddocility as a labor force, and b) their presumed neutrality in relation to the ongoingIsraeli-Palestinian conflict.
19. See also the recent book (in Hebrew) by journalist Nurit Wurgaft (2006).20. See, for instance, (Hotline for Migrant Workers 2002) and other reports by
that organization (www.hotline.org.il) and by the Kav La’Oved Workers’ Hotline(www.kavlaoved.org.il). For more on exploitative systems of contract labor as a formof modern-day slavery, see (Bales 2004; Bales 2005; Gardner forthcoming).
21. This section of the chapter is adapted from (Willen in press-a).
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22. One critic, for instance, has argued that it is grounded in “a simplistic and de-ceptive parallel between two phenomena: 300,000 foreign workers, 300,000 unem-ployed” (Sinai 2003).
23. (Hotline for Migrant Workers 2004)24. (Israeli Immigration Authority 2005)25. Hotline for Migrant Workers, citing statistics collected by the Israeli Prison
Authorities, the Central Bureau of Statistics, and the Immigration Authority (2007).26. (Mesila 2004; Willen forthcoming; Willen in press-a)27. For a detailed examination of these techniques, see (Willen in press-a).28. (Kuperboim 2003); see also (Willen 2006b).29. (Cf. Adout 2002; Filc and Davidovitch 2005a; Willen 2006a)30. (cf. Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer 2002; Castles and Davidson 2000; Joppke
1999; Ong 1999; Sassen 1998; Shafir 1998; Zolberg 2001)31. (cf. Freeman 1992; Hirschman, et al. 1999; Jacobson 1996; Joppke 1998;
Joppke and Rosenhek 2002; Schmitter Heisler 1992; Schmitter Heisler 2004; Soysal1994; Suárez-Navaz 2004b; Zolberg 1999a; Zolberg 1999b)
32. (cf. Holston and Appadurai 1999; cf. Kemp and Raijman 2004; Rosenhek1999a; Rosenhek 2000; Sassen 1996; Sassen 1998)
33. (cf. Albrecht 2002; Cornelius, et al. 2004; De Genova 2002; De Genova 2005;De Genova and Peutz forthcoming; Düvell 2006; Guiraudon and Joppke 2001; Ngai2004)
34. (see, for instance, Coutin 2003; De Genova 2002; Holmes forthcoming;Tormey forthcoming; Willen forthcoming; Willen in press-a)
35. (cf. Braun and Würflinger 2001; Fassin 2005; Graham 2003; PICUM 2002;PICUM 2003a; PICUM 2003b; Ticktin 2002; Verbruggen 2001)
36. (see also Alexander 2006; Filc and Davidovitch 2005b; Kemp and Raijman2000a; see also Kemp and Raijman 2004; Kemp, et al. 2000; Raijman and Kemp2002; Rosenhek 1999b; Willen 2006a)
37. (cf. Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2002; cf. Levitt 2003; VanDijk 1997; Van Dijk 2002)
38. (cf. Akyeampong 2000; Constable 1997; Parreñas 2001; Stoller 1999; Stoller2002)
39. (cf. Glick Schiller, et al. 1992; Goldring 1999; Rouse 1995a; Rouse 1995b)40. (cf. Anderson 2000; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo
2001)
Introduction 27
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ITRANSNATIONAL MIGRATIONAND THE ISRAELI STATE IN FLUX:NATIONAL-LEVEL PERSPECTIVES
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During the 1990s Israel became host country to approximately 200,000 la-bor migrants, arriving virtually from every corner of the world.2 Initially re-cruited to replace Palestinian daily commuters in the construction and agri-culture sectors, by 2002—i.e., in less than a decade—documented andundocumented labor migrants accounted for 9.6 percent of the total laborforce. By this point, labor migrants’ share within the Israeli labor marketoutnumbered that of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories (OT), whohad been working in Israel for over two decades. Their arrival also placed Is-rael first among the industrialized economies most heavily dependent onforeign labor (Kemp and Raijman 2003b).3
While the Israeli labor market had relied on organized and unorganizedPalestinian labor since the early 1970s, market dualism and dependence oncheap foreign workers in labor-intensive sectors of the Israeli economy nev-ertheless did not favor the recruitment of overseas labor migrants until thelast decade. To the contrary, overseas labor migration was presented by stateofficials as an “undesirable” solution, certain to become a “social problem”soon.4 The central question is why and how overseas labor migration be-came a most salient phenomenon within Israeli society and a structural fea-ture of its secondary labor market.
Researchers of labor migration in Israel have argued that the outbreak ofthe Intifada in 1987, coupled with strong pressure exerted by organized em-ployers in the construction and agriculture sectors, set in motion the polit-ical process that led to the mass recruitment of overseas labor migrants. Forexample, Bartram (2005) convincingly shows how clientelistic patterns
31
2Labor Migration, Managing theEthno-National Conflict, andClient Politics in Israel1
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characteristic of Israeli politics prove crucial in explaining governmental de-cisions to open the gates to labor flows to replace Palestinians in the early1990s. Yet by focusing on the “internal” institutional logic that drove thepolitical economy of labor migration (i.e., the coalition of interests betweenstrong employers and state officials and politicians), Bartram seems to as-sume rather than demonstrate the geopolitical interests of the state in re-placing Palestinians.
As we show in this chapter, the decision to recruit labor migrants illus-trates the transformations in the logic of the ethno-national conflict towarda paradigm of “separation” between Israel and the Palestinians (Shafir andPeled 2002). We argue that the developments that led to the massive re-cruitment of labor migrants in 1993 mirror the modes in which a system ofregulations and sanctions imposed on the Palestinian population devel-oped between 1987 to 1993 as a way of managing the ethno-national con-flict. The recruitment of overseas labor migrants was not only supposed toalleviate pressure from Israeli employers—these generally constituting theengine behind the initiation and perpetuation of labor migration flows (seeFreeman 1995; Piore 1979)—but also to fuel the changing logic of theethno-national conflict. Labor migration was conceived as a major politicaltool to signal to the Palestinians that they “had something to lose” from thepolitical uprising and violence, as well as a political device that would en-able the Israeli government to execute the separation process first and fore-most in the primary sphere within Israeli society into which Palestiniansfrom the OT had become integrated: the secondary labor market.
The national conflict thus proved to be a major “pull” factor for labor mi-gration flows and, later, a catalyst in their institutionalization. Here lies theuniqueness of the phenomenon of labor migration in Israel; while wars andethnic conflicts are known in the migration literature as “push” factors foremigration flows, Israel has become a distinctive case in which ethnic con-flict has turned out to be a “pull” factor in explaining the beginning andperpetuation of its overseas labor migration.
The replacement of Palestinian workers by new labor migrants as a conse-quence of escalation in the ethno-national conflict somewhat resembles thecase of countries in the Persian Gulf during the 1991 war. Prior to the GulfCrisis, Yemeni, Jordanian, and Palestinian workers in Kuwait and Saudi Ara-bia comprised a high percentage of the labor force in that region. Yemeniworkers in Saudi Arabia in particular enjoyed several privileges, which wererevoked by the Saudis as Yemeni support for Iraq became evident (Feiler1993: 12; Stevenson 1993). The departure of large numbers of Yemenis fromSaudi Arabia created labor force shortages that were filled by migrants fromother labor-exporting countries in South-East Asia (Addleton, 1991: 514).Jordanians and especially Palestinians were also forced to return home fromSaudi Arabia as well as the smaller GCC states (Offen 1993).
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The massive exodus of Yemeni, Jordanian, and Palestinian workers fromthe Gulf area after the Gulf War was a graphic illustration of the decision bythe oil-rich Arab states to use employment opportunity as a political tool andto show to these workers that their countries’ support for Iraq during the 1991war carried an economic “cost”: the loss of jobs that were an important sourceof remittances to their home countries (Abella 1995: 173; Crystal 1992: 168;Feiler 1993: 38–39). The Gulf War, which exerted a powerful transformativeimpact on the ethnic composition of labor migrants to the region, highlightsthe intertwined character of geopolitical and labor market processes in theMiddle East (Addleton 1991; Castles and Miller 1998: 117).5
As we shall see, the use of employment opportunities as a geopolitical toolis also a central aspect of labor migration policy in Israel. However, in con-trast to other cases in the region, Palestinians working in Israel representeda distinctive kind of labor migration. Subjected to Israeli military occupa-tion, hence to the jurisdiction of the Israeli authorities, Palestinian workerswere not “foreign” labor in the strict sense but an inextricable part of the Is-raeli control system (Kimmerling 1989). Their induced replacement in thelabor market could not be regarded as a matter of state sovereignty and in-ter-state relations as in the case of the Gulf countries. It instead carried sig-nificant questions—legal, moral and political—about the responsibility ofthe Israeli state toward a population under military occupation.
In the next section, we describe the political process that led to the sys-tematic replacement of Palestinian workers by overseas labor migrants in theIsraeli labor market. We do so by focusing on the period 1987–1993, whenthe intersection of contingent geopolitical processes (i.e., the Intifada) andstructural economic conditions (i.e., labor market dualism and dependenceon non-citizen labor) resulted in the massive recruitment of labor migrants,who were to become a central feature of the Israeli labor market.
THE INTIFADA AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF OVERSEAS LABOR MIGRATION IN ISRAEL
In 1987, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict entered a new phase. The Palestin-ian uprising proved that the strategy of economic integration between Israeland the territories, which had existed since the early 1970s, was no longerviable despite the relative prosperity of the Palestinian economy.6 As dis-quiet intensified in the territories, many Palestinian workers did not appearfor work; those who continued to do so arrived irregularly because of boththe road blocks and an appeal by the Intifada leadership to boycott work inIsrael. Now that these workers were not always at hand, and some amongthem were involved in acts of sabotage and murder, their allure for both Is-raeli employers and Israeli authorities faded markedly.
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Immediately upon the outbreak of the Intifada, the primary issues on theIsraeli public agenda were the replacement of Palestinian workers by labormigrants and the possibility of utilizing them as a means of deterrence andsuppression of the uprising. The underlying assumption of this strategy in-volved striking where it hurt most: the source of livelihood of over 100,000Palestinians, comprising 46 percent of the total work force in the Gaza Stripand 36 percent in the West Bank (Semyonov and Lewin-Epstein 1987).
As early as January 1988, less than a month after the start of the Intifada,a debate was proposed in the Knesset on “the absence of workers from theterritories and the importation of workers from abroad.”7 The debate cen-tered chiefly on the pros and cons inherent to the recruitment of labor mi-grants as a threat and a deterrent for the Palestinian workers from the terri-tories. Member of Knesset (MK) Avner Shaki of the National Religiousfaction, for example, was hopeful: “We shall certainly prove to those Arabworkers who chose to use their work in Israel as a weapon, and to stay offwork on those days . . . that we can manage without them, and that theywill not frighten or alarm us.”8
In those years, the Ministry of Labor and Welfare opposed the mass re-cruitment of labor migrants to Israel, especially in view of the high unem-ployment rates. Nevertheless, the Minister of Labor and Welfare Moshe Kat-sav did not disregard the element of deterrence embedded in the threat tobring in workers from abroad. He asserted that the absence of Palestinianworkers from their jobs in Israel was a kind of “double-edged sword”: “TheArabs of Judea and Samaria have to understand . . . that if they endangertheir workplaces, tomorrow they will not be offered work, and alternativeswill not be in short supply.”9
The absence of Palestinian workers from their workplaces in Israel wasalso perceived by the government, or by some of its members, as an oppor-tunity to reorganize the labor market so as to reduce Israeli employers’ de-pendence on non-organized Palestinian labor and bring back Israeli work-ers—primarily the unemployed, new immigrants, and dischargedsoldiers—into labor-intensive sectors. But above all, the government re-garded the idea of importing “foreign workers” as a political opportunity toshow the Palestinians the economic consequences of the uprising. SomeKnesset members even perceived labor migrants as a solution, albeit as thelesser of two evils: “Between employing terrorists and employing peoplenot from here, and I hope they’ll return to their countries of origin, the lessbad alternative, in my opinion, is foreign workers from abroad.”10
If the replacement of Palestinian workers by labor migrants was only athreat in the late 1980s, it began to be realized in 1991 after the Gulf War.Two factors coalesced to bring this about. First, the worsening of violencebetween the sides spilled over inside the Green Line and resulted in astricter regulation of entry and the imposition of curfew and closure. Sec-
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ond, employers pushed forth ever more forceful demands for an immedi-ate solution to the shortage created in the Palestinian labor force. This chap-ter concerns the conjunction of these two factors and their relationship tothe emerging flow of labor migration to Israel.
Stricter Regulation of Palestinian Workers
The developments that led to the massive recruitment of labor migrantsmirror the development of the regulatory and sanction system imposed onthe Palestinian population from the start of the Intifada. In 1987, restric-tions on the movement of workers from the territories were imposed, firston those from the Gaza Strip and later on those from the West Bank, whenthey were forbidden to cross into Israeli terrain without special permits. Theregulatory entry apparatus gradually evolved from the occasional placementof restrictions on inhabitants, through the imposition of total closure onentire populations for prolonged periods, to the consolidation of the pol-icy of separation. This continuum of actions, which varied in scope, sever-ity, and meticulousness of implementation, prepared the ground for the re-placement of Palestinian workers and lent legitimacy to the decision tobring in labor migrants from abroad in significant numbers.
On June 6, 1989, the civilian administration began the work of filteringand clarifying those “denied exit” from the OT—people with a record ofcrime or security offenses—and those “permitted exit.” The latter wereobliged to obtain magnetic passes from the military government in order toenter Israeli terrain. Such permits were distributed selectively according tovarious criteria determined by the military government and the civilian ad-ministration (Hass 1996: 297). From the Palestinian perspective, the per-mits regime became a means of control and personal and collective pun-ishment. From the perspective of Israeli employers, tightening the controlsystem meant that the “golden stream” of cheap and flexible labor from theterritories was drying up.
At the end of the 1980s, the debate in the Knesset and the various gov-ernment committees on limiting the entry of Palestinians into Israel con-centrated mainly on the need to intensify state control of unorganized la-bor. The labor ministry announced an increase in government controlbased on a desire to lay its hands on a substantial slice of the black marketeconomy that flourished through the employment of Palestinian workersand that enriched an extensive industry of contractors and sub-contrac-tors.11
The Israeli government also sought to take advantage of the Intifada as achance to draw Israelis into labor-intensive industries, which in previousdecades had been filled by non-citizen Palestinians. This was especially de-sirable in view of the increasing rates of unemployment, which in 1987
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reached 7.5 percent, while the percentage of Palestinians in the labor forcethat year was the identical figure. Knesset members from all factions andtheir representatives in the government pointed to the “paradox” in whichthe state of Israel was apparently caught; it was paying unemployment ben-efits to tens of thousands of Israelis, while at the same time the economywas employing tens of thousands of non-Israeli workers, most of them non-organized.12
To resolve this “paradox,” the government put forward various proposalsand plans whose purpose was to “restore” Israelis to the branches of the sec-ondary labor market.13 As the frequency of closures in the territories and theGaza Strip accelerated, the government increased its incentives to employ-ers to persuade them to take on Israeli workers. These efforts only grewgreater with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants fromthe former Soviet Union and the consequent increase in the rates of unem-ployment, which climbed to almost 10 percent in 1990.14
These programs, which piled up in the government drawer throughoutthe 1990s, mostly failed to “deliver the goods” because of both the lack ofresponse from the target population of unemployed Israelis, who were un-willing to return to jobs that twenty years had carried the epithet “Arab la-bor,” and their failure to satisfy the immediate demands of employers, whoclearly preferred to hire cheap labor from the Occupied Territories or labormigrants. “The great calamity that has befallen the country,” cried an anx-ious MK in a debate on the replacement of Palestinian by Israeli workers,“is that people don’t believe that Israel can exist without the labor of for-eigners . . . and when you say that this is a slap in the face of Zionism, noone knows what you’re talking about.”15
But phrases such as “Jewish labor” and “Zionism” caused no concern tothe employers’ representatives, who argued in response that with the bestwill in the world toward restoring Jewish labor, they needed a solution rightaway to the dearth of labor. The employers’ representatives, among themAriel Sharon, Minister of Trade and Industry at the time, proposed a solu-tion to the labor shortage in the form of overseas labor migrants. Thesewere portrayed as an “interim arrangement” and a “bridging” solution un-til a permanent solution could be found.16
However, with the overflow of violence and acts of terror into Israel, thedebate on the employment of Palestinian workers increasingly becamelinked not only to the issue of unemployment, but also to the debate on theproblem of internal security. These voices indicated that the employment ofPalestinians was no longer the sole concern of the employers and the gov-ernment, but had come to affect the public as a whole.17 Differences of opin-ion arose between the stance of the Police Ministry, which urged a toughen-ing of procedures for entry of Palestinians into Israel and defined them as athreat to internal security, and the defense establishment, which favored ad
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hoc punitive measures but regarded extended closure as a step that wouldcause great ferment among the Palestinian population in the territories.18
In 1990, the state comptroller published its annual report, which touchedon the piercing public criticism of the legal, security, and human aspects ofthe employment of non-organized workers from the territories.19 Followingthis publication, an inter-ministerial committee was appointed in July 1990(hereafter the Harmelekh Committee), whose task was to probe the em-ployment of non-citizen workers in Israel and means of intensifying controlover non-organized workers from the territories. In November 1990, thecommittee presented a series of recommendations to reduce the number ofthese workers and to increase the costs of employing them.
The importance of the Harmelekh Report stems from its role as the firststate document of its kind to deal with the phenomenon of non-organizedemployment of labor migrants and of Palestinians from the territories andcall for its eradication. The report is also especially interesting because itofficially bound together labor migrants and workers from the territories.The Harmelekh decisions were published about a month after the “TempleMount events,”20 in whose wake the army closed off the territories forsome days. The closure paralyzed many workplaces in Israel, and it ampli-fied calls for a reduction of the Palestinian workforce in Israel so as to im-prove the safety of individual Israelis (Hass 1996: 298). In this setting, it isnot surprising that of all the Harmelekh Committee’s recommendationson control of non-organized labor, the only recommendation to be im-plemented concerned the reduction in the number of Palestinian workersin Israel. This recommendation was quickly adopted by David Magen,Minister of Economy and Planning, who in November 1990 called for ahalving of the overall number of workers from the territories and their re-placement by new immigrants (from the former Soviet Union) and veteranlocal workers. 21
The enthusiastic adoption of the Harmelekh recommendations by Minis-ter Magen was seen by many Knesset members as an attempt by the govern-ment to shed its responsibility for the population under occupation and anattempt to arrange a miscellany of collective punishments to complementthe acts of curfew and closure. “Is it possible to leave in the territories aghetto without work, seething lava that will froth onto the Green Line?”cried MK Edna Solodar of the Labor Alignment. Solodar, with her fellow fac-tion members, saw the government proposal as an act of “unilateral with-drawal.”22 Others, too, chose not to mince words and called the recommen-dations of the Harmelekh Committee and Magen, “the institution of anapartheid regime.” 23 Against these arguments concerning the practical sepa-ration that the state of Israel had begun to apply, representatives of the de-fense establishment asserted that the acts of curfew and closure were onlypreventive measures and that there was no policy of collective punishment.24
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The start of the Gulf War in January 1991 and the Palestinians’ supportfor the regime of Saddam Hussein resulted in the imposition of a forty-one-day closure imposed on the territories. These episodes legitimized therecruitment of 3,000 labor migrants for the construction sector.25 ArielSharon, Minister of Construction and Housing, was quoted as saying, “Asfor employing foreign workers in Israel or employing those ‘dancing onthe rooftops,’ I prefer employing foreign workers.”26 Toward the end ofthat year, the number of permits in the construction sector was increasedto 10,000, and a total of 15,000 permits were issued for all labor marketsectors.
The formalization of the system of permits and the closure policy led anincreasing number of employers to stop hiring Palestinian workers, as theyrealized that this was no longer the cheap and profitable labor to whichthey had grown accustomed. In fact, what the Ministry of Labor and Wel-fare’s inspection teams and the Harmelekh Committee’s recommendationshad not achieved since the start of the Intifada, the security establishmentsucceeded in accomplishing by imposing closure and more strictly regulat-ing the conditions of entry into Israel.27
As a consequence of the prolonged closure imposed after the Gulf War,the socio-political “climate” prevailing among both the authorities and em-ployers seems to have changed regarding the employment of Palestinianworkers, at least in such large numbers as hitherto.28 During the first yearsof the Intifada, the main concern of employers had been the unavailabilityof workers from the territories; now the problem of personal safety was be-coming worse. The notion that Palestinians had to be kept out of the labormarket and off the Israeli street became increasingly popular in the highechelons of government and among the community of employers alike.29
Voices favoring “Jewish labor” were heard mainly after acts of murder of Is-raelis by Palestinians. They rose in volume, and gradually caused the dis-missal of workers from the territories en masse, something that had seemedimpossible just a year before.30
For example, the local council of the West Bank settlement of KarneiShomron decided to fire all Palestinian workers and called on all bodiesand contractors that worked with it, as well as mayors and chairpersons ofcouncils throughout Israel, to do likewise. The chairman of the council ap-pended to the announcement of the collective dismissal a “letter to thePalestinian neighbors” in Arabic, which was distributed in the nearby vil-lages. The letter read, in part:
We regard all the Arab workers laboring among us as emissaries of peace andco-existence. We have treated you with dignity. We have not been miserly withyour pay, and you have enjoyed all the benefits, just like all Jewish workers. Inreturn, we expect of you, when you return to your villages in Judea and Samaria
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and in Gaza, to vomit up from your midst the knifers, the gasoline bombers,and the stone throwers . . . Decide what you prefer: a decent living and foodfor your children, or Arab terror . . .31
At the end of March 1993, after four months of violence and terror at-tacks, the military government decided on the separation of the territoriesand Israel for an indefinite period by means of road blocks (Hass 1996:299). The hermetic closure lasted six weeks, and work permits, which in thepast had been valid for a year, were cancelled and replaced by two-monthpermits distributed on the basis of new criteria (minimum age and familysituation). Also, the number of permits issued was slashed in half. 32 The in-troduction of the permit apparatus caused the loss of thousands of jobs forPalestinians, some permanently.
The defense establishment’s role in limiting the scope of Palestinian in-volvement in the labor market in Israel attests to the significance of “extra-market” state elements in shaping labor market policy in general, and increating suitable conditions for recruiting labor migrants in specific. Morethan anything, the policy of closure and the formalization of Palestinian la-bor in Israel signified the ability of the Israeli defense establishment to al-ter the labor market dynamics that had marked the relations between Israeliemployers and Palestinian workers since 1967. This was a drastic changethat put an end to the hesitations of the Ministry of Labor and Welfare,whose leaders wanted to hold Palestinian workers back but were com-pelled, at the same time, to bow to employers’ pressure for cheap labor.
In this sense the closure policy, which prevented the entry of Palestinians,was an important step in the crystallization of the perception of separationthat guided the Rabin government and the architects of Oslo in 1993 and thatdefined detachment from the Palestinians as an absolute necessity. “The pur-pose of the closure,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin explained to the Knesset,
is to create, not in one fell swoop, more separation, entirely unconnected withthe matter of the political process . . . To give a sense of security to the major-ity of the citizens of Israel . . . Being spread out in various workplaces all over,they [the Palestinian workers] have generated a feeling of lack of safety . . .There is no alternative to making the separation, without prior distinction ofwho is set on knifing and who is not . . . Without separation there will be nopersonal safety. The more clear-cut the separation, the more security will be re-stored . . . 33
Thus in 1993, the “separation” between Israel and the Palestinians crys-tallized in the labor market arena with the gradual and systematic replace-ment of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories with overseas labor mi-grants. In 1990, the former comprised about 9 percent of the labor market;by 2000 their representation had dwindled to 3 percent.
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This replacement derived not only from the new geopolitical outlook andthe policy of “separation” between Israel and the Palestinians, but also fromthe strong client politics exerted by powerfully organized employers—inagriculture and construction—intent on finding alternative cheap workersin the form of labor migrants. As Bartram (2005:11) has pointed out, labormigration becomes an option when those who suffer from labor shortages(the employers) have the power to put the issue onto the political agenda.In the next section, we document the dynamics of client politics and theirinteraction with geopolitical changes.
The Government and Its “Clients”
While members of Knesset and government ministers discussed the valueof deterrence inherent in the recruitment of labor migrants, employers be-gan to present increasingly insistent demands for a concrete solution to theshortage of Palestinian workers from the day after the outbreak of the In-tifada.
The first organized pressure campaign directed at the government camefrom employers in the agricultural sector. The agricultural lobby in Israeloperated as a consolidated front and tried to enlist the Minister of Agricul-ture Arye Nehemkin to support their demand for cheap labor. But the min-ister rejected the farmers’ demand: “Pity the state that can’t assemble from
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Figure 2.1. Percent of Labor Migrant and Palestinians in the Israeli Labor Force,1999–2000
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its own ranks workers for the fruit harvest.” No great length of time was topass before he too eased his stance and was persuaded that granting permitsto bring in labor migrants was an effective admonition to Palestinian work-ers and a hint that they were not indispensable.34
Employers in the agriculture sector were not the only ones to apply or-ganized pressure on the government. In the construction and industrial sec-tors too there was an ever louder demand by employers for massive recruit-ment of labor migrants. However, not everyone concurred with these calls.Ora Namir, chairperson of the Knesset Labor and Welfare Committee,35
claimed that the industrialists’ pressure had long preceded the Intifada andthat employers’ preference for labor migrants derived from the foreignworker’s
not having a workers’ committee, and no one stirs things up for him, there areno working hours, no fringe benefits . . . He [the employer] doesn’t have to paynational insurance. They work fourteen hours a day . . . that way a foreignworker costs them half the money. By this logic you may as well run the coun-try with goyim [non-Jews]—that too would be a lot cheaper.36
Employers’ requests for labor migrants continued to grow against thebackground of the sporadic appearance of Palestinian workers at their jobsin Israel. However, only in 1991 did the employers’ pressure show results,as a result of the general closure of the territories during the Gulf War. How-ever, in 1992, when unemployment in Israel rose considerably, the govern-ment decided once more to reduce the number of permits to employ labormigrants and to try incorporating Israeli workers into the secondary sectorof the labor market.37 Employers demanded that the government not onlysubsidize the wages of Israeli workers willing to replace Palestinian workers,but also increase the number of labor migrants. The government, however,acquiesced only to the first of these demands, for they matched the policyof the Labor and Welfare Ministry to reorganize the secondary labor market“without Palestinians”; it refused to go along with the demand for an over-seas labor force.
In April 1993, the government approved a plan, submitted by the Laborand Welfare Minister, whose main features concerned the provision of pro-fessional training to Israelis in the construction sector, stiffening the criteriagranting unemployment benefits, and increasing supervision of the em-ployment of workers from the territories in Israel. The expectations werehigh, and the minister stated: “If 20,000 workers from the territories aresubstituted by Israelis in 1993, we shall regard this as an achievement.”38
For a moment it seemed that the feeble attempts of the previous govern-ment to restore Israeli laborers to the construction and agriculture sectorshad been replaced by an ironclad policy. But this judgment was premature.
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It is true that in the early days of the imposition of closure on the terri-tories, politicians and economic leaders spoke of the importance of “Jewishlabor,” and some rise was in fact recorded in the number of applications forIsraeli workers submitted by the employers to the employment service. Assoon as the entry of workers from the territories was eased, however, the de-mand for Israeli workers ebbed.39 And these relaxations of the closurestemmed in no small way from pressures on the government by Israeli em-ployers themselves to get cheap workers.40
In the first half of 1993, then, a wide gap yawned between the govern-ment’s plans to reorganize the secondary labor market and the actual stateof affairs, in which employers’ hunger for cheap workers grew only moreravenous. In response to the government’s restrictions on the entry of Pales-tinian workers, and its refusal to allow mass recruitment of labor migrantsto replace them, the employers’ pressure on the government turned intoreal threats.
The Agricultural Lobby
In April 1993, Minister Namir reported on holding a “difficult meeting”with representatives of the rural settlements in the Katif Bloc in the GazaStrip, who demanded the immediate importation of workers from Thai-land. She even reported having received actual threats from them.41 “Israelwill be built by Jewish labor, not Thai,” Namir told the farmers of the KatifBloc, possibly missing the topographic irony of her words.42
Despite their small numbers, employers in the agricultural sector hadstrong support and vocal representation in the Knesset across the entire po-litical spectrum. In fact, they constituted one of the strongest foci of powerin the Israeli economy.43 Representatives of the agriculture sector stressedthat in addition to the constant erosion in profitability of the sector due togrowing competition on the international markets and the chronic local cri-sis that had struck the sector since 1985 (see Yustman 2001), they were nowbeing forced to contend with the absence of two thirds of their Palestinianworkers, and they had to bear the “burden of security and panic,” which,they said, “exists in the state.”44
The farmers’ representatives announced that they would collaborate withthe government plan to hire Israeli workers, on the condition that the gov-ernment enlarge the number of labor migrants in the sector. Others weremore doubtful in their conclusions and held that the policy of employingIsraeli workers had simply failed, and that the effort to “enlist” volunteers,students, and the unemployed to help farmers in the fruit-picking seasonwas “quite pathetic.”45
The farmers’ representatives did not intend to sit idly by in the face of thegovernment’s opposition to the recruitment of labor migrants. They in-
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structed their members to claim damages from the agriculture and financeministries for losses caused by the closure.46 Ami Oliel, coordinator of theemergency headquarters of the Moshav (rural settlements) movement, saidthat the movement would not hesitate to organize regional demonstrationsto block highway intersections if the government did not rapidly solve theproblems caused by the closure in the territories.47
The actions of the farmers did not stop there. In May 1993, they peti-tioned the High Court of Justice to order the government to allow the im-portation of 3,500 workers from Thailand.48 The petitioners argued that thegovernment had the duty to provide the necessary workers because it wasthey who had encouraged them to establish labor-intensive farms. Theyalso stated that they were not interested in restoring the status quo ante andemploying “people who are not to be trusted” and who might constitute areal danger to the lives of the employers and the Israeli workers. Therefore,the petitioners held, the only solution left to them was to bring in moreworkers from Thailand.49 The matter ultimately ended in a compromisewhereby the government permitted the importation of 2,750 labor mi-grants from Thailand to work in the agricultural sector and formed a com-mittee to determine the way to allocate the permits. The condition for thecompromise arrangement was that the Moshav movement and its partnerswithdraw the petition from the court.
The Construction Lobby
The other organized body to exert strong pressure on the government in-volved the construction sector, in which half of the employees were Pales-tinian workers. With the imposition of the closure policy, Prime MinisterRabin clarified, “We shall not return to the disarray that prevailed in theconstruction branch on the eve of the closure.”50 This statement, made inresponse to the request of Finance Minister Shohat and Construction andHousing Minister Ben-Elizer to allow controlled entry of construction work-ers from the territories, reflected the view that the number of Palestiniansworking within the Green Line had to be reduced to a minimum.
In parallel to the demand to ease the closure, the contractors’ associationstrove for permission to bring in 10,000 foreign construction workers.51 Ac-cording to representatives of the construction sector, those workers were es-sential for the absorption of 20,000 Israeli workers into the branch. Like thefarmers’ representatives, the contractors also adopted the threat method whenthey announced their intention to call a protective strike in which permanentworkers would be sent on unpaid leave and temporary workers fired. “Withevery passing day the branch loses five million dollars immediately, notcounting possible claims for delays in delivering apartments.”52 The contrac-tors’ association threatened that it would not uphold the agreement with the
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Labor and Welfare Ministry to train 20,000 Israeli construction workers aslong as tens of thousands of labor migrants did not arrive in Israel. Mean-while, the association reported the cessation of activities in several construc-tion firms due to the shortage of skilled workers.53
On account of these claims, at the end of April 1993, an inter-ministerialteam was assembled with the task of presenting recommendations to theprime minister on the importation of labor migrants and on some easingof the entry of workers from the territories for the construction sector.54 Be-fore the recommendations were submitted, a meeting took place betweenthe contractors’ representatives, Labor Minister Namir, and Housing Minis-ter Ben-Eliezer. The contractors emerged from the meeting in good spirits.They said that Namir had agreed to grant 10,000–15,000 work permits forlabor migrants; the figure had been stated explicitly. When news of themeeting came out, the chairman of the left-wing Meretz Knesset faction,MK Ran Cohen, and the Histadrut (Israel’s General Federation of Labor)secretary-general, Haim Haberfeld, demanded that the prime minister re-tract the intention to import thousands of labor migrants and raise thequestion for debate in the government and in the coalition plenary. “Thereis . . . a hasty surrender to the contractors’ pressure,” said MK Cohen.55
Meanwhile, the inter-ministerial team submitted their recommendations,and Prime Minister Rabin decided, contrary to the position of the ministersfrom his party, to approve the entry of 2000 migrant construction workersfor a predetermined length of time.56 “It is very hard for me to defend thegranting of entry of foreign workers,” said Namir, the defeated Labor andWelfare Minister, on being obliged to explain to the Knesset plenary theturn in her government’s policy. “It runs absolutely counter to my percep-tion and my outlook. But I accept the decision of the prime minister.” 57
Namir expressed her fear that the importation of labor migrants for con-struction would prompt other sectors, including agriculture, to make simi-lar demands. Although Rabin had indeed promised that no more permitswould be given, clientelism by nature shifts the emphasis from principleddecision to the politics of bartering.
The government’s decision did not, of course, satisfy the contractors, whodemanded the importation of 10,000 labor migrants. They moved to peti-tion the High Court of Justice to allay their personal distress due to theshortage of labor.58 Zvi Fridman, spokesman for the contractors’ associa-tion, said, “2,000 foreign workers is nothing when there is a shortfall of50,000 workers.” He also explained that Israelis did not want to workalongside workers from the territories, and that the general public did notwant to have Palestinians working near their homes. “We will convene thehighest forum of the association, which will set a date for a gathering of all7,000 contractors in the association,” Fridman stated in a further attempt ata show of strength.59 At this stage, when representatives of a labor sector
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that hitherto had relied mainly on Palestinian workers supported the clo-sure policy, it was clear that the balance had shifted in favor of the replace-ment of Palestinian workers by labor migrants.
Employers’ pressure was about to win out. The Labor Minister and theHousing Minister, who just a month earlier had fiercely opposed the ideaof bringing in labor migrants, recommended to Prime Minister Rabin thathe enlarge the quota for the construction sector even though this recom-mendation would entail a drastic change in the ethnic profile of the sector’semployees.60 Within a few days, Rabin approved 4,000 work permits, in ad-dition to the 2,000 permits he had sanctioned just a short time before.61
The bursting of the dam in favor of mass recruitment of labor migrantsindicated that employers, both in agriculture and construction, were suc-ceeding in dictating the rules of the game and turning the scales in their fa-vor. Thus 1993 became a turning point in the history of labor migration inIsrael, signaling the beginning of the institutionalization of labor migra-tion. As Figure 2 shows, the number of permits for labor migrants—in con-struction, agriculture and geriatric care62—grew dramatically. Since then,they have become an alternative labor force not only to Palestinians, butalso to low-skilled native workers (Gottlieb 2002; Kemp and Raijman2003a). Already in 2000, at the time of the second Intifada, and as the mil-itary closures of the Palestinian Authority territories became longer andmore frequent, labor migrants were recruited as a “ready-made” solution toboth political and market upheavals. Even though the government announced
Labor Migration, Managing the Ethno-National Conflict, and Client Politics 45
Figure 2.2. Trade in Work Persuits, 1993–2004
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its declared intention to “close the skies” to new labor migrants as part of anew economic reform plan, once again geopolitical considerations on “con-flict management” superseded socio-economic ones, resulting in an enlarge-ment of the quotas and in the number of work permits for labor migrants.
CONCLUSION
Constituting overseas labor migrants as an alternative to Palestinian work-ers and a legitimate “solution” to clientelistic market pressures was to havethreefold importance in the history of the economy and political sociologyof Israel during the 1990s. First, it closed a chapter in the political economyof the occupation, putting an end to the policy of economic integration ofPalestinians, extant since 1967, and found for them a substitute that hadnot been possible previously. This “substitute” provided a new means ofmanaging the politics of the conflict throughout the 1990s. It was a politicsin which separation from the Palestinians was formulated not only as terri-torial withdrawal and as some kind of political solution to a protracted na-tional conflict, but also as an opportunity for the state to shed its responsi-bility for those who had made their living within it for over two decades ina context of military occupation. More than in any other region in theworld, the initiation and the changing ethnic composition of labor migra-tion flows in the Middle East in general, and in Israel in particular, are to beunderstood not simply in economic terms, but more fundamentallythrough the underlying geopolitical processes that drive them.
Second, the recruitment of labor migrants was an expression of and a cat-alyst for the inauguration of a new chapter in the society and the economyof Israel, which passed from the “old” regime, based on collectivist and Key-nesian principles, to a neo-liberal socio-economic regime (Filc 2004; Shafirand Peled 2002; Shalev 2000). In this new regime, based on the ethos of lib-eralization, deregulation, privatization, and casualization of labor, non-citi-zen labor migrants became a test case in a wide-ranging social experimentthat did not stop at the boundaries of citizenship. The essence of this exper-iment is the increasing encroachment upon the welfare state by the workfarestate (Jessop 1994). Within this context, labor migrants fulfill the central rolethat states commonly assign to them: a bargaining chip for the enfeeblementof the local workers and the banishment of “weak” workers from the worldof work (Gottlieb 2002). As in other advanced capitalist states, in Israel, too,labor migrants have become, unwillingly, a means of turning labor into arare resource, and of making workers a cheap commodity.
Finally, the recruitment of labor migrants has created a new category ofnon-citizens who, unlike the Palestinian workers who preceded them, havebecome “permanent temporary residents,” living in the very heart of soci-
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ety without being part of it. In Israel, as in other host countries, the officialrecruitment of labor migrants brought about an accompanying influx ofundocumented migrants. In the past decade, new ethnic communities of la-bor migrants have emerged, especially in the city of Tel Aviv and its outskirts(Kemp, et al. 2000; Raijman, et al. 2003; Schammah, et al. 2000).63 Thesenew de facto residents of Israeli society, non-Jewish and non-Palestinian,are indeed irrefutable proof that against all the assumptions that guide pol-icy makers, labor migration bears significant unintended but expected so-cial and political consequences within the context of an ethno-nationalstate and society such as Israel.
NOTES
1. This research was supported by the Israeli Ministry of Science and the IsraeliScience Foundation founded by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
2. For a comprehensive analysis of the process of institutionalization of over-seas labor migration in Israel see (Kemp and Raijman forthcoming).
3. For an analysis of labor migration policy in Israel see (Bartram 1998; Bartram2005; Kemp and Raijman 2003b; Raijman and Kemp 2002; Rosenhek 2000).
4. See speech of MK Haim Ramon, Knesset Record, January 25, 1988,p.1564–1565.
5. For example, Russell (1992: 720) suggested that although preference for EastAsian workers was evident well before the 1991 war, political tensions betweensending and receiving countries are a key factor for understanding the changing eth-nic composition of labor migrants in the Middle East region.
6. In 1987, an especially low unemployment rate of four percent was recorded,and about 110,000 Palestinians worked in Israel, formally or informally.
7. Knesset Record January 25, 1988.8. Knesset Record January 25, 1988, pp. 1567–68.9. Knesset Record January 25, 1988, p. 1571.
10. MK Uzi Landau of the Likud party, who in the early 2000s came to serve asMinister for Internal Security and was responsible for the mass deportation of labormigrants. See Knesset Record, 25 May 1989, p. 2118).
11. See Knesset Record, speech of MK Ora Namir, January 11, 1988, pp.1306–1307. According to the employment service, in 1987 some 60 percent of allPalestinian workers did not have work permits; See speech of David Mena, KnessetRecord, January 26, 1988, Minute 417, p. 17.
12. See speech of MK Y. Shamai, Knesset Labor and Welfare Committee, January26, 1988, Minute 417, p. 11.
13. These included subsidies to workers in agriculture, on-the-job training tracksin various construction trades, employment fairs, and subsidies for transportationcosts, among other measures.
14. Edna Solodar, Knesset Record November 28, 1990, p. 903; also ibid., May 24,1989, p. 2176.
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15. Menahem Porush, Knesset Labor and Welfare Committee, January 26, 1988,Minute 417, p. 11.
16. Ariel Sharon, Knesset Record March 8, 1988, pp. 2224–2225.17. Knesset Record October 20, 1990, p. 261.18. Knesset Record October 30, 1990, pp. 260–91.19. State Comptroller’s Report 40, 1990, pp. 79–83, 485–87, 490–97.20. In October 1990, twenty Palestinian worshipers at the al-Aqsa mosque were
killed by Israeli police in an attempt to stop stone-throwing at Jewish worshipers.The response was a lethal wave of knifings of Israelis by Palestinians.
21. Knesset Record November 28,1990.22. Knesset Record November 28,1990, p. 903.23. MK Ran Cohen, Labor and Welfare Committee, minute 210, December 31,
1990, p. 13.24. S. Goren, coordinator of actions in the territories, Knesset Labor and Welfare
Committee, Minute 204, December 17, 1990, p. 4. 25. Knesset Labor and Welfare Committee, January 28, 1991, Minute 221, p. 2;
Knesset Record February 6, 1991, pp. 2104–2111.26. MK Nawaf Masalha (Labor Alignment), Knesset Record March 6, 1991, p.
2593. 27. From 1991 onward, work permits were granted only to workers requested
personally by the Israeli employer at the employment service in Israel. These re-quests underwent strict checks and security controls before work permits were is-sued (Hass 1996: 302).
28. Ha’aretz March 9, 1993, A2: Daily talk with MK David Mena on the Israelieconomy’s degree of need of workers from the territories: “The employer prefers for-eign workers”—Gid’on Alon.
29. This “mood” acquired highly tangible expression; in 1992, the number ofworkers from the territories in Israel peaked at 115,600, but in 1993 it plunged to83,800. This drop was the result of government decisions regarding closure and therecruitment of labor migrants, but it also reflected decisions by Israeli employers notto engage Palestinian workers any longer.
30. Ha’aretz October 13, 1992, A2: “Irrigation expert from Yad Mordekhai mur-dered in Ganei Tal greenhouses in Katif Bloc. Suspect: Khan Yunis inhabitant.”Ha’aretz October 16, 1992, A1: “Searches continue for Ben-Haim’s killer; Residents:We’ll go on employing Arabs”—Eitan Rabin; ibid.: “Defense personnel instructfarmers in settlements on Green Line to go out to fields armed and in twos”—Mena-hem Horowitz, Eitan Rabin, and Gid’on Alon).
31. Ha’aretz March 15, 1993, A2: “After Katif Bloc, Karnei Shomron also decidesto stop employing Arabs”—Nadav Shragai.
32. Ha’aretz March 2, 1993, A1: “Closure in the Gaza Strip; A defense source: Wewill reduce by 50 percent the number of work permits for Israel”—Eitan Rabin,Reuven Shapira, and Yehudit Grinblat.
33. Cited in (Shiftan 1999: 46, note 6).34. (Ha’aretz January 22,1988, A–22. Focal subject / foreign labor in Israel “Sta-
tistics apart and reality apart”—Avi Ganor).35. Later, in 1992, Namir became Minister of Labor and Welfare in the Rabin
government.
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36. Knesset Record April 5, 1989, p. 1761. Detailed reference to the advantagesof the employment of labor migrants can be found in the state comptroller’s reportfor 1990 (State Comptroller’s Report 40, 1990, pp. 79–83, 485–87, 490–97).
37. Ha’aretz December 22, 1992, A4: “Ben-Eliezer: In January residence permitsof 5,000 foreign workers will be cancelled”—Zvi Zarhia.
38. Ha’aretz April 13, 1993, A2: Government approves plans of labor and welfareminister to replace workers from territories. “Namir: If in 1993 20,000 workers fromthe territories are replaced by Israelis, we will see this as an achievement”—ZviZarhia.
39. Ha’aretz April 9, 1993, A3: “Today 2,500 inhabitants of the territories will getwork permits for Israel”—Zvi Zarhia.
40. Ha’aretz April 7, 1993, A3: General closure on the territories. “Farmers demandand Rabin increases number of workers from the territories allowed into Israel to2,500”—Zvi Zarhia; Ha’aretz April 22, 1993, C1: Diary: Application of the closure isnot uniform: “Terner: Army does not properly stop unlicensed entry from territories.”
41. Haaretz, March 17, 1993, A3: “Minister Namir announces no more work per-mits to be given to workers from Thailand.”
42. Ha’aretz March 17, 1993, A3: “Namir promises to send 500 Israeli workers toKatif Bloc. Refuses to grant work permit to 250 Thais.”
43. In practice, only about 18,000 Israelis were engaged in agriculture, and ofthese only 10,000 saw it as their main occupation. The power of the agriculture sec-tor should be understood in the context of Zionism, which had emphasized the re-turn to the soil and the conquest of agricultural labor by Jews even before the es-tablishment of the state in 1948.
44. Ha’aretz April 7, 1993, A3: “Moshav movement gets ready to bring in 3,500workers from Thailand”—Haim Be’ur.
45. Ha’aretz April 7, 1993, C1: Response. “Diligence of Thai workers is needed”(writes Amiram Shahar, Moshav Kokhav).
46. Ha’aretz April 19, 1993, C1: “Farmers to sue for compensation for losses fol-lowing closure in territories”—Haim Be’ur; Ha’aretz 14 April 1993, A4: “Flowersbranch has lost millions of dollars since the closure”—Haim Be’ur.
47. Ha’aretz April 21, 1993, A3: “Namir on contractors’ intention to stop con-struction: ‘Threats don’t work with me.’” Moshav movement: Closure has causedlosses of about 50 million dollars”—Zvi Zarhia, Gabi Zohar, and Itim.
48. Ha’aretz May 13, 1993, A1: “Agricultural settlement movement petitionsHigh Court of Justice to allow importation of 3,500 workers from Thailand”—HaimBe’ur and Dalia Shehori.
49. High Court of Justice 2611/93: Moshav Movement in Israel—Mutual Assis-tance, Central Cooperative Society Inc., and others v. Minister of the Interior andothers).
50. Ha’aretz April 19, 1993, A3: “Rabin rejects Shohat and Ben-Eliezer’s requestto allow building workers from territories to work in Israel”—Yerah Tal.
51. Ha’aretz April 20, 1993, A3: “Contractors threaten to strike if importation offoreign workers is forbidden”—Dan Laufer.
52. Ha’aretz April 21, 1993, A3: “Namir on contractors’ intention to stop con-struction: ‘Threats don’t work with me.’” Moshav movement: Closure has causedlosses of about 50 million dollars”—Zvi Zarhia, Gabi Zohar, and Itim.
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53. Ha’aretz April 27, 1993, A3: “Namir and Ben-Eliezer to discuss contractors’demand to import foreign workers”—Zvi Zarhia and Dan Laufer.
54. The directors-general team consisted of the Arye Mizrahi of the housing min-istry, Avraham Ben-Shoshan of the labor ministry, David Lefler of the employmentservice, and Brigadier-General Arye Shifman, deputy coordinator of government ac-tivities in the territories.
55. Ha’aretz April 29, 1993, A3: “Namir agrees to allow importation of foreignworkers for building branch, but has not yet decided on their number”—Zvi Zarhiaand Dan Laufer.
56. Ha’aretz May 2, 1993, A4: “Rabin allows importation of 2,000 foreign work-ers for building branch: Contrary to decision of ministers of his party”—Zvi Zarhiaand Dan Laufer; Ha’aretz May 3, 1993, A3: “Restrictions on entry of workers fromterritories cause more problems, regardless of enlargement of quota”—Zvi Zarhia.
57. Knesset Record, May 5, 1992, p. 4658.58. Ha’aretz May 13, 1993, A1: “Agricultural settlement movement petitions
High Court of Justice to allow importation of 3,500 workers from Thailand”—HaimBe’ur and Dalia Shehori.
59. Ha’aretz May 2, 1993, A4: “Rabin allows importation of 2,000 foreign work-ers for building branch: Contrary to decision of ministers of his party”—Zvi Zarhiaand Dan Laufer; Ha’aretz May 7, 1993, C3: “Contractors and building workers’union: Bring in workers from abroad”—Dan Laufer.
60. Ha’aretz May 14, 1993, C2: “Shohat will propose that government allows en-gagement of 20,000 more Palestinians in construction: Namir and Ben-Eliezer toseek Rabin’s agreement to enlarge number of foreign workers in the building branchto 5,000”—Judy Meltz and Zvi Zarhia.
61. Ha’aretz May 16, 1993, A6: “4,000 more foreign workers to be imported forthe building branch”—Dan Laufer.
62. In contrast to the construction and agriculture sectors, the geriatric sector didnot display a dynamic of replacement. On the contrary, the recruitment of migrantlabor, mainly women, for care services created a hitherto non-existent market(Kemp and Raijman 2003b; Kemp and Raijman forthcoming; Yehezkel, et al. 2001).
63. Since September 2002, undocumented labor migrants, their families, socialnetworks, and institutions have been persecuted by the newly established immigra-tion police. As a result of these actions, the number of labor migrants was substan-tially reduced and communities were destroyed.
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INTRODUCTION: TEL AVIV LABOR COURT CASE 1427/02 B.T.—NATIONAL INSURANCE INSTITUTE1
Beatriz, a Filipina elder-care worker, entered Israel with a work permit in1994, a short time after the gates for migrant workers were opened wide. Beat-riz would not have been allowed into Israel in the past since Israel was notedas being a venue for aliyah (Jewish immigration to the Jewish homeland), butnot a welcome destination for other immigrants, whatever their purpose ormotivation. From the early 1990s, however, Israel’s government began allow-ing migrant workers in (see Raijman and Kemp this volume). This was par-ticularly true of domestic care-workers. Live-in care arrangements in Israel hadbeen uncommon in the past, when strong familial bonds could still meet theneed to provide care for the elderly and disabled. The possibility of employ-ing Filipino workers around the clock to take care of the elderly, or others inneed of constant care, relieved many of the unwelcome task.
Beatriz was employed by an elderly woman who was in need of constantcare. Three years after Beatriz started working with her, the woman died. Atthe time, the typical consequence for Beatriz would have been a choice be-tween two unattractive options. Because migrant workers are employed onthe basis of a permit issued to their employers, the termination of their em-ployment relationship also marks the termination of their permit to stay inIsrael (i.e., ‘the binding arrangement’) and legally compels their departurefrom the country.2 Consequently, their only other option is to remain in Is-rael as undocumented workers. Many have viewed this option as the lesser
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of two evils. Many migrant workers have paid very high (unlawful) com-missions to various manpower companies in their homelands to obtaintheir Israeli work permits.3 These sums were paid on the basis of the as-sumption that they would be employed for a sufficiently long period oftime to make the investment pay. Moreover, undocumented migrant work-ers in Israel earn higher wages than the documented workers, because theyare free to market their labor power without the state’s intervention (Bar-Tzuri 1999). At the time, other options were uncommon, but Beatriz wasthe exception. At the request of a foreign embassy she was granted a newvisa to work as a domestic employee in the embassy.
In her new position Beatriz was content. She even found love with anAfrican driver at another embassy. She remained there for several years. Shehad no social ties to the Philippines, but she left Israel twice to renew herwork visa. To ensure that migrant workers are not absorbed as residents,state policy (until 2004) was to avoid granting visas extending beyond fiveyears to any single worker. Moreover, extensions of the work visa could onlybe issued outside the country, thereby inserting artificial breaks in employ-ment. Despite this policy, Beatriz remained a documented migrant workerfor more than six years—until she became ill.
In 2002, Beatriz was found to have a serious illness that required her occa-sional hospitalization, as well as a special diet she could not afford. Shewould go in and out of the hospital for months. Her private health insurancerefused to pay for these medical treatments. The only way she could receivemedical treatment was under the Patients’ Rights Law (1996), which guaran-tees medical treatment in situations of emergency and risk to life, regardlessof insurance coverage. The medical insurance of migrant workers had beenvirtually unregulated during their first years in Israel. Only in 1999 did theLaw on Migrant Workers require that employers purchase private health in-surance for their employees with coverage similar (although not identical) tothat which is granted to residents and citizens under the National Health CareLaw (see Filc and Davidovitch this volume).4 In this particular situation, thedifference between the private and public arrangement was crucial, and theonly way to allow Beatriz coverage was to argue that the national health carearrangement applies to her as well. What this required first and foremost wasto pursue the legal claim that Beatriz was a resident of Israel, as residency is aprecondition for coverage by the national health care scheme, as well as fordisability benefits from the National Insurance Institute (Mundlak 2003b).
In the early 1990s, such a legal claim would have been doomed from thestart. Those who immigrated to Israel under the aegis of aliyah were grantedall rights, including extensive health coverage under the national healthcare system. All others were either denied entry into Israel altogether or al-lowed in with minimal rights and privileges. Immigration law in Israel wastherefore bipolar in two complementary senses; only Jews were welcomed
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to Israel, and all those who were welcomed received all the rights of citi-zenship either immediately or within a very short period of time. All otherswere unwelcome and, if allowed to enter, they were denied any rights thatmight seem to give them status akin to that of citizenship.
Ten years later, the Kav La’Oved Workers’ Hotline, one of several active lo-cal NGOs advocating the rights of migrant workers, filed a lawsuit askingthe state to recognize Beatriz as a resident—i.e., as a person whose center oflife-activity (domicile) is in Israel. This article seeks to explain whatchanged in the ten years since the gates were opened to migrant workers,and why such a lawsuit has now become conceivable. It seems that thebreakdown of the bipolar model, according to which only some are admit-ted as full citizens, imposed a change in the conception of citizenship in Is-rael. It will be argued hereon that the entry of migrant workers has under-mined the strong borders—geopolitical, nationalist, cultural andreligious—that Israel has erected around itself. Their arrival has requiredthat Israeli society face the consequences of opening its borders and admit-ting people whose material and moral presence fail to fit their formal andlegal status. Consequently, a growing share of the Israeli electorate and, toan extent, some branches of government, have viewed the gap as a forma-tive feature that demanded a certain re-constitution of the conceptions ofcitizenship, residency and inclusion that prevailed in Israel.
Despite these changes, the lawsuit failed in two cumulative respects. First,Beatriz’ claim was denied by the Labor Court. At the time of this writing,Beatriz’s future is unclear, and she may be sent back to her homeland,where she will be unable to receive the appropriate treatment. Second,shortly after the lawsuit, the Attorney General and several ministriesamended the law (“to be on the safe side”) to state that migrant workers cat-egorically cannot be residents in Israel, and that regardless of their length ofstay, or whether they are documented or not, they will never be entitled tothe social security and health care rights associated with residency.
Just as it seemed that the discourse of residency and citizenship was be-ing rethought, as the legal community was exploring the new law of migra-tion, and as the media failed to let a day go by without reference to the newresidents of Israel, a tally of achievements reveals that little has changed interms of their formal and legal status. This brings up the second objectiveof this article—to propose an explanation as to why the undoing of thebipolar definition of citizenship has been only partially successful.
Together, these two questions reflect a volatile period of change in whichold and new percepts of citizenship are in competition. Through the lens ofBeatriz’s case, this article observes the centrality of concepts of multiple citi-zenship to patterns of social transformation in Israel and reflects on thestrengths and weaknesses of this strategy and the extent to which it can beconsidered successful in achieving the objective of inclusion for non-citizens.
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FROM BIPOLAR TO MULTIPLE CONCEPTS OF CITIZENSHIP
Citizenship was conceived in the past as the ticket to inclusion within acommunity. It was therefore the border delineating the insider-outsider di-vide (Shklar 1991). The Israeli notion of citizenship trumpeted this bipolardistinction because of the unique history upon which the Israeli state—de-fined as Jewish and democratic—was founded (Shafir and Peled 2002). Inthis sense, the qualitatively distinct immigration that was permitted into Is-rael, aliyah,was intractably linked with the bundle of rights associated withcitizenship—including both economic and political rights. Immigrantswere even accorded extra privileges not offered to veteran Israeli citizens,such as special programs in the social security system, to compensate for theabsence of rights that were contingent on long-term savings. Those who didnot qualify for aliyah were not admitted on lesser conditions; they were sim-ply denied entry altogether.
Consequently, immigration law in Israel was long underdeveloped, in-deed almost nonexistent (Carmi 2003). The most fundamental question forimmigration law was in fact the question of religious affiliation with the Jew-ish people. Admittedly, this question stirred some intense debates and im-portant judicial cases, but these have had more to do with the relationshipbetween religion and state than with the core domain of immigration law.
The influx of migrant workers in the early 1990s marked the first majoropening of the gates to non-aliyah entry (Bartram 1998; Kondor 1997). Thelegal status of migrant workers in Israel was originally premised on the conti-nuity of status established for Palestinian day-workers and strongly contrastedwith the legal status of the large wave of immigrants who entered on the ba-sis of the Law of Return. Both premises conformed to and upheld the bipolarmodel of citizenship, but they were in tension with the emerging reality.
While Palestinian workers from the Occupied Territories had entered Is-rael in large numbers before, they were frontier workers with limited claimson the host country (at least qua workers, and certainly not as immigrants).Their presence in Israel entailed a very limited presence in the law, and formany years they were generally invisible in legal discourse (Mundlak 1999).However, their treatment as partial insiders in the labor market in tandemwith their position as outsiders in relation to the Israeli social and politicalcommunity was the bedrock upon which Israel’s later policies towards itsmigrant workers were erected. Yet the ongoing presence of migrant workersfueled tension between a status that had been devised for day-workers (de-ficient in itself) and the long-term sojourn of migrants with a strong resi-dential presence.
The development of immigration policy in Israel with the entry of the mi-grant workers was also affected by the massive entry of immigrants from the
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former Soviet Union beginning in the early 1990s and the controversy overthe Jewishness of the Ethiopians and their claim of entitlement to entry. Al-though the immigration of Ethiopians and Russians into Israel conformedwith the traditional status of aliyah, several factors—the number of non-Jews who succeeded in entering this immigration wave, the remote Jewishconnection of others, the persistent controversy over who is a Jew, and theallegedly instrumental view of immigration voiced by some of the new-comers—somewhat blurred the moral divide between aliyah and labor mi-gration (Shafir and Peled 2002). The bipolar model of citizenship some-how failed to fit the reality emerging throughout the 1990s.
The response to the tensions that emerged in adapting the bipolar modelto the new reality is well captured in the literature on citizenship, which hasgradually abandoned a sole emphasis on formal legal citizenship. Frombipolar models of insiders and outsiders in the political community, it hasbeen argued, multiple forms of citizenship have emerged (or been desig-nated as disaggregated citizenship by Benhabib (2002); or flexible citizenshipby (Ong 1999). This is particularly important for Israel with its idiosyn-cratic immigration regime, as it makes it possible to bracket the thorniestquestions of Israeli identity (Kemp 2007; Sassen 1995). However, thisprocess is not unique to Israel and is better understood from a comparativeperspective in which the significance of multiple perceptions of citizenshipis debated (Baubock 1994; Carens 2000; Jacobson 1996; Joppke 1999;Soysal 1994).5
From a legal point of view, multiple conceptions of citizenship can be de-scribed as distinct legal stati, each with a particular bundle of rights that nei-ther gives all rights of citizenship nor denies them en masse. A partial con-ception of citizenship sometimes appears in one statute that packages a wellthought-out set of rights. Yet often it is a loose bundle of rights, powers, andobligations. These rights emerge incrementally, through statutory changeand litigation, in response to particular problems that arise and are identi-fied (Klusmeyer and Aleinikoff 2000). Such models of partial citizenshipare abundant and tied to familiar categories that are not necessarily new—students, guest workers, special categories of workers (high-tech, medical,domestic and even sex ‘workers’), family reunification, asylum seekers andrefugees. What does change over time is the growth, in quantity and qual-ity, of rights that were originally reserved only for insiders, but which arecurrently incorporated into the foreigners’ status. It is the sum of theserights together, rather than any single right alone, that indicates that the po-litical community, defined by the formal legal status of citizenship, hasgiven-up some of its self-prescribed privileges, or that it is at least willing toshare its resources with non-citizens.
The development of a multiple citizenships framework is strongly con-nected with the values of democracy and the concept of human rights. It is
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a term that is normative, pragmatic and reflective of social practice (Joppke1998). From the normative perspective, it is strongly linked to an expansionof human rights as endorsed by T.H. Marshall (1963), albeit in a differentcontext. According to Marshall, political citizenship does not guarantee thesubstantive inclusion of citizens in the community. His discussion is there-fore rooted in the need to provide a conceptual framework for the inclusionof those who are legally assumed to be equal members of society, but whoare de facto excluded from it socially, economically and culturally (Twine1994). The use of citizenship in the new literature on migrants’ rights (be itin general terms of social citizenship, or in particular terms such as the Eu-ropean “denizen”) is meant to achieve the opposite. It is an attempt to ap-ply the rights of formal citizens to those who are not, but who are deemedto be normatively equal with regard to those rights. The inclination of thesetwo opposite processes is to craft a match between the moral and substan-tive affiliation of the individual and group to the community, on one hand,and their legal affiliation to it, on the other.
The advantage of the multiple citizenships approach is in trying to down-play the importance of formal citizenship in the bipolar model. Rights arenot sorted according to formal citizenship status. Moreover, it seeks to uni-versalize the problems of the foreigner, in the sense of indicating that thebattle for rights is not only about overcoming the status of being foreign,but also that of being poor, excluded, disabled, a woman, or belonging toother categories that are not exclusively concerned with the relationship ofthe individual to formal citizenship (Koopmans and Statham 2003).
At the same time, the move from formal citizenship to multiple forms ofcitizenship has its precarious side. It seeks to amend the consequences ofthe bipolar model of citizenship, but not the model itself. First, it neglectsthe fundamental question of extending the right of entry into the commu-nity (legal citizenship), offering at best a token set of rights and second-ratesolutions and compromises. Second, it forgoes the premise that the rightsaccorded to those who are admitted into the community must be equal inall respects to those of veteran community members (Walzer 1983). As a re-sult of both problems combined, those who allegedly benefit from the mul-tiple citizenship approach receive only a partial set of rights that are notnecessarily identical in theory or in practice to those extended to citizens.The political economy of migration is left out of the legal discourse, and themoral obligations of the state are bracketed as well. In addition, the partic-ular problems associated with alienage are overlooked by a general humanrights discourse, and radical challenges to closed borders are abandoned.
The normative view of multiple citizenships is not only a normative the-ory of justice. It has been equally useful in describing and conceptualizingstrategies of social and political agents who seek to advance a human rights-based agenda in favor of ‘foreigners’. Although a utilitarian approach to the
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prescription of foreigners’ rights is still dominant among policy makers, thenormative theory of social citizenship offers an alternative guidepost.Rather than asking “whether rights (of outsiders) can advance the benefits(of insiders),” the multiple citizenships framework shifts focus to the natureof individuals’ and groups’ affiliation with the community. While acknowl-edging the ambivalent approach one must adopt with regard to the multi-ple citizenships project, it is still one of the more powerful and usefulmeans for advancing the rights of migrant workers and other groups thatmove across borders and citizenships (e.g., refugees, “global families,” stu-dents). The normative problems underlying the multiple citizenships proj-ect, however, also help to explain the dynamics of expanding rights and crit-ically assess the project’s gains. In this context, it is useful to consider howrights are expanded, by whom, and how they are implemented.
Advancing Legal Rights—By Whom?
The partial effort to guarantee some rights is rarely conducted by non-cit-izens themselves, who are denied full-citizenship and therefore have lim-ited political power. Except for “privileged groups” of non-citizens (thosewho must wait several months for naturalization in cases of family reunifi-cation, or aliyah to Israel), non-citizens are generally denied a political voiceand an effective means of influence and use of civil rights. They are rarelyable to effectively strike, deny their labor power, associate, gather, or protest(Mundlak 2003a). Some groups are also better advised to lower their pub-lic profiles, including people seeking asylum, undocumented workers, andmigrant workers with families. Therefore, it is not possible to base the pro-motion of multiple forms of partial citizenship on the principle of demo-cratic accountability. Where the government does exhibit democratic ac-countability, it is to those who seek to employ cheap labor but prefer not tosee the labor force outside working hours, let alone share rights and insti-tutions with those who provide the labor power. This is designated as ademocratic deficit. As long as the more radical version of equality, such asWalzer’s argument in favor of full inclusion, is denied, the deficit cannot beclosed, only narrowed. Yet to narrow the deficit, the multiple citizenshipsframework assumes that someone will take on the task of speaking up forthose whose political rights have been given up on.
The mobilizers of change are usually NGOs operating within civil society(Fitzpatrick and Kelly 1998; Gordon 1995; Raijman and Kemp 2002). Theseare usually domestic NGOs, although some international organizations areactive in this process as well. The authors of change must be the legislatureand the courts, since they are the ones who write the formal law. Given thatthe objective of multiple citizenships claims is to extend legal rights to non-citizens, the mobilizers of change must press their claim in the legal arena.
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Advancing Legal Rights—Where?
In the legal arena, the courts are usually assumed to be more accommo-dating to the multiple citizenships approach than other branches of govern-ment, (Guiraudon 1998; Joppke 2001). Because of the democratic deficit,the legislature’s democratic accountability is distorted. The executive branchoften takes an instrumental view of non-citizens that benefits its utility func-tion of maximizing budgetary savings, administrative efficiency, future posi-tions in the civil service, and the inclination towards keeping hegemonic val-ues intact. In contrast, courts are usually more accustomed to human rightsdiscourse, they are not accountable to the interests of employers (cf. Raijmanand Kemp this volume), and in most countries they are also tenured andtherefore have extended horizons and display varied degrees of activism thatexpand the gaps of rights in the wall of legal exclusion. The courts are also amore useful venue for advancing claims that portray the non-citizen as a de-serving subject who is entitled to rights. At best, non-citizens can actually filea lawsuit or petition and be granted their day in court. The requirement thata plaintiff must have her day in court lets in narratives otherwise not heardin the public forum, which is dominated by the (full) citizens.
The courts also have their drawbacks, because there is a large gap betweenthe theoretical “day in court” and the busy, day-to-day litigation that tendsto forgo the rights of the weakest and most vulnerable. Therefore, the pres-ence of a high-visibility NGO may often make a greater impression. A do-mestic lawyer can serve as a bridge between the narrative of the non-citizenand that of the courtroom, thereby overcoming language and cultural bar-riers as well as the problem of translating life stories into legally recogniza-ble narratives. At the same time, the mediating roles of the lawyer and NGOalso point to potential tensions between the interests of the single plaintiffand the broader transformative legal argument. Consequently, litigationstrategies must maneuver between broad legal claims and targeted solu-tions that solve individual problems; between eliciting raw narratives andmaking theoretically complex moral arguments; between compromising atthe initiative of the government (or employer or health care provider) andpursuing a principled solution that may help other potential plaintiffs butmay also risk the case altogether. In sum, the advantages of litigation as ameans of promoting the concept of multiple citizenship are clouded by in-herent problems in the legal process generally, and in that of representingvulnerable groups of non-citizens in particular.
Advocating for Legal Rights—How?
Lobbying the legislature or the executive branch is conducted most effi-ciently when the mobilizers of change can indicate to the authors of law the
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benefits of reform (Bosniak 1996). Strategically, these benefits are best ad-dressed in terms of economic or electoral values. The non-citizens are notrepresented as morally deserving subjects in themselves, but as instrumen-tal to the common good (since the common good is typically comprisedsolely of the interests of the citizens). The right to health, for example, isbest argued in terms of fear of epidemics; rights at work are best justified bythe economic danger of wage-undercutting by migrants; and the rights ofrefugees are best explained in terms of a need to score points in the inter-national forum with a relatively small price tag (cf. Filc and Davidovitchthis volume; Adout this volume). This lobbying discourse is often useful,because if there is someone who is willing to listen to common sense, thenthe facts are clearly indicative of the “right” policy choice. But it is also themost precarious tactic for mobilizers of change to use because it not onlygives up Walzer’s maximalist equal-rights benchmark, but also takes part inerasing the identity of non-citizens as subjects of rights, intrinsically worthyin their own right. It takes part in the commodifying discourse so often de-ployed against non-citizens. Moreover, it confirms the suspicion that theymay be spreading diseases, taking work away from the citizens, and worthy,at best, of charity and mercy rather than being entitled to rights.
The alternative to making a rights claim based on utilitarian arguments isto draw on rights-based arguments. These are more suited to the advance-ment of multiple citizenships, but they can also be a liability. A rights dis-course can be a double-edged sword. While it may prove useful in promot-ing legal and moral reform, it can also serve to entrench the status quo.Rights must be balanced among themselves, and with other public interests.For reasons rooted in the need to maintain a separation of powers, the judi-ciary is often not quick to intervene. The boundaries between an infringe-ment of rights, on one hand, and a matter that concerns public policy and isbest left to the governing branches to administer, on the other hand, arehardly clear-cut. Where litigation to establish the social rights of non-citizensis pursued, these rights are often contested in the first instance. Legal skepti-cism of these rights is often voiced, whether they are argued in the context ofthe original Marshallian social citizenship or in the context of expandingpartial citizenship to non-citizens. There are numerous ways in which judgescan reject a human rights claim, consequently leading to a legal stamp of ex-clusion. In the move away from the benchmark of no-rights assumed by thebipolar model of citizenship, arguments on human rights grounds may helpconstitute legal rights and entitlements, but may also deter them.
Advancing Legal Rights: The Choice Of Moral References
I would like to offer a final observation on the advancement of rights inreference to the legal instruments used to make multiple citizenships
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claims. These can be roughly divided into domestic and international mea-sures. A priori, arguing for human rights in a multiple-citizenship modelwould seem to benefit the most from international instruments of humanrights. Arguing against the barriers a community places around itself can bemorally grounded in international precepts of human rights, as well as incontractual documents based on the consent and agreement of states toglobal human rights standards. Conventions, covenants, treaties and evenunilateral acts of power by other countries may affect the judgment of thelegislature or the judiciary when considering a claim to advance the rightsof migrants (Cholewinski 1997; Special Issue: U.N. International Conven-tion on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Membersof their Families 1991). At the same time, these instruments tend to beweak and are considered a double violation of sovereignty by individualstates, confronted with a demand to accept international standards over do-mestic ones with regard to non-citizens. There are also hardly any instru-mental reasons of international reciprocity that justify upholding theserights, since the countries of origin and destination are generally not thesame. Consequently, international instruments are sometimes better at giv-ing prominence to the north-south divide than at instigating a significanttransformation of rights within the nation-state.
The alternative to international instruments is to craft legal argumentsbased on domestic jurisprudence of human rights (Joppke 1998). In con-trast to the international strategy, this one seems weak because it involvesdrawing on a rights discourse that is exclusionary to begin with. Neverthe-less, the advantage of social citizenship claims surfaces here because claimsof social citizenship are not framed solely in terms of alienage, but also inmore universal terms of extending protection to the poor, the ill, womenand children. Reference to a domestic discourse of rights can therefore ben-efit from general principles in domestic jurisprudence that seek to addressdiverse problems of Marshallian exclusion (not necessarily of non-citizens).For instance, advancing the right of migrant workers’ children to educationis better served by changes in the jurisprudence of all children’s rights thanby moral claims about the equality due to aliens. Moreover, changes in do-mestic jurisprudence that result from the challenges of non-citizens mayhave a positive spillover effect on other groups in future cases.
Dialectics Of Legal Strategies For Advancing Rights
To summarize the argument of the chapter thus far, the move away fromthe bipolar model of citizenship, in which non-citizens within the com-munity enjoy no rights, can be furthered by trying to discard the bipolarmodel altogether and granting all rights to non-citizens who are physicallywithin the community. This complicated task has limited gains in reality,
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however, because it threatens the entrenched and protective boundaries ofexclusion surrounding the state. The alternative is to follow the multiple cit-izenships approach, which incrementally grants rights to non-citizens andgradually diminishes the practical significance of citizenship to the daily ex-perience of an individual or group. This is the more common pattern ob-served at present but, as noted here, it also has its drawbacks. It accepts thebenchmark that non-citizens have no rights to begin with, unless the statebestows these rights upon them; it leads to the representation of non-citi-zens by others, thereby downplaying the political empowerment of indi-viduals and associations of non-citizens; it can easily slip into the utilitar-ian discourse that assigns rights to non-citizens because these rights benefitthe host community, further entrenching differences; and it assumes a firmbelief in the universality of human rights, despite the strong trend in hu-man rights jurisprudence to assign these rights on selective bases. Most no-tably, this alternative approach is similar to the bipolar citizenship ap-proach since theoretically it benefits from the rights of non-citizens ininternational law, which are designed to address the problem of alienage ina global world, but in practice requires recognition within the domesticrights-jurisprudence, which downplays the aspect of alienage and associatesthe problems of non-citizens with those of other vulnerable groups—whichhardly offer a stronghold of social or legal support. The following sectionexamines how the dialectics of social citizenship strategies have shaped thefight for rights in the first decade or so since the entry of migrant workersto Israel as well as the outcomes of these processes.
LITIGATING CITIZENSHIP IN ISRAEL
Beatriz’s case is illustrative of the characteristics, advantages, and drawbacksof the multiple citizenship strategy that has shaped the quest for rights inthe years following the massive entry of migrant workers starting in 1993.As such, it provides an opportunity to reflect on the achievements andshortcomings of Israeli civil society efforts to improve the rights of migrantworkers. However, it also highlights the need both to appreciate yet also torethink the normative ideal embedded in the concept of multiple citizen-ships.
The entry of migrant workers was an unprecedented move in the historyof immigration to Israel, and one that landed in what seemed to be a legalvacuum. However, there is never a vacuum in law, and the state of the lawat the time was designed for the most part on the basis of the institutionsdeveloped for the Palestinian workers from 1970 onwards, which purposelymaintained a stark contrast between non-citizens in Israel and Jewish im-migrants. Given the bipolar model of citizenship that also constituted the
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benchmark for their rights, migrant workers had none, except those pro-vided to them by law. The law that had been constructed for the Palestinianworkers held them to be equal in terms of rights at work (statutory em-ployment standards and the applicability of collective agreements). More-over, they were entitled to very limited rights in the national insurancescheme: in the occupational accidents branch, the miniscule employers’bankruptcy branch, and limited and ineffective rights in the maternitybranch. These are the only three branches of the comprehensive nationalinsurance scheme in Israel in which benefits are not dependent on the le-gal condition of residency. For this reason, the National Health InsuranceLaw excluded migrant workers as well. Nor were there any other explicitstatutory arrangements regarding health, education (of children), housingand living conditions, access to justice, association, or any other humanright recognized in the jurisprudence applicable to residents. Beyond theseparticular arrangements, the unstated default premise was that non-citizenshave no rights other than those specifically accorded to them by law.
A few years after migrant workers were first admitted to Israel, the media(and not the agents of law) started zooming in on their enclaves in certainneighborhoods of South Tel Aviv (sometimes described as “Tel Aviv’s back-yard”). Not only were the poor living conditions and abusive employment re-lations depicted, but their long-term presence in Israel and the economic sys-tem of production that was engaged in importing them like commodities werealso highlighted. Despite this relatively favorable and empathetic media atten-tion, however, the underlying premise of bipolar citizenship remained intact.
NGOs, the mobilizers of change, began spurring the authors of law to en-act changes even prior to the media’s attention, but growing awareness onthe part of the electorate-public also had an effect on the legislature, the ex-ecutive branch, and the courts. Most of the important legal petitions andlobbying efforts were led by a handful of small, active and progressiveNGOs (most notably Kav La’Oved, the Hotline for Migrant Workers, andPhysicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR)), backed occasionally by otherNGOS, including the largest human rights organization—the Associationfor Civil Rights in Israel—as well as lawyers who were willing to work forlow wages, sometimes pro bono, and law students.
Beatriz’s lawsuit would not have been possible a few years earlier. It came ata relatively developed stage of an eclectic legal strategy to promote rights. Thisstrategy, which was launched from scratch in the mid-1990s, conformed withthe effort to develop a citizenship substitute that granted rights to non-citizens.In the legislative arena, NGOs established a presence on a parliamentary com-mittee that was established to deal with the “foreign workers problem.” Theirpresence occasionally succeeded in drawing the committee’s attention to the“problems of foreign workers” instead. Statutory change, however, was slow.The major statutory changes came about in 1999—guaranteeing some rights
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in the areas of living conditions and health—and in 2001—improving dueprocess rights in matters of detention and deportation.6
In addition to the media attention, it seems that only a credible threatfrom internal sources, most notably the judiciary, led to legislative initia-tive. The impact of external factors such as international institutions andlaw was more limited. The only area in which external pressure seems tohave induced internal change pertained to trafficking in women for pur-poses of employment in the sex industry and, to a much lesser degree, inother labor sectors (Levenkron and Dahan 2003). It is also noteworthy thatexternal pressure mostly was brought to bear by unilateral U.S. State De-partment reports and by the threat of sanctions rather than by institutionsthat enforce multilateral and international agreements and conventions.
The emphasis of the internal processes therefore centered in the court-room. Litigation since the mid 1990s can be sorted into several categories,the appearance of which can be roughly placed on a chronological axis. Thefirst lawsuits were not aimed at changing the state of the law so much as try-ing to provide individual migrant workers with access to due process andexisting entitlements. This was also when NGOs began to develop a divi-sion of labor. Kav La’Oved emphasized the representation of migrant work-ers qua workers, drawing on the expertise it had developed with Palestinianworkers.7 Most of the litigation was in the lower courts, but despite thegrowing rate of litigation, for many years migrant workers did not appear incases before the National Labor Court of a legal precedent caliber. The Hot-line for Migrant Workers developed its expertise in the day-to-day represen-tation of migrant workers in detention and deportation matters,8 whilePHR dealt mostly in providing medical services but also promoted research,lobbying, and litigation of legal issues regarding access to health care.9
These lawsuits have generally been characterized by individual cases, day-to-day matters (which of course does not undermine their utmost impor-tance in the lives of the migrants involved), and a limited effort to reformthe existing rights regime itself.
As litigation over day-to-day grievances became more common, the secondphase emerged in which NGOs tried to nudge the state away from the no-rights default of the bipolar citizenship model. Sometimes individual clientswere added to the lawsuit, and at other times the lawsuit was brought by theNGOs as representatives of an alleged public interest in the matter. Over time,these lawsuits covered considerable ground. In the area of civil liberties, thelawsuits challenged, among others, problems related to the very low statutorystandards of due process in detention and deportation processes10; the with-holding of passports by employers and sometimes even by state authorities11;and the use of violence by the police authorities (Hotline for Migrant Work-ers 2003). In the sphere of social rights, these cases challenged the absence ofenforceable arrangements for extending health insurance coverage to migrants
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and the caveats in the legislative arrangements introduced thereafter (Adout2002)12; and the rights to various social security benefits, including the rightto be acknowledged as a resident on the basis of the general test that is usedin Israel for residency in social law.13 One of the more significant achieve-ments in litigation was the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision that the “bindingarrangement,” which limited workers’ right to move freely from one employerto another, was unconstitutional and hence void.14 Unlike the first category,these were mostly one-time cases that leveled principled arguments againstthe existing rights regime. They were complemented by lobbying efforts anddiffusion of information in the Knesset—for example, with regard to educa-tion rights of migrants’ children.15
The third, albeit relatively meager, phase of litigation concerns the rightto be in Israel, rather than the rights associated with de facto presence. Inthis stage, litigation has been aimed mostly against deportation, arguing infavor of amnesty for some undocumented migrants while blocking the en-try of new migrants.16 This litigation therefore does not undermine thestate’s power to exclude, but rather seeks to create a duty to include in situ-ations of prior mutual reliance. Unlike the first two categories, the cases inthis phase do not merely seek to provide rights to migrants who have en-tered the state, but also to grant them the right of entry (or at least the rightto stay). The most important development in this phase was the decision ofthe Ministry of Interior to (partially) naturalize migrant workers’ childrenwho have grown up in Israel and reached the age of eighteen, contingent onthe fulfillment of several criteria, such as the requirement that the parentshave entered Israel with a valid permit prior to the child’s birth (Kemp2007; see also Rosenhek, this volume).17
Beatriz’s lawsuit encapsulates all three of these phases of litigation. Interms of the legal claim, it falls within the second phase. It seeks to guaran-tee a right to be part of the national health care system, because her pres-ence over seven years has created a strong link between Beatriz and the Is-raeli community. It is nevertheless a case that seeks to find a solution forone migrant worker, and as such it belongs to the first phase. Finally, the re-quest to allow Beatriz to stay in Israel for medical treatment, and the court’srefusal—which implies a need to send her back to the Philippines withoutany promise of health care there—touches at the very heart of the state’s ob-ligation of inclusion toward non-citizens, not as a matter of charity but asa matter of duty and human rights.
CONCLUSION
The rapid development of litigation for rights that made Beatriz’s lawsuitpossible demonstrates that the incremental strategy of substituting the
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bipolar citizenship model with the multiple citizenships model has provensuccessful in Israel. Additional gains include a lively debate and a (very)slow process of consensus-building that cuts across the economic right andleft. Elements of this consensus-building process include an understandingthat binding migrants to one employer is a bad strategy for migrant work-ers and the Israeli community alike18; better access to the labor courts andgreater recognition of migrant workers’ extreme hardship at work19; and theassurance of rights to limited social security benefits even for undocu-mented workers, although with some reservations,20 among other issues.Clearly, the law regarding rights accorded to non-citizens in Israel will neveragain look as it did in the period before migrant workers began arriving inthe country.
The effects of litigating away from the bipolar model towards a multiplemodel of citizenship have also had a spillover effect on other groups withinsociety. The Supreme Court, and subsequently a public commission, havesuggested that citizens who leave the country and are no longer residentsshould be eligible for some social benefits such as old-age pensions.21 Ac-cording to both the court and the commission, their link with the stateshould not be viewed as having been terminated altogether. At the sametime, the public commission did not suggest that they be treated as old-ageresidents, and it held that more stringent requirements for social securitybenefits are justified. This approach resonates well with the multiple citi-zenship approach, whereby rights are assigned according to the strengthand qualitative nature of the relationship between the individual and thecommunity. A different yet related process can be seen in the growing recog-nition of the status of refugees in Israel (Ben-Dor and Adout 2003; Adoutthis volume). Again through NGO pressure, the state is for the first timewilling to extend some rights to individuals seeking refugee status and asy-lum in Israel. Here, too, a blend of international norms and domestic con-stitutional rights discourse has made this move possible. Legal discourse atpresent avoids the question of whether those awaiting a decision on theirasylum petitions are insiders or outsiders in the Israeli community. Instead,it expands the application of rights that resonate with their status, such asthe right to work during the long process during which their claim torefugee status is being assessed by the authorities.22 Also symptomatic ofthe spillover effect has been a petition regarding the statutory exclusion ofnon-citizens from the residency test for social security purposes, which wasfiled on behalf of migrant workers as well as Jewish migrants and non-Jewswho arrived in the country through family reunification programs.23
The development of the multiple citizenships strategy over the past sev-eral years has therefore proven very useful in expanding the sphere of rightsto those who fall outside the domain of full citizenship. This applies notonly to migrant workers, for whose benefit this strategy was designed, but
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also to other groups that enjoy the spillover effect from the changesachieved on migrant workers’ behalf. However, the dialectic nature of citi-zenship suggests that we should also critically observe whether there aredownsides to this legal, moral, and social strategy.
First, there are limits to the changes that legally can be promoted withoutstrong public support. The lengthy list of achievements in the previouspages can also be dubbed a string of limited gains. As long as the bench-mark remains that of no-rights, as was the case in the early 1990s, thenevery change is a step forward. But when the moral benchmark is definedin terms of either equality or some global and international standard, thenthe outcomes appear less promising. Due process rights in detention anddeportation cases have been changed, but the time a migrant worker can bedetained before a judge reviews her case is still longer than what is allowedin “internal criminal” affairs.24 Some children of migrant workers were nat-uralized, but the general policy prescribed a set of limiting conditions thatstill render many children physically present and legally foreign.25 Follow-ing the seminal court decision that abolished the binding of workers totheir employers, the current roster of alternatives replaces it with compul-sory employment through temporary work agencies that will enable work-ers to move from one employer to another, while remaining under the con-trol of the manpower company.26 Health care insurance for documentedworkers is compulsory, but it is never provided by the national health caresystem.27 Migrant workers must be insured by private insurers, and thedrawbacks of this system, as well as the practical difficulties involved in itsimplementation, have been documented by the courts.28 Workers still en-counter grave exploitation in workplaces. In the most extensive case inwhich the National Labor Court considered the harsh narrative of exploita-tion, the employer was penalized a sum equivalent to US$70,00029 for em-ploying hundreds of workers over many months for approximately US$150dollars per month—i.e., about 20 percent of the minimum wage. Livingconditions remain poor for many migrant workers, and the assurance of aminimal (not to mention adequate) level of subsistence is not legally ac-knowledged. Whether the bottom line is a positive or negative outcome isall in the eyes of the beholder.
Beatriz’s lawsuit, a complex act of litigation that demonstrates the strat-egy of multiple citizenships at its best, aptly demonstrates the downside aswell. Not only was the lawsuit denied, but the concept of multiple citizen-ships was handed a setback. The lower labor court accepted the state’s ar-gument that Beatriz is not a resident (hence this is not a binding prece-dent). It also leaned towards the argument that migrant workers, by the verynature of their stay, can never be considered residents. The specific natureof the court’s intentions—i.e., whether it meant to put a lid on the expan-sive interpretation of residency and rights—no longer matters much be-
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cause the government was quick to change the law in response to the law-suit, holding that migrant workers (as well as other “problem” groups ofnon-citizens) are categorically not residents for the purpose of social secu-rity benefits regardless of their individual circumstances.30 Consequently,the court will no longer consider the narrative reflecting the nature and in-tensity of Beatriz’s relationship with the Israeli community. This change, in-stituted (at least in part) in response to Beatriz’s lawsuit, is limited to na-tional social insurance and health care rights, yet it is an importantindicator of the state’s insistence on preserving the bipolar model of citi-zenship.
Moreover, the advantages of the multiple citizenship approach lie in thepossibility of expanding rights that previously had been granted exclusivelyto citizens (or residents). This expansion was made possible because it wasno longer a matter of granting either all rights or none. Rights could be de-signed to fit the purpose and objective of the non-citizens’ affiliation withthe Israeli community. This flexibility, however, has also been shown tohave its downside. The underlying rationales for improving the rights ofsome can be used to degrade the rights of others. For example, Israeli Pales-tinians also experienced the darker side of flexibility in citizenship when alaw was passed that terminated their right to family reunification, in starkcontrast to that of other citizens (Davidov, et al. 2005; Peled 2007).31 It isalso difficult to find praise for the strategy of litigating for citizenship-re-lated rights at a time when the original objective of Marshall’s social citi-zenship claim is being withdrawn as part of the welfare state’s retrench-ment. Instead of promoting equal rights by pushing for migrants’ rights, thestate has been taking away rights from insiders by limiting the rights to wel-fare, requiring increased participation in the labor market without improv-ing labor market conditions, increasing private participation in health carecosts, and deploying divide and conquer strategies in which weak groupsare presented as competing for a zero-sum set of rights. The gains of mi-grant workers, it has been argued, come at the expense of disabled people,and those of the disabled at the expense of others in need. Litigating forrights can construct solidarity, but it can also undermine shared interestsand causes.
Distinctions and flexible concepts, which are the tools for litigating mul-tiple citizenships, are therefore a handy legal instrument for promotingrights, but they are also just as useful in making distinctions that allow thedowngrading of rights. Distinctions can be inclusive or exclusive; rights canconnect or disconnect individuals from society; and the concept of multi-ple citizenships may be an advantage or a liability depending upon thebenchmark and the expectations. This discourse of citizenship is not apanacea. While it draws on Marshall’s concept of social citizenship, whichwas aimed at expanding the rights of those who have political citizenship,
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multiple citizenships are developed in the immigration context as a meansof providing second-best substitutes while forgoing political citizenship al-together (Benhabib 2002; Soysal 1994).
However, the very rapid change in the perception of citizenship in Israelover the last few years seems to be an irreversible element in Israel’s con-struction of its loose self-identity. Similarly, the change in jurisprudence,which has instituted the new body of immigration law in Israel, will onlybecome more complex. Litigating citizenship should therefore be taken asa given, but highlighting its dialectic nature may aid in better conceiving thegains and the losses and in questioning the legal strategies of “by whom,”“where” and “how” citizenship claims are made and granted.
NOTES
1. Although the name of the plaintiff is fully disclosed in the court’s decision, adifferent name is being used here to respect her privacy. However, the facts of thecase are based on the court’s factual findings. The court’s decision was rendered inMay 2004; case not published.
2. This is a result of integrating immigration law (The Law of Entry to Israel—1952 and labor law (The Employment Bureau Law—1959). The employer mustprove its legitimate need for workers and request the work permit for an employee.In a sense, then, the worker’s visa is a byproduct of the work permit.
3. These unlawful payments are well acknowledged by the state, as can be seen inthe Parliamentary Proceedings, records of the Parliamentary Committee on ForeignWorkers (inter alia from Nov. 12, 2002, June 4, 2002, Jan. 1, 2002, July 3, 2001; seealso the Introduction).
4. Foreign Workers (Prohibition of Unlawful Employment and Assurance of FairConditions) (1999), Executive Order (Basic Health Services for Workers) (2001).
5. I am avoiding in this context the thorny and very important question ofwhether new forms of citizenship are global, international, supra-national, na-tional, or a combination of all of the above. For the present purpose it suffices tomaintain a notion of multiple forms of citizenship that transcend the bipolar con-cept of insiders and outsiders that is carved out by formal legal citizenship. How-ever, generally in this article I have assumed a strong leverage of state policies argu-ing, infra, that domestic policies and the rights discourse have been more importantin the transformation of citizenship in Israel, as compared with similar interna-tional and global instruments.
6. In 1999, the Foreign Workers Law (1991) was amended and renamed the For-eign Workers (Prohibition of Unlawful Employment and Assurance of Fair Condi-tions) Law (1999). Another important amendment was the 2001 amendment no. 9to The Law of Entry to Israel (1952) regarding due process rights in deportation.
7. www.kavlaoved.org.il 8. www.hotline.org.il 9. www.phr.org.il
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10. High Court of Justice 4963/98 Hassan Barry Sasai v. Minister of Interior Af-fairs (the petition was withdrawn in 2001 after an amendment to the Law of Entryinto Israel). Additional petitions against the amendment to the law were filed inHigh Court of Justice 6535/02 The Hotline for Migrant Workers v. Minister of Inte-rior Affairs (January 3, 2005); High Court of Justice 9402/02 The Hotline for Mi-grant Workers v. Minister of Interior Affairs (February 23, 2003) (In both cases thepetitions were denied, but it was noted that the petition induced a policy change re-garding detentions and deportations.)
11. Cf. National Labor Court 1459/02 Buchiman—Best Construction Inc. (De-cember 19, 2002).
12. Initially, a petition was filed requesting the issuance of an injunction order-ing the state to extend the National Health Care Law (1994) to migrant workers(High Court of Justice 6433/01 Maria Emily Filora v. Minister of Health [October23, 2001]). As it became clear this strategy would not succeed in the courts, follow-ing the amendment to the Foreign Workers Law, NGOs turned to litigate the newframework of regulated private insurance for migrant workers. Cf. High Court of Jus-tice 82/04 Physicians for Human Rights v. The Insurance Commissioner. (The peti-tion was withdrawn on October 18, 2004).
13. High Court of Justice 494/03 Physicians for Human Rights and others v. Min-ister of Finance and others (December 9, 2004) (The petition was denied, claimingno tangible constitutional right is violated in a manner that justifies the judicialscrutiny of the law.)
14. The first petition in this matter was filed in 2000. Following several attemptsto challenge the constitutionality of the “binding arrangement,” the case that suc-ceeded in eliciting that statement from the Supreme Court was: High Court of Jus-tice 4542/02 The Workers Hotline v. Minister of Interior Affairs (March 30, 2006).
15. Cf. the joint meeting of the Committee on Foreign Workers and the Com-mittee on Education and Culture held on June 8, 2004, and the previous tour of theCommittee on Foreign Workers in day-care facilities, held on January 18, 2004.Such meetings and tours have been held periodically since the late 1990s.
16. High Court of Justice 9402/02 Hotline for Migrant Workers and others v.Government of the State of Israel and others (February 23, 2003).
17. This decisions was triggered, among other factors, by a lawsuit filed by ACRIregarding this issue in February 2003—Tel Aviv District Court 1113/03 Yohin Mokand others v. Minister of Interior Affairs (The petition will be dismissed after all ofthe children who brought the petition to court succeeded in obtaining permanentresident status in accordance with the new policy).
18. State Comptroller’s Report No. 49, 1998, p. 279; State Comptroller’s ReportNo. 53, 2003, p. 655; Report of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Foreign Work-ers and the Establishment of an Immigration Authority, July 2002, pp. 11–19; TheBank of Israel, announcement to the press—December 18, 2000.
19. Cf. National Labor Court 001218/02 Xue Bin and others—A. Dori Construc-tion Inc. (March 20, 2003).
20. High Court of Justice 1911/03 ACRI v. Minister of Finance (November 12,2003).
21. High Court of Justice 9405/00 Chalamish v. National Insurance Institute, PD44(4) 423; The Report of the Commission in the Matter of Paying Benefits to
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Claimants Residing Outside of Israel (Ministry of Interior 2001). The views of thecommission were not accepted and the Supreme Court did not intervene in this de-cision—High Court of Justice 8313/02 Eizen v. National Insurance Institute (June28, 2004).
22. The right to work was provided in internal regulations of the Ministry of In-ternal Affairs in May 2003, following correspondence with human rights organiza-tions.
23. High Court of Justice 494/03 Physicians for Human Rights and others v. Min-ister of Finance (December 9, 2004). The lawsuit was filed by Physicians for HumanRights (arguing on behalf of migrant workers and refugees), The Center for the De-fense of the Individual (arguing on behalf of Palestinians from Eastern Jerusalemand the Occupied Territories), the Israel Religious Action Center, part of the JewishProgressive [Reform] movement (arguing on behalf of Jews and non-Jews who areaffected by these policies in family reunification cases), and Adva, a think tank onsocial and economic matters. Resonating with the overall ambivalent message ofthis chapter, the empowering effect of this case was in bringing these diverse groupstogether, yet in terms of the case’s outcomes—their common claim was flatly de-nied.
24. See supra note 10.25. The implications of this limiting policy have been the subject of yet another
petition by ACRI: High Court of Justice 8204/05 Andres Rovio and others V. TheGovernment of Israel. (Petition filed August 25, 2005).
26. See the Attorney General’s response to the petition cited in note 14 supra. 27. See supra note 4.28. CF. Tel Aviv Peace Court HP/200408/03 Mary Grace Nakur v. Menorah In-
surance Inc. and others (June 11, 2003).29. Supra note 19. 30. Amendment to the National Insurance Law (1995, consolidated version)
passed in Section 24 of the Economic Arrangements Law (Amendment to Statutesto Obtain Budget Targets and Economic Policy for the 2003 Fiscal Year).
31. The Citizenship and Entry to Israel (Temporary) Law (2003) [temporary leg-islation that is periodically extended; at the time of revising this chapter the law isin force until January 2007]; Following a petition to the High Court of Justice8099/03 ACRI v. Minister of Interior Affairs (May 14, 2006), the Supreme Court ina scant majority of 5–4 decided not to intervene in the law, although one of the ma-jority judges sided with the dissent regarding the substance of the law, deferring tothe government on the assumption it will change it. Towards 2007 some revisionshave been made to the law, which include an exception for humanitarian cases. Inother respects, however, it was made even harsher.
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IITEL AVIV AS GLOBAL CITY:LOCAL AND MUNICIPALPERSPECTIVES ONTRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION
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This chapter describes Tel Aviv’s response to the arrival and settlement of la-bor migrants over the past fifteen years. This is but one case of glocalization,or the interaction between global forces (here: international labor move-ments) and local environments (here: cities). Tel Aviv is among a growingnumber of cities facing the obstacles and opportunities presented by over-seas labor immigration. Increasingly, not only national governments butalso local authorities are determining how these migrants (including thesecond-generation) are incorporated into (or excluded from) the host soci-ety (Alexander 2003b).2
Tel Aviv’s response toward ‘its’ labor migrants is both exceptional and in-triguing. It is exceptional in that Tel Aviv is the only local authority in Israelto have developed its own migrant policy, although cities such as Jerusalemand Eilat also contain significant migrant worker populations.3 Furthermore,Tel Aviv has developed a policy of migrant incorporation within the contextof a strict guestworker regime. Israel’s exclusionary immigration policy in the1990s resulted in the entry of a large number of “illegal” labor migrants,many of whom were concentrated in Tel Aviv. By 2001, the proportion of Is-rael’s undocumented migrants residing in that city was estimated at approx-imately 80 percent, including a significant number of children.
This case is intriguing, because Tel Aviv’s local migrant policy appears tocontradict the national immigration regime—or does it? In the followingpages I explore this question, following Tel Aviv’s policymaking through threedifferent phases. I conclude with a brief comparison of this policy trajectorywith that of European cities facing similar patterns of labor immigration.
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4Local Migrant Policies in aGuestwork Regime
The Case of Tel Aviv1
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LOCAL CONTEXT: LABOR MIGRATION TO TEL AVIV
Overseas labor migrants began settling in Tel Aviv in the late 1980s, arriv-ing mostly from Africa and Latin America on tourist visas and remaining towork irregularly. Until the mid-1990s their presence (a few thousand,nearly all undocumented) was “invisible.” After 1993, Israel’s recruitmentof overseas workers as a “temporary substitute” for Palestinian workers re-sulted in a massive “guestworker” population.4 However, systematic ex-ploitation of legal labor migrants led many to abandon their employers,thus becoming irregular.5 At the same time, irregular labor migrants enteredIsrael in ever larger numbers, either as tourists or by infiltrating the border.
Tel Aviv became the focal point of Israel’s irregular migrant communitiesdue to its large informal labor market as well as chain migration. From1996 on, the city’s total labor migrant population was estimated at between30,000 and 60,000 residents (constituting 8 to 17 percent of the city popu-lation).6 Most resided in southern Tel Aviv and in Jaffa (the Arab city an-nexed to Tel Aviv in 1950). Up to one third were concentrated in the work-ing-class neighborhood of Neve She’anan (and nearby Shapira). In thismigrant “core area,” foreigners accounted for between 50 and 60 percent ofthe population, according to one estimate (Planning Division—PolicyDraft Report 1999). Perhaps 20 percent were legal labor migrants, amongthem single men (mostly in construction) and women (mostly in geriatriccare), working long hours, residing for one to three years in overcrowdedhostels, and living frugally to maximize their savings. The rest were illegallyresident, working primarily in housecleaning, geriatric care, restaurants, andlight industry.
Prior to 2002, migrants from Eastern Europe and Russia constituted ap-proximately one third of the total population, followed by migrants fromSoutheast Asia, Africa, and South America and an unknown number fromneighboring Arab countries. The largely illegal African and Latino commu-nities had developed various self-help networks, “underground” churches,crèches, and one community “school,” all operating in rented premises(Kemp and Raijman 2000). The Filipino community had also developed athriving communal cultural life. The number of children grew steadily to anestimated 1,500 in 2001. On weekends, migrant workers from all over Is-rael converged in Neve She’anan to meet, relax, and exchange information.
In 2002, the government initiated an aggressive deportation policy, withpolice raids rounding up illegal migrants, especially in the migrant “corearea.” This substantially reduced Tel Aviv’s labor migrant population, espe-cially among the veteran African and Latino communities. Since then, thecommunal systems have largely collapsed, and the number of migrant chil-dren is assumed to be much lower. The municipality has not released re-vised estimates, but Tel Aviv’s labor migrant population may have fallen by
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as much as one third.7 Since the deportation policy began, more and moremigrants have moved to “safer” neighborhoods in the city and beyond.
In contrast to official government policy, Tel Avivians have displayed rela-tively tolerant attitudes toward labor migrants for a number of reasons. First,human rights organizations and the local media created public empathy byexposing the exploitative conditions in which the migrants lived andworked.8 Second, overseas labor migrants are seen as a non-threatening sub-stitute for Palestinian workers who had previously held many of the samejobs. Above all, local residents regard them as a temporary phenomenon—aperception reinforced by the government’s deportation policies. Some resi-dents see the migrant presence as “exotic,” adding spice to the city (Alexan-der 2006). Nevertheless, anti-immigrant sentiments did surface amongpoorer residents in the neighborhoods of migrant concentration.9 Untilnow, this generally passive tolerance allowed the local authorities to respondto the growing migrant presence with little public pressure in one way or an-other. However, the potential for tensions between local and migrant resi-dents did play a role in municipal policymaking, as elaborated below.
The main constraint on local policymaking toward migrants in Tel Avivhas been, and remains, the national immigration regime. Israel defines it-self as a non-immigration country, except for Jews. To meet labor demands,a rotation system is applied that strictly limits the stay of foreign workers.The government does its utmost to deny (non-Jewish) overseas workers ac-cess to the welfare system and other modes of incorporation (Kemp andRaijman 2003). In this exclusionary context, Tel Aviv found itself hosting alarge “illegal” population that had been ignored by national agencies atbest and liable to deportation at worst, yet which nonetheless had begunshowing signs of permanence.
THE EVOLUTION OF MIGRANT POLICIES IN TEL AVIV
The city’s response to the situation described above can be divided into threephases from the early 1990s to 2002. Following the aggressive deportationpolicy initiated in 2002, a fourth local policy phase may be emerging.
Phase 1: Informal Service Provision
In the early 1990s, the municipality was still largely unaware of its irreg-ular migrant population, but as their numbers grew, labor migrants in-creasingly came into contact with municipal workers. Gradually, Tel Aviv’s“street-level bureaucrats” responded to the needs of the migrants they en-countered on a daily basis. Thus, two “Mother-Infant Clinics” (local healthclinics) in the migrant neighborhoods began providing preventive medicine.
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By 1996, half of all patients at the Neve She’anan clinic were migrant moth-ers and children. Meanwhile, social workers began treating migrant chil-dren whom they found in critical situations (such as abandonment andchild abuse). In 1998, the city’s social workers defined forty-two cases in-volving migrants as “critical” (Welfare Division, “Foreign Workers—Wel-fare” Report, 11 April 1999). A similar norm developed at the municipalhospital, Ichilov. In addition, although most municipal schools in Tel Avivrefused to admit children of undocumented migrants, the director of theBialik Primary School in Neve She’anan initiated an “open arms” policy to-ward migrant children and even added bilingual teachers to some classes.
The provision of these basic health, welfare and education services devel-oped as a bottom-up response to “facts on the ground.” It then received thepost facto approval of municipal departmental directors, who reported it tothe political echelon. This process was described by Dr. H. Nehama, direc-tor of the Public Health Division, as follows:
[W]e knew then that they were being treated [at the Family Health clinics], butwe didn’t yet know the breadth of the phenomenon . . . . At that time there wasno written policy regarding them. My attitude is that medical treatment shouldbe given universally, without regard to status . . . . I was aware of the practiceand did not give a directive for or against [treating migrant children] . . . Thenon-intervention [of the political level] and the fact that they did not try tostop this practice is also a policy.
Phase 2: Limited Recognition of “The Foreign Worker Problem”
At this point (1995–1996), the head of the Planning Division (the CityEngineer) made several attempts to alert the political echelon in City Hallto the labor migrant presence. The City Engineer’s calls to prepare a long-term municipal strategy were rejected by the mayor, Ronnie Milo, who in-sisted that this was a responsibility of the national government, not of thecity. According to him, the government should ensure suitable conditionsfor legal foreign workers and repatriate illegal labor migrants, per nationalpolicy. Nonetheless, in mid-1996 he agreed to establish a Committee onForeign Workers (chaired by the deputy mayor, and including the directorsof the Welfare and Planning Divisions) that produced a number of policyrecommendations. First, it noted that the municipality could not preventthe arrival, settlement, or concentration of labor migrants in the city. Sec-ond, it defined their presence as a long-term phenomenon, an urban problem,and a humanitarian problem. Finally, it recommended the city continue pro-viding basic local services, especially to the migrant children (Sub-com-mittee on Foreign Workers in Tel Aviv-Yafo—Intermediate Report, Septem-ber 5, 1996).
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This led to a two-pronged strategy in the final two years of Mayor Milo’sadministration (1997–1998). First, City Hall formalized the previously adhoc provision of minimal health, welfare and education services to the(mostly irregular) migrants. Second, municipal officials including themayor lobbied government ministries to cover some of the ensuing costs ofproviding these services for the Tel Aviv municipality10 and tried to per-suade the government to change the existing guestworker regime so as tominimize the number of irregular migrants. These efforts produced no sig-nificant results. At this point, then, the municipality of Tel Aviv had ac-knowledged the migrant presence as a fact. Yet the espoused policy ofMayor Milo was ultimately to refuse to take responsibility. The “foreignworker problem,” in his view, had been created by national policy and mustbe solved by the government, not by the city.
Within the Planning and Welfare Divisions, however, there was recogni-tion of the potential long-term impact of the labor migrant presence and ofthe dangers of ignoring it. In particular, the director of the municipal Wel-fare Division, Zeev Friedman, explained in an interview that he saw the mu-nicipality as responsible for its foreign population, for practical as well asethical reasons:
In essence, we have here a population that is isolated, a Fourth World within amodern city, disconnected from all the welfare systems, and they have to sur-vive somehow . . . . We saw this situation as one in which they endanger them-selves, but they also endanger others.
Friedman assigned a social worker to investigate the local migrant com-munities. On the basis of the resulting study, the Welfare Division devel-oped a model defining three concentric “spheres of vulnerability”: the mi-grant population, the “foreign worker neighborhoods,” and the rest of thecity. To prevent further deterioration, the report recommended, the cityshould strive to incorporate Tel Aviv’s migrant residents into existing ser-vices that could meet their immediate problems and try to prevent conflictsarising between migrant and indigenous residents. The most efficient wayto do this would be through a special municipal unit, or center, in the mi-grant neighborhoods (Welfare Division—Draft Report, April 14, 1999).
Phase 3: A “Liberal Guestworker Policy”
Following the 1998 municipal elections, the new mayor, Ron Huldai,adopted all of the proposals that had earlier been formulated in the WelfareDivision as delineated above. The various actions undertaken since then arediscussed below. Together, they comprise Tel Aviv’s third policy phase in re-sponse to the migrant presence.
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Establishment of a Municipal ‘Aid and Information Center’ for Labor Migrants
In July 1999, the new mayor officially opened the “Aid and InformationCenter for the Foreign Community of Tel Aviv-Jaffa,” or Mesila (in its He-brew acronym). At the center’s inauguration, Huldai gave a speech that wasa calculated gesture of municipal autonomy:
Approximately 200,000 foreign workers reside in Israel today, many of themwithout permits. This disturbing statistic requires a policy response at the na-tional level, however, until such policy is formulated the municipality of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa must assume responsibility for the estimated 60,000 foreign workersin the city. We can no longer stand aside. We can no longer turn a deaf ear totheir cry . . . . The creation of Mesila . . . is a necessity, not a luxury (cited inMesila brochure, July 1999).
To oversee the new policy, the mayor established an advisory Forum onForeign Workers, which was also supposed to coordinate between local andnational policymakers. In practice, government representatives rarely at-tended the Forum’s meetings, and most of the daily decision-making at thelocal level devolved to Mesila. The municipal Aid and Information Centeris located in the heart of Neve She’anan and operates as a semi-autonomousunit within the Social Services (previously Welfare) Division. Mesila is en-tirely funded by the municipality and is the only service of its kind in Is-rael.11 The center employs five professional staff and has some sixty volun-teers providing information, counselling and guidance to the labor migrantpopulation. It acts as liaison between migrants and their Israeli neighborsand provides “preliminary intervention in critical situations involving for-eign individuals/communities” (ibid; see also Willen, this volume).
In its first year of operation, Mesila reached out to the migrant population,established working relations with relevant municipal, governmental andcivic organizations, and began handling individual migrant requests for as-sistance. By 2001, this averaged some 100 requests per month, over 95 per-cent of them concerning undocumented migrants (“Analysis Report of Re-quests to Mesila—July to December 2001,” January 2002). Migrant requestsfor assistance were increasingly handled by volunteers, while the staff fo-cused on community-related work (below). Concurrently, a database on thecity’s foreign community was built as a basis for future migrant policy.
Health, Welfare, and Education Policies
Since 1999, the municipality has intensified the policy, begun in the pre-vious policy phase, of incorporating labor migrants into existing social ser-vices. The difference is that now Mesila acts as a front office, mediating be-tween the mostly undocumented migrants and public agencies and NGOs.The center has come to specialize in problems regarding migrant children,
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welfare, and education, filling a niche that was relatively unattended to bylocal NGOs helping labor migrants.12
In the health area, Mesila made efforts to persuade migrants to registertheir children for National Health Insurance.13 Of the 600 migrant childrenregistered in Israel by February 2002, 500 were registered at the center.Mesila also conducted workshops to acquaint nurses at the Mother-InfantClinics with the special needs of migrants. The number of migrants treatedat these clinics rose steadily, reaching 856 families (1039 children) in July2000 (Public Health Division, Report on Migrants, July 2000). Another fo-cus of Mesila activity was the underground migrant crèches or day-care cen-ters. In the mid-1990s, the local press revealed the unhealthy conditions inwhich hundreds of migrant children were kept during their parents’ longworking hours. The center has tried to improve the conditions of these mi-grant-run babysitting services by collecting equipment, sending volunteerassistants, and holding workshops on basic childcare.
As a municipal agency, Mesila is in a unique position to mediate in indi-vidual welfare cases between migrants who are illegally resident and variousgovernmental agencies (e.g., for children with disabilities). Over time, suchinvolvement has brought about changes within some public agencies thatpreviously rejected any cases involving undocumented migrants. Thismethod of incremental, case-by-case incorporation of labor migrants intothe welfare system differs significantly from the strategy of the Israeli civilsociety organizations, which direct their efforts at more fundamentalchanges in the entire immigration regime of Israel, mostly through thecourts but also through public pressure (Kemp and Raijman 2000; Mund-lak, this volume; Rosenhek this volume).
The incorporation of migrants’ children into the pre-school and schoolsystem has been another area of focus for Mesila.14 In 2002, some 1,500children of migrant workers were estimated to reside in Tel Aviv, of whomtwo-thirds were believed to be under age six. Through its outreach activities,Mesila encouraged migrants to enroll their children in the public schoolsystem and operated a registration service at the center. In 2001, it success-fully lobbied the Education Ministry to open two new kindergartens for mi-grants’ children on the grounds of the Bialik Primary School. By 2002, thenumber of migrant children enrolled in Tel Aviv’s public school system (in-cluding kindergartens) surpassed 500.
Parallel to Mesila’s activities, the Bialik School has been unique in its pol-icy toward migrant children. With the support of the municipal EducationDivision, the school’s principal, Amira Yahalom, initiated a policy for mi-grant pupils which, as she explained in an interview, was meant “to preservetheir identity and language on one hand, and on the other hand to offerthem everything this country, which they have chosen, can offer within ourlimited resources.” By 2002, migrant children accounted for half of theschool’s pupils. In 2003, the Bialik School moved out of its building
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(deemed unsafe) to the premises of a nearby secondary school that also hasa significant migrant presence. Tel Aviv’s policy in this area appears to en-courage the concentration of foreign students—in contrast to the desegre-gation policies applied in many European and American cities towardschools with a concentration of migrant-origin children.
Cultural and Religious Policies
One feature of Tel Aviv’s labor migrant population is the central role ofChristianity in the lives of many migrants (primarily Filipinos, Africans andLatinos). Since the mid-1990s, the municipality has been aware of the phe-nomenon of “underground churches” operating in south Tel Aviv (cf. Sabar,this volume). Until now, City Hall has pursued a (non)policy of benign neg-lect regarding the religious practices of its migrant population, neither sup-porting nor preventing the spread of these ad hoc churches. To some degree,this has to do with Israeli sensitivity on maintaining religious freedom for mi-norities within the Jewish state. There have been very few actions regardingother cultural needs of the labor migrants. In 2001, an attempt to allow an in-ternationally known Nigerian singer to appear in the municipal amphitheatresparked a public argument between the municipality and the Ministry of In-terior, which refused to issue an entry visa. Following this incident, the mu-nicipality lowered its profile in this policy area (Alexander 2003a).
However, it is not just political expediency but also an ambiguous attitudewithin the municipality that is behind Tel Aviv’s (non)policy regarding the re-ligious and cultural needs of its labor migrants. Specifically, there is uneasi-ness among municipal policymakers regarding the possibility of a signifi-cant, new non-Jewish minority in Tel Aviv. According to former director ofMesila Edna Altar-Dembo, “Very few perceive Tel Aviv as a multicultural city. . . The religious issue is always in the background.” At the end of the day,municipal officials dealing with labor migrants see their role in terms of pro-viding services, meeting needs, and preventing crises—not in terms of chang-ing the fundamental character of Tel Aviv as a Jewish city. In this respect, TelAviv’s religious-cultural policy toward migrants resembles that of “assimila-tionist” cities such as Paris, which have downplayed religious-ethnic diver-sity (until recently), rather than cities such as Amsterdam, Birmingham, orFrankfurt, where ethnic and religious diversity became a basis for local poli-cies in the 1980s and 1990s (Alexander 2003b; Alexander 2006).
Urban Development Policies
As early as 1995, municipal planners noted the “threat” posed by thelabor migrant presence to renovation plans for the city’s southern neigh-borhoods, but no actions were taken. In 1999, the new administration
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initiated a “Strategic Planning Process” for the city, beginning with a se-ries of meetings held between municipal planners and residents. In thesouthern neighborhoods, these meetings included several invited “repre-sentatives” of the labor migrant communities, thereby setting a precedentin Israeli planning and raising the issue of the short- and long-term im-pact of their presence. The Strategic Planning Process continues, butmeanwhile the city has advanced two non-statutory plans in the areas oflabor migrant concentration. One of these, the Strategic Plan for the Sta-tions Area (covering the Neve She’anan neighborhood) was the first toconsider labor migrants as a significant springboard for urban renovation.Its preliminary recommendations proposed, “transforming the foreignworkers from ‘threatening’ to ‘interesting’” in a “process of transforma-tion [of the neighborhood] into a multicultural area” (PresentationSlides, Forum on Foreign Workers, 2001).
The final plan report was written in 2004, after the deportation policyhad substantially reduced the local migrant population. It still assumedthat labor migrants would remain a significant population in the area andproposed adopting an “inter-cultural municipal policy” that would takeinto account “the multicultural existence” of the migrants and other localpopulations—without specifying what that might mean. One section sug-gested a “publicity/marketing campaign of the area as ‘ethnotown’,” and“encouraging local entrepreneurship by labor migrants.” Another sectionnoted that the entire plan would depend on coordination with governmentministries—including those implementing the deportation policy! (Plan-ning Division, Stations Area—Strategic Plan, June 2004). It is safe to as-sume that these proposals, as well as other components of this non-statu-tory plan, will remain safely on paper.
Civic Status and Representation
In the policy area of civic status and representation, Tel Aviv continues tohold the government responsible for the high proportion of irregular mi-grants in the city. In 2000, the municipality issued a document with pro-posed changes to government policy, addressed to the prime minister andrelevant ministries. Among other recommendations, it included proposalsto regularize undocumented workers and issue temporary work permits di-rectly to migrant workers (rather than to their employers, as in the “bind-ing arrangement”). (Municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Principles and Guide-lines for Israeli Government Policy on Foreign Workers, 25 October 2000).Meanwhile, Mesila’s director has continued to lobby the Knesset and rele-vant ministers for specific changes that would incorporate labor migrants inIsraeli social legislation. It is difficult to gauge the effect of these efforts onchanges in national policy (see Kemp and Raijman 2003).
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What is clear, however, is that the Huldai administration (like its prede-cessor) does not present these proposals as a step toward extending citizen-ship to labor migrants. Instead, it bases its reasoning on “practical necessity”(e.g. the public health hazards posed by thousands of residents without ac-cess to healthcare) as well as on humanitarian grounds. Mesila’s lobbying ac-tivities focus on incrementally incorporating migrant workers into welfareservices from which they are excluded (e.g. the National Health Insurancescheme), rather than directly challenging the ethno-national basis of Israel’scitizenship regime (Kemp and Raijman 2000; Rosenhek 2000).
With regard to migrant participation in the local polity, any kind of formalrepresentation or even consultation—i.e., along the lines of the “migrant ad-visory councils” adopted by some European cities—appears out of the ques-tion. Instead, Tel Aviv’s municipality has adopted a top-down manner of in-formal consultation in which Mesila maintains regular contacts with those itdefines as “migrant community leaders.” Their concerns and needs are thencommunicated to relevant officials when necessary. The informal consulta-tion style adopted in Tel Aviv is one reason behind Mesila’s goal of cultivat-ing migrant leadership, or what it calls “community empowerment.”15 Thishas included an ongoing series of meetings with migrant leaders (cf. Willen,this volume), courses for migrant activists (in Hebrew, healthcare), andother activities. According to Mesila, approximately one thousand migrantsparticipated in these activities in the center’s first two years. Another effort toempower labor migrant residents was the 2001 publication—in four lan-guages—of a sixty-page “Guide to the Foreign Worker in Israel” outlining la-bor migrant rights. However, labor migrant empowerment is not a goal in it-self for the municipality, but a means of achieving more effective local policy,in that it allows local officials to understand the needs of, and provide ser-vices to, this largely undocumented population.
CONCLUSION: TEL AVIV’S MIGRANT POLICIES IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Tel Aviv presents an example of local policymaking toward migrants in aparticular context: the exclusionary immigration regime of Israel. Yet itsstory is not so different from that of other cities that have experienced laborimmigration. It appears that local policy responses to the arrival and settle-ment of foreign workers often follow a similar pattern. Beginning with CityHall’s (sometimes willful) neglect of labor migrants, local authorities even-tually rise to the challenges posed by this significant new population, atleast in the short term. If and when the labor migrant presence is recognizedas permanent, municipalities develop local integration policies that else-where I have labeled “assimilationist” (as in Paris until 2001), “pluralist”
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(as in Amsterdam in the 1980s–1990s) or “intercultural” (as in Birming-ham more recently). Over time, these local policy responses evolve fromone phase to another, creating local policy trajectories (Alexander 2003b;Alexander 2004; Alexander 2006).
Tel Aviv can thus be seen as one more example of a local authority’s re-sponse to a global phenomenon. The local response is mediated by the na-tional context, for immigration regimes remain an overriding factor in the de-velopment of municipal migrant policies. Local authorities in France, forexample, developed policies toward migrants within the context of the Frenchrepublican (assimilationist) ideology. Such policies emphasized a territorialdefinition of problems and solutions with regard to migrant settlement (e.g.‘areas of exclusion requiring development’) while disregarding their ethniccharacter. In contrast, cities in the Netherlands developed local policies in the1980s and 1990s that emphasized ethnic-based empowerment of migrants,backed by a national, multicultural “Minorities Policy.” Nevertheless, localvariations have emerged within each national context (ibid.).
Tel Aviv’s policy response to labor immigration has developed within anational regime based on an ethno-religious definition of Israel that deniesthe possibility of non-Jewish migrant settlement. National immigrationpolicy allows (some would say promotes) the recruitment of legal foreignworkers, but within a strict rotation system. Deportation of irregular mi-grants (including those who were recruited as guestworkers but left their le-gal employers) has been a central component of Israel’s immigration policysince 1997 and has been vigorously enforced since 2002. This strictly ex-clusionary immigration regime has meant that all local authorities in Israelexcept Tel Aviv have remained in what I call the “non-policy” phase. TelAviv, with its large migrant population and relative independence vis-à-visthe central authorities, is the only city to have developed its own migrantpolicy. In doing so, it has shown considerable autonomy.
This chapter has described three phases in Tel Aviv’s policy response. Thefirst phase lasted from the late 1980s to 1995, during which there was littleor no awareness of the labor migrant presence. Eventually, bottom-up re-sponses by local health, welfare and education professionals led to the ad hocprovision of some basic services, mostly to migrant children. These informalprocedures then received the approval of higher-level officials within the mu-nicipal bureaucracy. The latter pressed the political leadership to formulate along-term policy, but the mayor at that time refused to accept responsibilityfor the migrant presence, claiming it was a national-level problem.
Tel Aviv’s response differs little from that of other cities in this first phaseof labor migration. Amsterdam, for example, went through a similar non-policy phase in the late 1950s-early 1960s, and Rome ignored its labor mi-grant population throughout the 1980s. Other cities in self-declared “non-immigration” countries, such as Athens, have responded similarly during
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their first decade of labor immigration. In Tel Aviv, as in other cities at thisstage, it is often the civic sector, especially human rights organizations, thatrecognizes and assists the new migrants (ibid.).
In Tel Aviv’s second policy phase, City Hall formally acknowledged the la-bor migrant presence and approved the previously informal provision ofminimal services. This shift was based on expectations of the labor mi-grants’ temporariness, despite internal policy reports to the contrary. Themayor’s stand was that national government would solve “the labor mi-grant problem” in the long run. This approach resembles that of westernEuropean cities in the 1960s to mid-1970s, when their national govern-ments implemented guestworker policies. I have termed this a “minimalistguestworker” policy (ibid).
A third period began in 1999 with the election of a new mayor and theadoption of a strategy developed by the Welfare Division in the two pre-ceding years. The new approach recognized the presence of labor migrantsin Tel Aviv as a long-term (although not necessarily permanent) phenome-non that required a local strategy, regardless of national policy. This wasmanifested in the establishment of a municipal Aid and Information Cen-ter for labor migrants. Mesila has pursued a policy of incremental incorpo-ration of Tel Aviv’s labor migrant population into some health, welfare andeducation services. While making efforts to empower its migrant commu-nities, the city has refrained from officially recognizing their permanence.Instead, it tries to do “what is possible” for them under the circumstances.I label this a “liberal guestworker policy.”
Since 2002, the government’s intensive deportation policy has severelyaffected the irregular migrant population in Tel Aviv, reducing their num-bers especially among the African and Latin American communities. As a re-sult, the city’s current policy (expressed through the actions of Mesila in thepast two years) now focuses less on community-based activities and moreon solving individual problems arising from the deportations. This may beseen as a fourth phase in Tel Aviv’s local migrant policy.
Since 1999, Tel Aviv has openly challenged the government’s immigra-tion policy by institutionalizing the extension of local services to its largelyillegal migrant population. But while City Hall criticizes the current guest-worker policy, it does not fundamentally challenge the basic assumptions behindthe national immigration regime, which is based on the supposedly tem-porary nature of (non-Jewish) labor immigration to Israel. Indeed, munic-ipal representatives repeatedly stress that their goal is not to turn Tel Aviv’slabor migrants into future citizens or even permanent residents, only tomeet the practical and humanitarian needs arising from their continuedpresence, “as long as they are here.”
In this respect, Tel Aviv’s response to labor immigration differs substantiallyfrom the policies adopted by European cities in the 1980s–1990s. Following
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the abandonment of national guestworker programs in nearly all Europeancountries after 1973, local authorities began acknowledging the permanenceof the labor migrant population. This was followed by various actions andpolicies aimed at integrating the new “ethnic minorities,” ranging from as-similationist to multicultural-type policies, depending on the city (ibid).
In the case of Tel Aviv, such a policy response appears premature in lightof the Israeli immigration regime. Under current national policy, even thepermanence of the labor migrant population remains an open question (al-though it does not appear that Palestinian workers will soon replace over-seas workers). It appears that most labor migrants also recognize this, andfew expect to settle permanently in Israel. In short, while a significant long-term labor migrant presence in Tel Aviv is probable, it is too early to regardit as irreversible. Under these circumstances, the city’s current “liberal guest-worker policy” may be a sensible one.
But is Tel Aviv’s policy response only due to the external limitationsnoted above? I would argue that it is also a consequence of ambivalent at-titudes within the municipality regarding its non-Jewish labor migrant pop-ulation. If local policymakers were to adopt a truly multicultural attitude,this would mean not only recognizing the permanence of these newcomers,but also accepting their Otherness—in other words, accepting a new ethnic-religious minority in Tel Aviv. Thus far, such a (post-Zionist) attitude is lim-ited to a small number of Israelis active in human rights organizations.16 Itis unacceptable to most Israelis, including key actors within the municipal-ity. While expressing empathy for the plight of the labor migrants in the city,Tel Aviv’s policymakers are still reluctant to accept the full consequences ofreligious-ethnic pluralism. In other words, the “first Hebrew city” is not yetready to expand its self-definition as a tolerant and pluralistic city to thepoint of incorporating a permanent new non-Jewish minority.
NOTES
1. This chapter is based on fieldwork carried out in Tel Aviv in 2002 as part of aPh.D. dissertation comparing local policies toward labor migrants in different cities(Alexander 2003a), plus data updated to 2004. Parts of the chapter appeared in anearlier version in Hebrew (Schnell and Alexander 2002).
2. For recent research on cities and migrants, see for example: (Penninx, et al.2004; Rogers and Tillie 2001) www.international.metropolis.net.
3. Jerusalem’s municipal planning unit has just begun preliminary attempts toestimate the number of overseas labor migrants in the city. Other local authoritieshave not even taken this step.
4. The arrival of overseas labor migrants was largely a by-product of the firstPalestinian Intifada (1987–1994) and consequent government restrictions on em-ployment of Palestinians inside Israel (cf. Raijman and Kemp, this volume).
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5. Until 2005, the guestworker regime bound foreign workers to a specific em-ployer. A legal labor migrant who left (or was abandoned by) his employer becameautomatically “illegally resident” and liable to deportation.
6. Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s official population (excluding the labor migrants) is around360,000. The municipality claims there are some 60,000 labor migrants in the city.Among researchers, however, estimates have varied between 30,000–50,000(Schnell and Alexander 2002).
7. See (Alexander 2006).8. See especially the regular newspaper column by Einat Fishbein in the He-
brew-language Ha’Ir weekly newspaper (Fishbein August 1996 to June 1999)9. For example in Hatikva, a working-class, traditionally right-wing neighbor-
hood in east Tel Aviv that experienced a substantial migrant influx.10. Municipal costs for these services were estimated at 9.3 million shekels per
year (in a report submitted by the Deputy City Manager to the chairman of the Knes-set’s Labor and Welfare Committee, 10 January 1997) (Kemp and Raijman 2000:92).
11. Mesila’s annual budget was originally some 500,000 shekels. This has beenpartially reduced since 2003 as part of overall cuts in the city’s welfare budget.
12. The latter include the Kav La’Oved Workers Hotline (fighting violations ofworkers’ rights by employers), the Hotline for Migrant Workers (aiding labor mi-grants facing deportation), Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (confronting mi-grant health problems), and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (fighting vari-ous human rights violations).
13. This followed the 2000 amendment to the National Health Insurance Law(see Davidovitch and Filc, this volume).
14. Israeli law requires that all children from age six be enrolled in school, re-gardless of legal status. Pre-school education is available from age three in desig-nated low-income neighbourhoods.
15. This arrangement also suited the leading migrants’ association, the AfricanWorkers Union, whose leadership feared that any formal representative arrange-ment would be viewed by the government as a provocation and therefore was to beavoided at all costs (interview N. Holdbrook, President, African Workers’ Union).
16. According to this view, Israel’s structural dependence on foreign labor since1967 (either Palestinian or overseas workers) requires a fundamental change in theIsraeli migration regime. Unless Palestinian laborers can one day replace the over-seas workers, in effect turning back the clock to the pre-Intifada period (a possibil-ity that some say is no longer viable), then Israel should allow eventual citizenshipfor long-term labor migrants, following the American and European example. Inother words, if Israel expects to fully integrate into the global economy, it must openitself to non-Jewish immigration, even on a limited scale.
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Migrant workers have entered Israel in large numbers since 1993 constitut-ing a community of about 200 to 300,000, half of who remain undocu-mented. A capitalist country that joined the ranks of the developedeconomies in the 1990s, Israel, like several other such countries, has becomea destination for migrant workers (Schnell 2001). The exclusion of com-muting Palestinian workers from the Israeli labor market and the long insti-tutionalization of the bifurcation of the Israeli labor market have furtherstimulated the demand for migrant workers in Israel’s secondary labor mar-ket (Bartram 1998; Schnell 2000; Raijman & Kemp this volume). An ethnic-based democracy that gives priority to Jews (Peled and Shafir 2000; Smooha1993), Israel marginalizes migrant workers as a new underclass of temporaryoutsiders. National policies tend to ignore the consequences of the non-ab-sorption of migrant workers. Absorption of migrant workers is left in privatehands to free the state of any moral commitment to their human rights, thusconferring its imprimatur upon their harsh exploitation (Kemp and Raijman2000; Rosenhek 2000; Rosenhek and Cohen 2000; Schnell 2001). Geo-graphically, the absorption of marginal migrant workers may be associatedwith a trend toward socio-spatial segregation, which in turn may increaseprejudices against marginalized minorities and further block their chancesfor social integration and mobility (Massey and Denton 1988).
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dynamic of migrant workers’adaptation to a socially and spatially marginal position within the ethnic mi-lieu of Tel Aviv. Two questions may be posed in this context. First, do migrantworkers tend to segregate in space, or do they tend to disperse? Second, if they
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5Migrant Workers’ Segregation andAdaptation to the Ethnic City
The Case of Tel Aviv-Jaffa
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do segregate, do they tend to integrate and to improve their economic statuswhile desegregating in space? This study focuses on Tel Aviv for several rea-sons. It contains the largest community of migrant workers in Israel, withabout 50,000 people from some eighty countries. Also, Tel Aviv has becomethe main destination for migrant workers who have decided to postpone re-turn to their countries of origin (Schnell 1999). Tel Aviv has a reputation fortolerance likely to engender more liberal attitudes toward strangers. The mu-nicipality of Tel Aviv acts as an important agent of multi-cultural policies to-ward migrant workers (Schnell and Alexander 2002; Alexander this volume).In this context, the question arises whether migrant workers succeed in break-ing barriers for integration and mobility while postponing their return totheir countries of origin.
The chapter begins with an explanation of background and methodol-ogy. The second section analyzes the segregation of migrant workers usingindividual indices related to residential, territorial, and interactive aspectsof segregation. The third section examines some evidence that migrantworkers have attempted to settle in Tel Aviv, leading to two more questions.One question concerns migrants’ tendency to desegregate while postponingtheir return to their countries of origin. The second concerns their socialand economic mobility while desegregating in space over the years. Thechapter’s conclusion discusses some comparisons between the results of thepresent study in Tel Aviv and a similar study conducted in Bremen, Ger-many (Taubman and Farewick 2004).
CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND
Israel is a highly ethnic society in which ethnicity to large extent determinessocial stratification (Kimmerling 1999; Kimmerling 2001; Mautner, et al.1998; Smooha 1993). Israel’s regime of civil, national and sectarian structuresseems to incorporate all citizens at a basic level of citizenship; to assign com-munal rights to Jews (among whom certain Jewish groups are privileged);and to fragment society into various sectarian groups (Peled and Shafir 1993;Peled and Shafir 2001; Ram 1999; Ram 2005). Accordingly, non-citizen Pales-tinians are excluded even from civil society; Israeli Palestinians enjoy civilrights but are excluded from the Jewish collective; and Mizrahim (Jews ofMiddle Eastern origin) and Orthodox Jews are marginalized even within theJewish community. Like Palestinians, both undocumented migrant workersand documented migrant workers (who are recruited to Israel by private com-panies) are excluded from civil rights (Rosenhek 2000).
Within Israel, a second important issue pertains to the question of socio-spatial segregation. Traditional models measure collective indices for theresidential segregation of social categories, assuming that they act as cohe-
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sive ethnic groups (Boal 1987). Such models involve latent assumptionsconcerning the power of ethnic enclaves to determine their inhabitants’ lifechances, worldviews, and social identities (Schnell 2002). New approachesassume that segregation should be measured for individuals, leading onlyafterward to aggregation of the results (Benenson and Omer 2002; Schnelland Benjamini 1999). Schnell and Benjamini also disregard two other as-sumptions of traditional segregation models. They propose first, that segre-gation should be measured with respect to individuals’ daily life spacesrather than in relation to their residential neighbors, and second, that resi-dential segregation does not have necessarily the power to determine socialnetworks (Schnell 2002; Schnell and Benjamini 2001). In this context, itmay be hypothesized that residential segregation is correlated neither to in-dividuals’ segregation in daily activity spaces and in developing social net-works, nor with stages of adaptation to Israeli society.
A key assumption in most traditional segregation studies is that migrants,with few exceptions, tend to settle in ethnic enclaves in host cities, movingout of the enclaves while acculturating and assimilating into society at large(Boal 1987; Massey and Denton 1988). While scholars like Boal emphasizefunctional aspects of segregation, Wacquant (2004) searches for social andspatial mechanisms associated with discrimination against and marginal-ization of minority groups. This leads to the conclusion that migrants donot necessarily acculturate and assimilate and, accordingly, that their de-segregation depends upon a wide range of mechanisms. In this study, we tryto measure the tendency of migrant workers to assimilate, acculturate, anddesegregate during the decade many of them spend in Tel Aviv.
METHODOLOGY
This study is based on a snowball sample of 200 interviews conducted in twostages in February and March 2001. The distribution of respondents by genderwas controlled systematically. Since the study was dependent on migrantworker informants, the representation of groups is not proportional by coun-tries of origin. I focus only on African and Latin American migrant workers, thetwo groups with whom it was possible to develop relations of trust. Most ofthe interviewees were recruited from two or three countries within each group.
Data analysis develops in two stages. In the first stage, analysis is basedon the Schnell and Benjamini segregation model (2001) according to thefollowing principles:
(a) assignment of each individual to segregation indices, assuming thatnot all members of any social category represent common norms ofconduct;
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(b) measurement of segregation with respect to individuals’ actual dailylife spaces, rather than only their immediate neighbors in residentialspace; and
(c) constitution of three comparable indices for residential, territorialand interactive types of segregation.
The first index measures the extent to which a person’s neighbors are simi-lar to or different from him. The second index measures the extent to whichpeople perform their daily life routines in homogeneous or heterogeneoussocial areas. The third index measures the extent to which people develophomogeneous or heterogeneous social networks.
The indices for residential, territorial, and interactive segregation include(a) initial proportions, which measure the probability agents will encountersimilar (and conversely, dissimilar) others in each studied sphere of activ-ity; (b) weights, which measure the tendency of agents to regionalize theirdaily lives in different spaces and social circles; and (c) the product of thetwo, which measures the tendency of agents to segregate from members ofalternative social categories in their daily life spaces. Spatial dimensions areanalyzed on the scales of the closed vicinity and the neighborhood, as wellas the outside world. The close vicinity relates to neighbors in the sameapartment building or in immediate neighboring single-family houses. Theneighborhood relates to a circle within a radius of 100 meters of a protag-onist’s home, the average radius of protagonists’ perceived neighborhoods.The territorial dimension is analyzed in four major, hierarchically orderedterritorial bases: close vicinity, neighborhood (defined as in the residentialdimension), city, and the outside world. The interactive dimension is ana-lyzed in terms of three major spheres of daily activity: work, friends andtelecommunications. These three spheres of activity represent the major as-pects of human social life, with telecommunicative interactions represent-ing the new lifestyles influenced by globalization.
The equation defines two essential elements. First is an initial rating of aperson’s tendency to interact with similar (or different) others in any of theaforementioned spheres of activity. The second is a weighting method forthese initial rates, in proportion to the time and importance assigned toeach sphere of activity. In order to permit weighting on a meaningful scale,an initial proportion p is re-expressed in the logistic scale: log(p/(1-p)). Av-eraging initial proportions at different activity spheres and territorial basesis performed in much the same way that explanatory variables explain theprobability of an outcome in a logistic regression. The proportion variesmonotonically over the entire unbounded range around 0, and it is furtheranti-symmetric for this value. These indices, at each of the lowest levels, arethe logistically transformed number of the group’s members, ni, out of thenumber of alternative group members Ni, in the relevant territorial bases or
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activity spheres. Technically, a third value is added to set the transformedvalues at approximately their expected values for a sample from the logisticdistribution. This permits the use of the logistic transformation when ni =Ni or when ni = 0, (Tukey 1977).
The weighting process is essential to the characterisation of agents’ formsof regionalisation in their everyday life spaces, as well as for the assessmentof their overall segregation with respect to those spaces. They may involvetwo sets of weights: those that are time-related and those related to their rel-ative importance in an agent’s social life. The time set of weights measuresthe proportion of time the agent spends in each territorial base, and in eachdaily activity, out of the total number of socially active hours on an averageday. Similarly, two other sets of weights express the relative importance thatagents assign to each of these spatial and social settings. The informationleading to the weights is based on respondents’ answers to a questionnaire.Time spent at any territory and the relative importance assigned to it formtheir product Tr(i) Vr(i), which is then normalized by the sum of theseweights over all territorial bases. Similarly, time spent at activity a and therelative salience of that activity form their product Tq(i) Vq(i), which in turnis normalized by the sum of these weights over all activity spheres.
As a logarithmic function, values may range from minus to plus infinity,but they tend to be limited to values in the closed interval –5 and +5 inmost practical cases. Minus 5 represents a high degree of exposure to po-tential or actual inter-ethnic encounters, while +5 represents a high degreeof isolation from such encounters. We consider values between –1 and +1to represent mixed situations, in which the probabilities of an agent’s en-gaging in inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic encounters in everyday life spaces areapproximately equal. This analysis is followed by correlation analysis be-tween the different indices of segregation and seniority in Israel as well as
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Table 5.1. Segregation Model
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economic success in Israel in order to determine the extent to which thepattern of segregation is stable.
ARE MIGRANT WORKERS SEGREGATING IN SPACE?
Despite the fact that Tel Aviv is a highly ethnic city, it is striking to discoverthat traditional spatial segregation indices (i.e., the Dissimilarity Index orD.I.) are relatively low for most social groups. Only Arabs demonstrate aD.I. value similar to those characterizing non-white minorities in Europeancities (Domburg-de Rooij and Musterd 2002). Migrant workers’ index is al-ready lower than would be expected from their degree of marginalization inurban society and is similar to the degree of segregation of Jewish immi-grants from the Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union – e.g.Bukharans (Table 5.2).
Calculation of segregation indices for migrant workers in the suggestedmodel reveals a more complex picture. The distribution of migrant workersby residential segregation, presented in Figure 1, shows that segregation val-ues differ from high exposure to Israelis (values of –3.5) to high levels ofresidential segregation (+3.0). The majority (56 percent) experience resi-dential segregation with values higher than one. In addition, clear differ-ences between Latin American and African migrant workers may be seen.While the average Latin American experiences residential segregation (R.S)of -0.12, the average African experiences residential segregation of R.S. =+0.8, indicating a greater tendency of Africans to live in close proximity toother Africans.
Territorially, Figure 2 presents a bifurcated distribution with one group ofprotagonists highly exposed to Israelis in performing their daily activities,while the larger group (about 50 percent) tend to perform their daily activ-ities in mixed spaces in which some priority is given to members of theirethnic group while still being exposed to members of other groups (values
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Figure 5.1. Migrant Workers by Residential Segregation
Figure 5.2. Migrant Workers by Territorial Segregation
around –1 to +1). The percentage of those who perform their daily activi-ties in segregated spaces reaches only approximately 7 percent. Latin Amer-icans demonstrate a stronger tendency to desegregate in their activity spacesrelative to Africans. Africans’ average degree of territorial segregation (T.S.)is -0.36, compared to T.S.=-1.14 for the average Latin American. The differ-ence is due to the shorter range of Africans’ daily activity spaces relative tothose of Latin Americans. Approximately 80 percent of the frequently usedshopping and leisure activity destinations of Africans lie within a tenminute walk from the center of the migrant workers’ enclave in Neve
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She’anan, while only about ten percent of the destinations of Latin Ameri-cans lie within a comparable range of their residential enclaves. For LatinAmericans, about 70 percent of such destinations lie within a twentyminute walk from the center of migrant worker enclaves. The rest are moredistant, where migrant workers have high probabilities of encounteringIsraelis. In contrast, the center of the African enclave in Neve She’anan hasbecome a meeting point for migrant workers from the entire metropolitanarea and even beyond, transforming it during the evenings into a relativelysegregated space. Furthermore, Africans spend more time in ethnic placeswithin their neighborhoods like churches, in which they are highly segre-gated for the evenings. Only work is highly distributed in space, with mostmigrant workers availing themselves of their proximity to the city’s CentralBus Station, from which they travel to work throughout the Tel Aviv metro-politan area, sometimes commuting relatively long distances. ManyAfricans work at domestic jobs in Jewish homes, yet Africans do not men-tion their employers as meaningful others in the work place. Latin Ameri-cans, in contrast, tend to work with Israelis and make friends with them (cf.Rosenthal, this volume).
In terms of interactive segregation (I.S.; see Figure 3), about 60 percent ofmigrant workers are segregated with only about one quarter being exposedto Israelis. In this case, the gap between Latin Americans and Africans iseven deeper. The average Latin American experiences an index of I.S.=-0.25,meaning that she has some Israeli contacts, while the average African expe-riences an index of I.S.=+1.16, meanings that she has developed quite seg-regated social networks.
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Figure 5.3. Migrant Workers by Interactive Segregation
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In comparing the results for the three dimensions of segregation, we cansee that while the majority of migrant workers perform their daily activitiesin mixed spaces where they have a high probability of encountering bothother migrants and Israelis, they tend to live in segregated residentialblocks. Also, the majority of migrants maintain segregated social networks.This study also leads to the conclusion that there are only partial associa-tions among the three dimensions of segregation. Residential segregationhas no impact on territorial and interactive segregation, with correlation co-efficients of less than R=0.2. The fact that residential segregation does notpredict the other two indices supports my argument first, that the three di-mensions of segregation must be measured separately, and second, that res-idential space is no longer the most significant factor in understanding seg-regation. Territorial and social segregation, however, are partly correlatedwith a coefficient of R=0.39. This is due to the tendency of many migrantworkers to maintain their communal lives among neighbors and in privatehomes in order to avoid exposure to the Immigration Police in the streets.
Factors that increase or decrease the tendency toward segregation, asreflected in the components of the indices for the average Latin Ameri-can and African, are summarized in Table 5.3. Each contributing factor isthe total of the initial segregation and the relative weights, as suggestedin the segregation indices. The table shows that the interactive segrega-tion of Africans may be explained mainly by their tendency to assign ahigh weight to friends and to spend long hours with African friends afterwork. Even at work they remain segregated, despite the fact that they as-sign their workplace relatively low weight. In comparison, Latin Ameri-cans assign lower salience to their South American friends, while assign-ing greater importance to their chances to get to know Israelis at work.Latin Americans perceive their search for Israeli friends at work as a ma-jor lever for assimilation, which has a vast impact on their lower degrees
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Table 5.3. Contribution of the various components of segregation
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of segregation. In the case of territorial segregation, both groups are notsegregated due to their long hours at work outside their home areas.However, the groups differ in terms of Africans’ tendency to segregateboth at home and after work whereas Latin Americans tend to encounterIsraelis as well.
While migrant workers constitute a majority in the urban enclave insouth Tel Aviv centered around the neighborhood of Neve She’anan (or diduntil the mass deportation campaign initiated in 2002), they have nottended to create mono-ethnic residential spaces. Many Jews continue to liveand work in these neighborhoods, with more than 70 percent of the build-ings inhabited by households from more than one ethnic group. Thismeans that anyone leaving his apartment, even for a short distance, has afair probability of encountering people from other ethnic groups, althoughin practice the majority of migrant workers develop segregated social net-works. In conclusion, Tel Aviv seems to present a model of both an ethnicand a heterogeneous city, in which there is no isomorphism among thethree dimensions of segregation.
THE TEMPORAL DIMENSION OF SEGREGATION
Migrant workers’ settlement can be expected to comprise four stages: (1)migration as temporary workers who plan to save capital for about threeyears in order to improve their situation in their country of origin; (2) de-lay in return due to changes in expectations or failure to fulfill them in duetime; (3) struggle for integration in the host society in which migrant work-ers may campaign for improvements in their income and for closing in-come gaps between them and local workers; and (4) absorption of migrantworkers in the host society (Schnell and Benjamini 1999). The results of thesurvey among 200 African and Latin American migrant workers in Tel Aviv-Jaffa show that assuming that in 1994–2002 the number of migrant work-ers in the city has remained relatively stable, many do not leave Israel afterthree years. Only 34 percent had entered Israel in the two years prior to thesurvey. One third lived in Israel for three to five years and 25 percent for sixto eight years. Seven percent lived in Israel for more than ten years, mean-ing that they were from the first cohort of migrant workers in Israel.
Duration of stay in Israel does not affect degree of segregation, as the dif-ferent coefficients imply they are close to zero. The same applies to eco-nomic mobility. The economic situation of migrant workers has not beenimproving by length of stay in Israel (Table 5.4). The highest income, of4,250 New Israeli Shekels (NIS) per month on average (approximatelyUS$975), is paid to workers who have been in Israel for three to five years,which means that during their first five years, the average income grows ap-
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proximately 120 NIS per month (US$27), on average. Beyond this period,however, the average income drops by about 100 NIS (US$23) per month.Furthermore, the gap between the more and less successful increases signif-icantly. This means that while some migrant workers experience economicmobility, the majority who stay in Israel over five years experience eco-nomic deterioration. This result confirms our argument that the more suc-cessful migrant workers return to their home countries, while many who re-main for longer periods are the less successful, i.e., those who have failed tosave enough. This tendency is also confirmed in migrant workers’ subjectiveevaluations of their economic success. Among the newcomers who havelived in Israel for less than two years, 41 percent feel successful. This per-centage increases to 53 during the third to the fifth years, but drops to 39percent among those who live in Israel for six to eight years and 30 percentamong those who have lived in Israel more than eight years.
DISCUSSION
Migrant workers’ patterns of segregation, economic mobility, and integra-tion in society are central issues for cities in the Western industrializedworld. Present empirical studies of residential segregation based on dissim-ilarity indices reveal that some levels of segregation characterize Europeanand Israeli cities in the same way, while North American cities are evenmore segregated (Domburg-de Rooij and Musterd 2002). Yet the current re-search shows that most ethnic individuals confront much more mixed mi-lieux and that the relation between spatial segregation and social integra-tion could not find any significant impact of space on integration (Lyons2003). One major deficit of these studies is the treatment of spatial segre-gation as residential segregation, which neglects the ethnic composition of
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Table 5.4. Distribution of income by years in Israel
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individuals’ different activity spaces and social networks that may be lessgrounded. Therefore, we have examined the impact of space on integrationby introducing the new concepts of territorial and interactive in addition toresidential segregation. A parallel study conducted in Bremen, Germany(Taubman and Schnell 2004), exposes highly heterogeneous residentialpatterns of Turks and ethnic Germans with low residential segregation in-dices in both cities. These results confirm growing voices that reject theChicago School tradition, which assumes widely homogeneous ethnicneighborhoods (Schnell forthcoming). Furthermore, a lack of correlationbetween residential and territorial segregation confirms that an analysis ofspatial segregation only on the basis of residential segregation would neg-lect the fact that many ethnic residents of the neighborhoods studied in TelAviv and in Bremen are highly exposed to daily life spaces beyond their res-idential vicinities. Ethnic communities, like most neighborhoods in bothcountries, therefore cannot be understood as closed entities with social in-teraction limited within their borders.
Both in Israel and in Germany, high variability of the segregation indicesamong members of all ethnic categories has been measured, thus challeng-ing the tendency to treat them as cohesive social groups. This means thatethnic and class groups cannot be treated as the building blocks of socialspace. Rather, many individuals develop their own patterns of behaviour in-dependently of their supposedly ethnic reference groups. Therefore, we sug-gest starting any study by analyzing individuals’ segregation as a prelimi-nary stage for aggregation.
As in these studies, the influence of residential and territorial segregationon interactive segregation and economic mobility proved insignificant.Most migrants in both countries had only a low number of contacts withmembers of the host society whether they live in segregated or desegregatedneighborhoods. Most migrants seek to develop such contacts, but differentethnic groups found it easier or more difficult to do so. This means thatboth host society and migrant workers’ openness to interethnic integrationmay influence migrant workers’ integration in society. Africans in Israel andTurks in Germany find it more difficult to develop interethnic interactionsthan Latin American migrant workers and ethnic Germans respectively. Re-garding the impact of segregation on economic mobility, we found for thegroup of African migrant workers a weak but significant positive correlationbetween interactive segregation and level of income. For the South Ameri-can migrant workers, no such correlation was found as in the German case.These results show that the quality of interethnic contacts in terms of theirpotential to advance economic mobility should have been considered: aquestion that was not tackled in either study. However, the results empha-size that mainly among closer groups, intra-ethnic networks may play a pos-itive role in opening limited economic opportunities for migrant workers.
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Finally, comparison with the German case study leads to the conclusionthat structural barriers regarding both social integration and economic suc-cess seem to have a considerably stronger impact than segregation evenwhen our elaborated indices are used. Still, the fact that migrants’ daily ac-tivity spaces, as we have seen, are in no way limited by the boundaries ofethnic neighborhoods and, as such, create opportunities for contact withhost society members does not automatically lead to greater social, andtherefore greater economic, integration. This seems to be the case evenmany years after migrants’ arrival within the two countries under investiga-tion here.
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IIIIRREGULAR MIGRATION AND HEALTH
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Migrant workers’ civic rights and their entitlement to services such as edu-cation and health care are among the main issues facing host states whenabsorbing immigrants, and the responses developed throughout the late1980s and 1990s show a significant rate of national variation. In the fieldof health care, responses range from the denial of rights to the provision ofa minimum basket of health care services. Differences among health carepolicies for migrant workers in different countries result mostly from the in-teraction between the specific concepts of citizenship in each state and theinternationalization of rights, which would allow for a “post-national” cit-izenship (cf. Mundlak, this volume; Rosenhek, this volume). The presentchapter compares the development of the right to health care for migrantworkers in Israel, Spain, and Germany in order to better understand the re-lationship among immigration, citizenship, and access to health care. Ourclaim is that the development of health care policies toward migrant work-ers involves contradictory trends that result from the interaction amongeach country’s particular conception of citizenship and other logics (i.e. ra-tionales guiding practices and policies) relevant to the health care field. Inthe Israeli case, the ethnonational conception of citizenship still plays thedominant—though not unique—role in the development of health careservices for migrant workers.
We have chosen Spain as a comparative model since both Israel and Spainhave similar levels of socioeconomic development as measured by per capitagross domestic product (GDP) and the United Nations’ Human Develop-ment Index. Moreover, both countries have experienced a significant increase
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6Rights, Citizenship, and theNational State
Health Policies toward Migrant Workers inComparative Perspective1
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in labor migration since the 1990s. We have included Germany as our sec-ond test case since Germany shares with Israel an ethnonational conceptionof citizenship and, as such, since their immigration regimes are relativelysimilar.
In the first section, the chapter discusses the current literature on nationaland post-national citizenship and the different logics that interact to shapemigrant workers’ access to health care. The second section presents the de-velopment of access to health care in Spain and Germany. The third sectionshows how health care services for migrant workers were developed in Is-rael. Finally, in the conclusion we discuss the differences among the threecases and what can we learn from the comparison.
NATIONAL/POST-NATIONAL CITIZENSHIP AND HEALTH
The parallel processes of growing migration and the expansion of rightshave led to a debate about the place of national citizenship and the specificcharacteristics of each national state in the development of rights for mi-grant populations. One perspective maintains that while migration doeschallenge nation-states, the decisive factors in determining migrants’ accessto health care are each nation’s citizenship policies and conceptions of na-tional belonging (Brubaker 1992). An opposing perspective, stemmingmainly from studies of the development of migrant rights in postwar West-ern Europe, emphasizes “post-national” citizenship as a concept that hasbeen based on the transnational expansion of individual rights. Accordingto this view, globalization processes such as migration and the developmentof an international framework of human rights have modified the tradi-tional nation-state, thereby decoupling the two major traditional compo-nents of citizenship: identity and rights. This process, in turn, introducednew forms of belonging as well as an alternative basis for claims and enti-tlements leading to the “increased incorporation of foreigners into existingmembership schemes” (Soysal 1996: 18). Soysal claims that in Europe themajority of immigrants have permanent resident status, are entitled to fullcivil rights, and have access to a set of social services and economic rightsalmost identical to those available to national citizens (ibid. 20). These newforms of post-national citizenship imply multiplicity of membership,meaning that while the distribution of rights among different immigrantgroups and citizens is not uniform, the nation-state’s conception of citizen-ship is no longer the sole criterion for inclusion.
Yet, as Castles and Davidson have shown, we should not be too optimisticregarding ideas of “post-national” citizenship. While international humanrights conventions establish international standards and rights, these con-ventions are not always ratified, and even when ratified they are not always
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implemented or incorporated into national legislation (Castles and David-son 2000: 95). Thus, it seems that the situation, as Lydia Morris argues, can-not be “readily construed as either national closure or post-national expan-sion” (2003: 75). While social benefits for immigrants have been expanded,at least partially, citizenship still plays a central role in building a multi-tiered structure that differentiates among citizens, permanent residents, tem-porary residents, and immigrants without visas (Demleitner 1998).
Research on migrants’ health should explore the concrete ways in whichthe transnational expansion of rights interacts with national variables in or-der to shape the concrete ways in which rights and entitlements are imple-mented. More specifically, the development of health care services for mi-grant workers shows that while there are areas in which migrant workers’access to health care services has expanded, there are still clear differencesbetween their entitlement to health care services and that of citizens (De Lu-cas 2001; Filc and Davidovitch 2005; Scott 2004). As we have describedelsewhere, the scope, quality and accessibility of health care services for mi-grant workers are framed by the interaction among five different logics orrationales guiding policies and practices: the conception of citizenship, thelogic of the labor market, the logic of health care, the logic of cost-contain-ment, and the logic of rights. These logics interact within three differentspheres: state, market, and civil society (Filc and Davidovitch 2005).
In the next sections we discuss how the aforementioned logics have in-teracted to shape the development of health care services for migrant work-ers in Spain, Germany, and finally in Israel.
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES
Spain
Since the mid 1980s, Spain has become a destination for immigration. AsWestern European countries’ immigration policies became harsher, Spain’sstatus as a preferred target for immigration from poor countries grew forboth cultural and geographical reasons. Its geographical location—as abridge between Africa and Europe—as well as Spain’s particular culturallink with Latin America make it a preferred destination for immigrants. InSpain today there are slightly more than one million documented immi-grants and another half a million who are undocumented. Migration isgrowing at an annual rate of 15 percent, and in certain areas, including theAutonomy of Catalunia and the Community of Madrid, annual growth isover 20 percent (Val Combelles and Garcia Algar 2004).
The first law aiming to regulate immigration was legislated in 1985, mostlyin response to the market and to the restrictive logic of Spain’s immigration
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regime. The law approached immigration mostly as a temporary phenome-non and regarded immigrants first and foremost as workers (Peréz 2003).These two logics—the prevalence of the labor market and the immigrationregime’s logic—had detrimental effects on the health status of migrants,who were represented as a threat to public health and a source of unneces-sary increases in national health expenditure. Migrant workers had access tohealth care only through private insurance or in the case of life-threateningconditions. Within this framework, health care services for migrant workersdeveloped within the interaction between local governments and non-gov-ernment organizations (NGOs). To cope with the situation and regain aminimum of control over public health consequences—including the pre-vention of tuberculosis (TB), HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections(STIs), and other infectious diseases—metropolitan administrations in par-ticular, in cooperation with humanitarian organizations like MedicusMundi and Caritas, established health centers for migrant workers. How-ever, this solution severely limited migrant workers’ access to health caresince they did not provide the same scope and quality of services as offeredwithin the Spanish public health care system. Moreover, there were only afew such centers in most provinces, making access difficult. Paradoxically,this solution was illogical from a health costs point of view since integrat-ing migrants into the existing the health system would have cost less thanfinancing new institutions.
As immigration became a broader and more permanent phenomenon, asecond law was legislated which incorporated the logic of rights and, in thearticle concerning access to health care, the logics of public health and costcontainment as well. This was the Law on the Rights and Freedoms of Foreign-ers in Spain and their Integration (Law 4/2000), which went into force on Jan-uary 12, 2000.
Article 12 of the law guarantees pregnant women, minors, and undocu-mented migrants who are registered at town halls equal access and qualityof health care to that enjoyed by Spanish citizens. It also guarantees all im-migrants—regardless of their legal status—treatment for urgent, life-threat-ening diseases and accidents. Treatment is not limited to life-saving proce-dures, but rather includes all treatments for the condition specified untilhospital dismissal.
While the 2000 law considerably expanded migrant workers’ rights tohealth care, it still discriminates against undocumented migrant workersand has been criticized for adopting a model close to the German Gastar-beiter (guestworker) model, meaning that workers are treated as providersof cheap labor who will then disappear without leaving any imprint on so-ciety (De Lucas 2001).
Since the law’s preconditions are the possession of a passport and a hous-ing contract, certain undocumented groups are unable to register and, as
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such, still lack access to health care. Different NGOs have continued tomanage a number of special health care centers focusing on those groups,exemplifying the intersection between state and civil society in the provi-sion of health care services.
The rights guaranteed by the 2000 law have been expanded at the locallevel, providing another example of the interaction both between nationaland local government and between state and civil society. In the commu-nity of Andalucia, for instance, an agreement was made between the An-dalucian Department of Health, NGOs (such as the Fundacion Progreso ySalud, the Federacion Andalucia Acoge, the Andalucian Red Cross ) andtrade unions (such as the General Workers Union Trade Union—UGT andthe Trade Union Confederation of Workers Commissions—CCOO) toguarantee access to the health care system. There, an undocumented mi-grant worker can access health centers either directly or using a referral cardobtained at a participating organization.
The communities of Valencia and Navarra went one step further. Thehealth authorities of the Autonomous Community of Valencia recently in-troduced a “Solidarity Card” that enables undocumented immigrants livingin this region to receive the same medical care as other citizens. This solu-tion ensures that all residents have access to public health services irrespec-tive of their legal status. Immigrants’ personal details are registered in filesthat are available to all public health centers.
In 2000, Navarra passed a law that extended health care access to all peo-ple living within its community, specifically addressing undocumented mi-grants. The body of the law makes it clear that the two logics guiding it arethe logic of rights and the logic of public health. The law states that lack ofaccess to health care services deprives immigrants of “a basic human right,the right to health care, recognized by the Constitution.” Furthermore, thelaw states that undocumented migrants’ lack of access to health care ser-vices, “represents a risk for public health, since it does not allow for diseaseprevention and sanitary education” (Ley Foral 2000).
At the national level, however, recent years have witnessed the strength-ening of the logic of the labor market in combination with the logic of im-migration control. In particular, the Foreigners Law was modified in 2003.The new law emphasizes integration into the labor market but not into so-ciety as a whole and expands disciplinary measures, including deportation.The new measures include a fast-track systematic expulsion procedure for il-legal residents, expansion of the right to detain migrants undergoing ex-pulsion proceedings in detention centers, and expansion of the possibilityof expelling foreigners against whom charges have been brought in Spanishcourts. The law substitutes residence permits and employment permits withvisas serving as authorization to work and reside in Spain. While this re-form to the law does not explicitly modify the right to health care, the
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harshening of the immigration regime has resulted in limitations on un-documented migrants’ access to health care. The new law’s third articlecompels local governments to provide data to the police about undocu-mented migrants registered at town halls. This is a disincentive for migrantsto register, and since registration at town hall is a precondition for access tohealth care services, the new law de facto limits undocumented migrants’ ac-cess to health care.
Germany
After World War II, West Germany had one of the highest immigrationrates among industrialized countries. In the decade after World War II, ex-pelled persons from former German territories and repatriated soldiers wereintegrated into the labor economy (Elkeles and Seifert 1996). Since thissource of labor dried up abruptly after the construction of the Berlin Wall in1961, the West German government, in cooperation with industry, started torecruit foreign workers in Mediterranean countries in the context of a guest-worker program designed to keep up a rotation of workers and prevent themfrom settling permanently (Castles and Miller 2003). After the oil crisis in1973, the German government stopped this recruitment of foreign labor.
The fall of the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1980s and the opening ofborders between Eastern and Western Europe marked the beginning of alarge migration process affecting Europe as a whole. Germany became oneof the main countries of destination. Between 1989 and 2002, almost 2.9million persons of ethnic German origin—so-called Aussiedler (resettlers)coming mainly from the former Soviet Union, Poland, and Romania—ar-rived in the country (Ronellenfitsch and Razum 2004).
Germany’s interpretation of citizenship has been based upon descent,and immigration policy has focused upon groups with German ethnicbackgrounds. Yet even when the arrival of immigrants with no German eth-nic background was accepted, there were still major differences in the inte-gration of different ethnic groups. While ethnic Germans are privileged be-cause they have the right to citizenship upon arrival to Germany and arealso entitled to various integration measures, other immigrant groups maynot be granted citizenship, even in the case of second or third generationoffspring (Seifert 1997). In some respects, this immigration regime resem-bles the Israeli ethnonational concept of citizenship.
In order to better understand German health policy regarding migrantworkers, one should keep in mind the unique characteristics of the Germanhealth system. Germany relies on labor market-based financing and ad-ministration of the health care system. Membership in social health insur-ance is mandatory for employed persons whose earnings are less than astate-determined ceiling. This scheme is based mainly on private employer-
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based coverage supplemented by coverage for the elderly that is financedlargely through payroll taxes. In its reliance on employment as a source ofhealth insurance, the German system views the worker as the primarysource of health insurance for a circle of dependents: spouse, children, re-tirees, and those temporarily unemployed.2
Estimates of the number of undocumented migrants in Germany rangefrom 150,000 to 1.5 million (Martin 2003: 49). In larger cities such asBerlin and Cologne, estimates are 100,000 and 20,000 respectively (Scott2004). Unlike some of its EU neighbors such as Greece and Italy, Germanyhas not conducted legalization programs thus far, and this issue has noteven been given serious political attention. Such programs have been re-jected with the argument that this would act as a pull factor for undocu-mented migrants and counteract immigration policy (Cyrus and Vogel2003: 16). In addition, the German Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS or German Bor-der Guard) has one of the largest border patrol staffs in Europe and activelyencourages citizens to denounce suspected “illegal” migrants via a free tele-phone hotline. Police in the late 1990s located between 130,000 and140,000 foreigners per year who were suspected of being unlawfully in thecountry (Martin 2003: 51).
As in other countries, undocumented migrants are singled out in Germanpublic discourse with terms like “illegal aliens” and closely linked withcriminal activities and the undermining the state’s authority. Most undocu-mented migrants are visa-overstayers. Legalization programs, marriages,and the granting of refugee status are a few of the limited possibilities forthe undocumented to regularize their status.
Since the labor market in Germany is highly regulated, sanctions againstboth employers and employees show their effect. Any type of employmentin Germany must be reported both to the tax office and to one of the pub-lic health insurance agencies. Employers are required to pay half of socialsecurity payments and to deduct these payments and all of their employees’taxes. Thus it can pay, for both the employer and the employee, if the em-ployment is not registered with the tax and social security agencies. Chil-dren of non-citizens cannot simply be sent to school. German law requiresthat immigrants apply to schools through the municipality, which checkson the children’s and parents’ immigration status. Additionally, teachersand principals are obligated to report any change in the immigration statusof their students to the immigration authorities.3
Thus by virtue of their “illegalized” status, undocumented migrants inGermany are essentially excluded from the health care system and are un-able to enjoy their right to health. Even though employers are theoreticallyobligated to pay social security payments, they do not do so becausethrough these payments the irregular employment would be detected. Pay-ing medical bills in cash is also possible, but the prohibitive costs of health
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care do not make this a viable option for undocumented migrants. Therehave been reports from Berlin construction sites that workers who are in-jured on the job are put into a van and driven to a hospital across the Pol-ish border to avoid trouble and high hospital bills. Other migrants againrely on their social networks and either consult doctors who are acquain-tances or borrow insurance cards from family and friends. Those who can-not rely on social networks often try to ignore their illnesses and frequentlyend up in emergency rooms (Stöbbe 1998).
In theory, undocumented migrants can obtain medical care and financialsupport through the Social Welfare Center since by law they are considered“persons obligated to leave the country.” This classification also means theyare subject to Article 4 of the Asylum Seeker Benefits Law— Asylbewerber-leistungsgesetz (AsylblG) which does allow restricted care for acute healthconditions. However, other laws make it impossible for undocumented mi-grants to make such claims without risking deportation. The first of these isArticle 87 of the Aufenthaltsgesetz (Residence Act) or AufenthG, which stip-ulates that any member of an official board who has information on an in-dividual without a valid residence permit must pass this on to the Ministryof the Interior. Public servants, therefore, have a “duty to denounce” all un-documented migrants voluntarily at risk of being penalized if they do not.
A second legal hindrance that effectively blocks undocumented migrants’right to access health care is Article 96 of the AufenthG, which clearly statesthat anyone who helps an individual without a regular residence permit canbe punished. In the domain of health care, this article effectively means thatalthough medical doctors are bound to assist anyone in need, this assis-tance is illegal and punishable by law (cf. Castañeda, this volume).
When illness occurs, the initial response of undocumented migrants is torely on self-medication, consulting members of their own network orhealth professionals from their communities if they exist (Braun and Wür-flinger 2001: 7). It is only when these strategies fail that undocumented mi-grants risk seeking professional help, sometimes by borrowing the insur-ance card of a trusted friend or family member.
In recognition of these practices, human rights networks in a number ofcities refer “illegalized” migrants to sympathetic doctors who treat them forfree or provide more extensive treatments for a minimal fee (Kieser, et al.2000: 9). In Berlin, the Büro für medizinische Flüchtlingshilfe (Office of Med-ical Assistance for Refugees) was established in 1996 as a non-governmen-tal resource providing free and anonymous medical treatment twice a weekto undocumented migrants and refugees. This professional network com-prises volunteer physicians, midwives, therapists and interpreters. There arenow ten similar offices in Germany all loosely connected by the “Kein Men-sch is illegal” (“No one is illegal”) campaign (Scott 2004). In addition, somecharity and church organizations are extending their medical aid to include
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“illegalized migrants” as well as the homeless. Since February 2001, theCatholic charity Malteser Hilfsdient has offered a medical service free ofcharge without verifying the patients’ residence status. These initiatives toprovide medical support for “illegalized migrants” are in fact illegal underthe AufenthG but, as Kieser et al (2000: 9) write, this is generally toleratedby the authorities due to a concern “for the people’s health.” Here we cansee the contradictory nature of the development of migrant health policies.
For infectious diseases there is the possibility for undocumented mi-grants to take advantage of some health care measures. The new law for in-fectious diseases (Infektionsschutzgesetz) stipulates that some infections suchas TB are diagnosed and treated anonymously and free of charge at publichealth offices. Vaccinations for children are also offered by some cooperat-ing public health services without verification of residence status. Sexuallytransmitted diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea are diagnosed anony-mously and free of charge, and some are also treated by the STI departmentsof the public health office. HIV/AIDS testing is also anonymous and free,yet the cost of treatment is not covered unless migrants have at least a Dul-dung—a special temporary visa usually awarded to asylum seekers who havebeen rejected but who cannot be deported. This special visa entitles the mi-grant to highly restricted eligibility for health care, which includes reim-bursement of expenses from the Social Welfare Center. Undocumentedwomen are also able to legalize their residence status by applying for a Dul-dung. The temporary visa is issued on the grounds that they are unable totravel due to medical reasons, and it entitles them to pre-natal and post-na-tal care. The newborn child will also receive a birth certificate if the motherpossesses a valid residence permit. Once this legally protected period isover, however, both the woman and her child lose their residence status,and since the authorities know their names and address, they are likely tobe deported (see Castaneda, this volume, for an ethnographic examinationof this issue).
Hospitals, emergency units and general practitioners are obligated by lawto provide medical treatment regardless of health insurance or residencystatus. Some politicians cite this law as evidence of the adequacy of medicalcare available to undocumented migrants (Braun and Würflinger 2001: 8).However, the experience of undocumented migrants seriously challengesthis perception. If an individual is unable to provide a valid insurance card,the hospital administration usually tries to find another person or institu-tion that will sign documentation assuming responsibility for the cost oftreatment, usually even before treatment has commenced (cf. Adout, thisvolume). The undocumented migrant may unwittingly declare him/herselfas a private patient as a way of sidestepping this issue, which increases thecost of treatment significantly. Other reported hospital practices include re-taining personal documents of patients, such as passports, in an effort to
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ensure payment; calling the police at the point of admission in order to as-certain residence and insurance status before treatment begins; and arrang-ing “deportation” of undocumented patients at their own cost by sendingthem by ambulance to countries such as Poland or Ukraine, since trans-portation is less expensive than hospital treatment in Germany. All of thesepractices lead many undocumented migrants to discharge themselves fromhospitals before treatment is complete for fear of being deported.
The net result is that planned hospital treatments such as operations orthe treatment of chronic diseases like diabetes are not available to undocu-mented migrants. In the event of non-payment, hospitals may ask the So-cial Welfare Center to refund the costs of treating an uninsured person re-gardless of their residence status. Yet this is a highly complicated andtime-consuming bureaucratic procedure with an uncertain outcome. Onlya few hospitals have created social funds or special agreements for treatingundocumented migrants (Braun & Würflinger, 2001:9).
By “illegalizing” undocumented migrants, criminalizing assistance tothem, and requiring their ‘denunciation’ by all governmental and public in-stitutions, the German government has created a web of laws that effectivelyexclude undocumented migrants from claiming their human rights, in-cluding their right to health. The de facto discrimination experienced by un-documented migrants regarding access to health care in Germany is con-trary to the principles of equality and non-discrimination informing theright to health.
DEVELOPMENT OF HEALTH CARE SERVICES FOR MIGRANT WORKERS IN ISRAEL
Migrant workers began arriving in Israel in significant numbers in the early1990s. The reasons for this new phenomenon were the need to replacePalestinian workers, Israel’s economic growth, and the consequent devel-opment of a low-wage, hard labor service sector as well as the globalchanges that cause huge migratory movements from poor to rich countries(see also Raijman and Kemp, this volume).
This wave of migrant workers has presented Israel with a new social phe-nomenon. While some workers remain in Israel only for brief periods,many reside for long periods of time and have become part of Israeli soci-ety. This new community—or, more accurately, communities—has createdan urgent need for policy responses.
As a result of the dominant role of Israel’s ethnonational conception ofcitizenship and the needs of the labor market, access to health care serviceshas been differently constructed for documented and undocumented mi-grant workers. However, as we will show in the next section, the immigra-
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tion regime and the labor market logic have not been the sole factors shap-ing migrant workers’ access to health care. The development of health careservices for migrant workers in Israel has been the contradictory result ofthe combination of the five aforementioned logics at levels of the state, themarket, and civil society.
Documented Migrant Workers
As addressed elsewhere in this volume, Israel adopted a contract labor sys-tem (the “binding arrangement”) in relation to documented migrant work-ers in which rigid contract labor frameworks restrict migrant workers’ free-dom of employment and, as a consequence, severely constrict even theirmost basic rights. This approach also affects their entitlement to health careservices. While the law compelled employers to provide health care insur-ance for documented migrant workers, the actual scope of services was muchnarrower and more restricted than the services provided to Israeli citizens bythe National Health Insurance (NHI) law. This resulted from the combinedeffect of the ethnonational conception of citizenship (which maintained seg-regation between citizens and non-Jewish immigrants), the logic of publichealth (in order to prevent the spread of contagious diseases) and the labormarket logic, acting at the interface between market and state. In contradic-tion to the cost-containment logic, the insurance policies available were verylimited, emphasizing hospitalization over primary care coverage. Moreover,insurance companies found easy ways of avoiding responsibility for care,such as sending the migrant worker back to his/her country of origin, or—since insurance must be renewed every year—denying coverage for pre-exist-ing conditions even if the disease was contracted while the migrant workerwas insured by the same company while working in Israel.
This state of affairs was modified with the passage in 2000 of a ForeignWorkers’ Law that included a section dedicated to health care insurance.The law, which modified the health insurance requirements for docu-mented migrant workers, was the result of the convergence of the logics ofrights, public health, and the ethnonational conception of citizenship. Thepressure of human rights organizations supporting a universal conceptionof rights, on one hand, and the awareness of migrants’ health care needsamong the professional strata at the Ministry of Health (MOH), on theother, suggested that the existing arrangement opposed the logic of publichealth needs and eventually led the government to modify the law. How-ever, the dominant character of the ethnonational conception of citizenshipled the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) to opt for a solution that maintainsthe separation between citizens and non-citizens.
The law established that employers must provide documented migrantworkers with private health insurance coverage similar to the basket of
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health services guaranteed to Israelis by the NHI law—with the exceptionsof infertility treatment and chronic diseases unrelated to work. The govern-ment could have opted for a more inclusive alternative by extending thebenefits of the NHI law to documented migrant workers, which would havemade sense according to the logics of public health and cost containment.Since the migrant worker population is young and generally healthy, the de-duction of the health tax from their wages would contribute to the financ-ing of the public health care system. The utilization of existing public facil-ities is more cost-efficient than subcontracting private facilities by privateinsurers, and the concentration of health services for the whole populationin the same public sick funds, or HMOs, would have made the implemen-tation of public health policies easier. Thus, the fact that legislators chose toprovide health care services for documented migrant workers outside theframework of the public health care system reflects the dominance of theethnonational conception of citizenship and the resultant immigrationregime over other logics, including the logic of cost-containment.
While the law represented an improvement over the previous state of af-fairs, it still discriminates against documented migrant workers. They areentitled to health care services only in their capacity as workers, makingclear the central role of the labor market logic in the development of healthcare services for migrant workers. The main consideration is the labor mar-ket’s need for a cheap, healthy working force. Thus, chronic conditions un-related to work are not covered by the mandatory health insurance. More-over, if a worker’s disease impedes his/her eventual return to work, theinsurance company is freed from its responsibility and can still replace cov-erage of treatment by paying for a ticket to send the person back to his/hercountry of origin. In addition, once an employee falls ill, the employer maynullify the policy and thus cancel his or her insurance coverage. Private in-surance companies, in trying to avoid payment, often exploit the subordi-nated situation of migrant workers by claiming that health problems forwhich they currently seek treatment are “pre-existing medical conditions.”
In sum, the improvement of documented migrant workers’ access tohealth care services is the result of the cost containment and public healthlogics acting at an intrastate level (involving the opposing interests of theMOH and the Ministry of Interior); of the labor market logic acting at thestate/market interface; and of the logic of rights acting at the interface be-tween state and civil society, all modulated by the dominant role of the eth-nonational conception of citizenship.
Undocumented Migrant Workers
Undocumented migrant workers, from the point of view of their healthstatus, represent a population at risk in terms of both the conditions they
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faced within their countries of origin and their living and working condi-tions in Israel. Yet, ironically, they enjoy very limited access to health careservices. As established by the Israeli Patient’s Rights Act (1996), they areentitled to life-saving procedures and emergency treatment. The process ini-tiated by the law, which led to the opening of Mother and Child Clinics forpreventive care for children, made the clinics accessible to pregnant undoc-umented women for prenatal care as well. The cost of hospitalization forbirth is supposed to be covered by the National Insurance Institute even ifthe mother is not legally employed, provided she has worked for more thansix months prior to delivery. In practice, however, hospitalization costs arecovered only when the employer has paid National Insurance fees, which isnot always the case for undocumented workers (Willen 2005).
Until 2003, undocumented migrant workers were entitled to treatmentfor work accidents. However, a recent amendment now excludes workerswithout permits from receiving such treatment. This decision is another ex-ample of the dominance of the ethnonational conception of citizenshipand the labor market’s need for cheap labor over other logics. In a contractlabor system such as Israel’s, the only way migrant workers have access todocumentation is through subordination to a specific employer. The denialof treatment for work accidents to undocumented workers is one moreform of subordinating workers to their employers and limiting their rightto freedom of employment.
Undocumented migrant workers have access to treatment for special con-ditions, such as antiretroviral treatment for pregnant women who are HIV-carriers, treatment for TB, and treatment for STIs. Treatment for STIs is pro-vided in clinics managed by the MOH, with the cooperation of localmunicipalities (in Tel Aviv and Haifa) and NGOs (especially Physicians forHuman Rights-Israel, or PHR). The provision of free treatment for STIs isanother example of how interaction between the city, the state, and civil so-ciety (the NGO) can shape the treatment of patients independent of theirlegal situation. The decision of the MOH to provide free treatment to STIcarriers regardless of legal status (in clear opposition to the government’sapproach to migrant workers) clearly stems from the public health logicand the attempt to control the spread of STIs among the population as awhole.
Undocumented workers almost completely lack access to primary andsecondary care as well as hospitalization. The public health care system isclosed to them (with the exceptions mentioned above), and access to pri-vate clinics and medical centers is limited. The alternatives available tothem include Palestinian hospitals and medical centers in East Jerusalem,which are cheaper, and the volunteer-run Physicians for Human RightsOpen Clinic in Tel Aviv, which offers a range of primary and secondary careservices to migrant workers lacking health insurance at little or no cost. The
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Open Clinic works in cooperation with Ichilov Hospital, owned by the cityof Tel Aviv, for the provision of a limited array of laboratory tests and med-ical imaging procedures at relatively low costs. However, the Open Clinic isfar from capable of addressing undocumented migrant workers’ full rangeof health care needs or providing continuity of treatment, which is basic inprimary care. Language and cultural barriers as well as fears of being de-tected by immigration authorities make access to health care even more dif-ficult.
Exclusionary policies toward undocumented migrant workers were ac-centuated with the government’s announcement in September 2002 of aharsh expulsion policy that involves arresting undocumented workers evenin the surroundings of public health care services. Fear of expulsion hasthus led undocumented workers to refrain from seeking treatment at pub-lic facilities and or even at NGOs. As a result of the expulsion policy, thenumber of visits to the PHR clinic decreased substantially. Comparing theperiods June through October 2002 with the same period in 2003, we seethat the number of new visits to the PHR clinic decreased from 1,092 to 797(almost a 30 percent decrease), and the number of total visits went downfrom 2,404 to 2,033 (a 17 percent decrease). Hence, this policy has had aclear negative impact on the health of undocumented migrant workers andpotentially on the health of the population of Israel as a whole. Once again,we can see the dominant role played by the ethnonational conception ofcitizenship—expressed most prominently in the immigration regime andthe exacerbation of exclusion represented by the policy of deportation—inshaping migrant workers’ access to health care services. The logics of publichealth, cost containment and human rights play only a marginal role.
Migrant Workers’ Children
From a health care perspective, children of undocumented migrants con-stitute a special group. Their singularity results from the influence of thelogic of rights on patterns of access, since the fact that Israel signed the in-ternational Covenant on Children’s Rights opened the way for a differenttrajectory in terms of pediatric health care services. The population of mi-grant workers’ children is a relatively small one. Since work permits are is-sued for relatively short periods and the Israeli immigration regime doesnot allow for the reunification of non-Jewish families, most documentedmigrant workers live without their families. Thus, the contract labor systemand the immigration regime play a key role in limiting the number of chil-dren of migrant workers. However, there are undocumented migrant work-ers—mostly from African, South-American and Filipino origin—who havebrought their children with them, or whose children were born in Israel.
Their undocumented condition and consequent fear of authority make it
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difficult to know the precise number of migrant workers’ children. There are1,500 children registered in the various services associated with the Tel AvivMunicipality. Yet, assuming that some 500 children living in Tel Aviv arenot registered in any system along with hundreds of families living in areasoutside Tel Aviv (the Tel Aviv periphery, Haifa, Jerusalem and Eilat), onemay cautiously estimate that the total number of children of migrant work-ers is in fact between 3,000 and 4,000. One estimate presented at a discus-sion of the Ministers’ Committee for Population Affairs indicated that thenumber of children of undocumented immigrants was 2,821 (Sa’ar 2004).
As a result of the exclusionary immigration regime, until February 2001migrant workers’ children’s entitlement to health care was limited. Theyhad access only to emergency medicine, under the protection of the Pa-tients’ Bill of Rights, and to developmental and preventive health servicesthrough Mother and Child Clinics. The provision of preventive health careto migrant workers’ children was an initiative of the Tel Aviv Municipality.According to the logic of public health, the city authorities and health offi-cers realized that to preserve the health of Tel Aviv’s population overall, theyshould provide immunization and preventive care for all children. The logicof rights led them to extend services to include developmental screening.Thus by January 2002, 1,016 families were receiving preventive care at theTel Aviv Mother and Child Clinics. The MOH subsequently followed TelAviv’s example and opened all Mother and Child Clinics throughout thecountry to the families of migrants. This process exemplifies how serviceshave developed in part via interaction between actors at the local and na-tional levels.
It is important to note that prior to February 2001, children of migrantworkers lacked access to pediatric primary care, specialist consultations, lab-oratory tests, medical imaging, pharmacological drugs, and hospitalization.Access to primary care was limited to the few families holding private healthcare insurance, to the Open Clinic managed by PHR, to primary care some-times provided voluntarily by physicians at the Mother and Child Clinics,and to private physicians. Secondary care and hospitalization were limitedto the few who held private insurance policies or to special arrangementswith the municipally owned Sourasky Medical Center mediated by PHR.The hospital’s decision to participate in this special arrangement is moti-vated by a combination of the public health logic, the cost containmentlogic (since hospitalization of migrant workers for emergencies was asource of the hospital’s uncollected debts), and pressure from human rightsactivists.
This situation changed in February 2001. As a result of human rights or-ganizations’ public and judiciary pressure, and in response to a proposedlaw that would have included all children under the NHI law, the MOHproposed a special arrangement with one of country’s four non-profit sick
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funds (Kupot Cholim) to provide health care services to children of migrantworkers. According to the new regulations, one of the sick funds provideshealth care insurance to children of migrant workers independent of theirlegal situation. Migrant workers are required to pay a monthly fee of aboutUS$40 for each of the first two children, with no additional charge for threeor more children. This fee gives children access to a “health basket” similarto the one guaranteed to Israeli children by the NHI law.
This new regulation undoubtedly represented an improvement over theprevious situation. However, by 2002 only 800 children (of an estimated3,000) were insured. Several factors explain the low number of children in-sured, including the relatively high cost of the insurance for migrant work-ers, who often earn less than minimum wage; fear of being registered in anyway and thereby becoming visible to the immigration authorities; and lackof familiarity with the concept of governmental insurance. The relatively lownumber of insured children ultimately works against the ethical imperativeto guarantee children access to health care regardless of their legal condition.This state of affairs contravenes the logic of public health since it delays di-agnosis and treatment of conditions that potentially threaten the health ofthe population as a whole. It is inefficient from an economic point of viewsince uninsured children are at higher risk of needing more sophisticatedand expensive treatment as a result of delays in diagnosis and postponedtreatment, and it puts an unnecessary burden on the HMO that insures mi-grant workers’ children since families with sicker children tend to purchaseinsurance while families with healthy children refrain from doing so.
While we can witness the interplay among the different logics, the exclu-sionary role of the ethnonational conception of citizenship and the immi-gration regime stills prevails. This role is still more marked in relation to un-documented migrant workers.
CONCLUSION
Immigrants, regardless of their legal status, are given contradictory messagesabout the extent to which they are valued in society. On one hand, manycountries encourage immigrants’ participation in the labor force, mainly inlower-skilled positions (e.g., farming and domestic work) yet also in higher-skilled positions (e.g., computer and medical sciences). On the other hand,immigrants’ contributions to the economy are not always valued suffi-ciently to ensure that they are afforded the workplace protections and soci-etal benefits made available to other workers.
The conception of citizenship plays a significant role in shaping migrantworkers’ entitlement to health care services. Citizenship can be consideredas ethnonational, cultural, or republican/territorial. Spain, which became a
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country of immigration only during the past two decades, tends to adopt acultural concept of citizenship (as expressed in the Autonomous Commu-nities’ stress on their languages and cultures). Germany and Israel share anethnonational conception of citizenship.
This study of the development of health care services for migrant workersshows contradictory trends. The access and quality of health care servicesfor documented migrant workers have improved over the past few years butare still far from satisfactory. Moreover, the improvement does not alter thefundamental separation between services for citizens and services for mi-grant workers. The situation of undocumented migrant workers has becomemuch worse. Both in Israel and in Germany, this has resulted from crimi-nalization of this subgroup and from the harshening of expulsion policies.Furthermore, in Israel and Germany, the development of the right to healthcare for migrant workers, while influenced by the logics of rights and pub-lic health, is still dominated by the ethnonational conception of citizen-ship. However, the improvements in the various countries described in thisarticle reaffirm the impression that we cannot understand the developmentof rights and entitlements for migrant workers as either the pure result ofthe nation-state or the development of a post-national conception of rightsand transnational personhood. In order to understand the concrete devel-opment of rights for migrant workers in specific countries, we must studyhow specific national conceptions of citizenship interact with current shiftstoward the universalization of rights while simultaneously taking into ac-count the needs and logic of labor markets and the logics relevant to dif-ferent social fields (including, in this case, the logics of public health andcost-containment).
The development of health policies for migrant worker populations canbe described as the result of interaction among different logics acting at theinterface of different spheres of the state and society. The first level of inter-action is the intersection between market and state, as employers are inter-ested in the cheap labor provided by migrants. In the Israeli case, employ-ers put pressure on the state to allow the entrance of migrant workers whocan provide cheap labor in sectors such as agriculture and construction. Em-ployers are interested in one of two options: either cheap private health in-surance, or public provision of health care through a scheme of public in-surance that would shift costs from the employers to the state.4 States, onthe other hand, tend to limit the inclusion of migrant workers in publichealth care systems. The second level of interaction takes place within thestate itself. This level of interaction, which is less salient in the Spanish andGerman cases, is expressed in Israel as a conflict between the MOH bu-reaucracy, which tries to find ways to provide minimal health care servicesto the migrant worker population (in accordance with the logics of publichealth and cost containment), and the Ministry of the Interior and its
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Immigration Department, which seeks to limit services to the population ofmigrant workers and which has, in recent years, focused on expelling un-documented migrant workers.
The third level of interaction takes place along the local/national axis, i.e.the city vis-à-vis the state. Most migrant workers live in metropolitan areas,or in specific communities (such as Berlin in Germany, Catalunia andMadrid in Spain, and the Tel Aviv metropolitan area in Israel). The fact thatmunicipalities must deal with this reality on a daily basis has led some mu-nicipal authorities to adopt a “population approach.” This approach stemsfrom the public health logic, where the goal is to provide a minimum levelof services to all of the city’s residents. In Spain, this led the municipalitiesto develop health care services for migrant workers even when they were notformally entitled to such services and—since the 2000 legislation which rec-ognizes the right to health care for many groups—to broaden entitlements.In Israel, city policies toward migrant workers, which accept residence as acriterion for entitlement, are thus in contradiction with the state’s policies,which attempt to constrict services and expel undocumented migrants (cf.Alexander, this volume). This decoupling of state and city policies is one ofthe characteristics of post-Fordist globalization.
The fourth level of interaction takes place at the interface between thestate and civil society. Civil rights organizations, building on the logic ofuniversal rights, put pressure on the state to recognize migrant workers’rights to health care and develop services of their own.
Taking into account the migratory forces resulting from uneven globaliza-tion processes and employers’ interest in a cheap labor force, migrant work-ers will continue to form part of Western societies in the foreseeable future.The need to provide for their health care needs will also continue to persist.While a comprehensive solution to the question of how best to providehealth care services to migrant worker populations is far from simple, theunique characteristics of the Israeli immigration regime make it particularlydifficult to adopt solutions that comply with public health criteria empha-sizing efficient preventive and primary care treatment within a universal con-ception of human rights. Such a solution should combine changes on sev-eral levels. The immigration regime should be modified in order to allow fortemporary and permanent residency status for some migrant workers(mostly those with families or residing in Israel for long periods). For thosewho will not become permanent residents, a minimum health basketshould be provided through a state-guaranteed insurance scheme. The exist-ing public sick funds should be responsible for the provision of a health carebasket at community clinics that are sensitive to the cultural needs of the mi-grant worker population. However, a precondition for all of these changes isa change in the relation of forces between the ethnonational conception ofcitizenship and the logic of rights and public health.
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As Penelope Scott (2004) argues, irregular migration is a logical outcomeof three complex and inter-related processes: the failure to introduce com-prehensive labor migration policies in an age of both increased economicneed in Europe and growing global migratory pressures, the uncheckedforces and effects of globalization, and the dismantling of the refugee pro-tection system as the EU seeks to harmonize its asylum and immigrationpolicies. These forces are accompanied by a parallel development: the in-creasing vilification of migrants, particularly undocumented migrants.What has become abundantly clear in the post-September 11, 2001, periodis that migrants and migration in general have become increasingly associ-ated with security concerns, a situation further exacerbated by the linksamong trafficking, smuggling, and international organized crime (cf. Ad-out, this volume). One result of this disturbing phenomenon is a lack ofprotection of migrants’ human rights, a fact that is clearly demonstrated inthe problematic implementation of their human right to health.
As we argue in this chapter, health care policies for migrant workers indifferent countries result mostly from the interaction among the various“logics” presented here: the logics of citizenship, the labor market, healthcare and public health, cost-containment, and rights. These logics interactin a contradictory way within the different spheres of the state, market, andcivil society. Migrant workers’ health rights should be understood in the so-cial and cultural contexts of specific locales in order to develop a better un-derstanding of their implementation.
NOTES
1. AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank Heide Castañeda for her comments, Sarah Willen
for her excellent and devoted editorial work, and Rami Adout and Physicians forHuman Rights-Israel for the inspiration.
2. In recent decades, changes in the German demographic, social, and laborstructure have had an important influence on the health market which have weak-ened the labor market base of the health insurance system and led to several healthreforms. Many new jobs now operate outside the employment-based insurance sys-tem (Bäcker, et al. 2000: 51). These changes are beyond the scope of this chapter.
3. See Alexander (this volume) for a discussion of educational access for migrantworkers’ children in Israel.
4. In Germany the situation is different since health insurance is not provided bythe state but is a function of the workplace. In the Israeli case, however, the last op-tion represents a default alternative for employers, since any recognition of entitle-ments by the state may undermine the situation of total lack of rights in which mi-grant workers’ exploitation is based.
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Germany has consistently ranked as one of the top immigrant host coun-tries in the world over the past two decades (IOM 2005; Klopp 2002). Un-til very recently,2 however, it officially considered itself to be a country of“zero immigration” and still lags behind its European neighbors in recog-nizing the presence of undocumented migrants within its borders. Whilemigrants with legal residency status, regardless of citizenship, typically en-joy the same health insurance coverage as German nationals, undocu-mented migrants are left without any apparent rights. Their presence has re-sulted in a tension between traditional notions of universal health care forthose paying into the social welfare system and humanitarian concerns ofproviding at least basic medical services for all persons, “legal” or not.
Soysal (1994) has suggested that postnational membership in a changingEurope will increase the “array of rights” for noncitizens over time, and thatthis will eventually be extended to marginal groups such as undocumentedmigrant workers. In their analysis of health care services for migrant work-ers in Israel, Filc and Davidovitch (2005) conclude that Soysal’s conclusionsare overly optimistic. They propose instead a series of contingencies that de-termine when such rights are made available to migrants. These include 1)the ethno-national conception of citizenship, which guides the differentialrights accorded to citizens and migrants; 2) the logic of the labor market,which seeks to maintain a balance between a too large and too small, butpreferably healthy, migrant workforce; 3) the logic of public health, in whichresidence and not legal status guides the provision of health services; 4) thelogic of cost-containment, which understands that preventive and primary
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Points of Comparison to Israel
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care are less expensive than emergency care in the long run; and 5) the logicof rights, which rests on the principle of a universal human right to health.These observations made from the Israeli case appear to be widely applica-ble to other nations, including the case of Germany, which I discuss here.This chapter responds to the authors’ call for further research to illustratethe “ways in which the transnational expansion of rights interacts with na-tional variables in order to shape the concrete ways in which rights and en-titlement are implemented” (2005: 3). In the preceding chapter, Filc andDavidovitch (this volume) provide an extensive discussion of citizenship,rights, and formal access to medical care in comparative context, sketchingthe contours of the situation in Germany. This chapter aims to complementthat description by providing an ethnographic view of the situation inBerlin. In addition to reporting on local services available, I utilize a partic-ular health issue—prenatal care—to help illuminate issues of access andstatus in this setting. In addition, I emphasize the important yet contradic-tory role of NGOs in Germany in particular and to this debate in general.
Levy and Weiss (2002) provide an excellent comparison of the Germanand Israeli immigration regimes and discourses on citizenship. A compre-hensive study of citizenship and migrant rights in both nations is beyondthe scope of this paper. However, as Adout (2002) has previously noted (seealso Filc and Davidovitch, this volume), the situation regarding health ser-vices for undocumented migrant workers in Germany is very similar to thatin Israel. Thus, the intent of this chapter is to provide a glimpse into healthservices for undocumented migrants in Germany in order to illustrate somekey points of comparison.
After a brief overview, I discuss several major themes or “national vari-ables.” First, I present specific laws that, in effect, criminalize the provisionof medical care to undocumented migrants in Germany. These laws arehighly ambiguous and impact not only migrants, but also health care work-ers, who are made insecure about the legality of their activities. This is fol-lowed by a discussion of “third sector” organizations such as NGOs andchurch-based charities, which are particularly prominent and take on a spe-cific function in providing social services in contemporary Germany. I arguethat this shapes the institutional arrangements in which services are pro-vided as well as how the legality of such services can be interpreted. Third,cost issues will be explored, both in the case of emergency and non-emer-gency care and in comparison to other neighboring countries. Fourth, I ex-amine the role of local policy and short-term solutions at the municipal level(often via such NGOs), which run counter to prevailing government poli-cies. These efforts are compared with the work of NGOs in Tel Aviv. Finally,I discuss the interplay among pregnancy, citizenship, and residency status. Iillustrate its impact on pregnant undocumented women using a short caseexample. The chapter concludes with a summary of major points of com-parison to the Israeli case.
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BERLIN’S MIGRANT CLINIC
My experience derives from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004and 2006 in Berlin, Germany. During this time, I collected sixty-one semi-structured interviews with physicians, NGO staff, and migrants who fell illduring their stay in Germany and required medical attention. I also volun-teered at an outpatient clinic that treats undocumented persons and collected204 patient case studies. The Migrant Clinic3 was set up in 2001 to serve thosewithout insurance in general, but some 85 percent of all patients who passthrough its doors are living in Germany “illegally.” The clinic’s model is thatof a general practice, where acute issues can be handled immediately andmore complicated illnesses are referred to specialists participating in an in-formal network. Housed in a large charity organization, it is run entirely bydonations: volunteer staff, donated medications, and a network of specialistswilling to forego compensation. It is staffed by one physician and one or twoassistants, and it is open three days a week. Located in the heart of formerWest Berlin, it accommodates approximately 2,500 patient visits per year asof 2006, a tenfold increase from the year it opened. An estimated 100,000 un-documented migrants live in the city of Berlin (Brzank, et al. 2002). For com-parative purposes, consider that between 100,000–200,000 live in Israel (Ad-out 2002). At the Migrant Clinic in Berlin, the majority of patients (about 80percent) are under forty-five years old, and about 60 percent are female. Mostare well-integrated and highly-skilled. The largest percentage come fromSouthern and Eastern Europe, followed by West Africa, Southeast Asia (espe-cially Vietnam), and the former Soviet republics. The most common reasonsfor attending the clinic, in order of frequency, are prenatal care, internal med-icine complaints, and dental problems.
“Not Legally, But Not Illegally”: Undocumented Migrants in Germany Misha,twenty-five, arrived in Germany over six years ago from the Ukraine to workalongside his uncle, though he has since moved out on his own. He first cameto the Migrant Clinic in 2004 following a serious accident at the constructionsite where he worked. The wound required over twenty stitches to his ab-domen, and though it was very serious, his recovery was complete. The clinicstaff remembers him fondly, perhaps because of the cheerful personality theysaw so much of during the lengthy healing process.
One afternoon he arrived with his “kollege,” Yuri, who appeared to have bro-ken his wrist. He slipped going down some stairs, Misha told me, breaking hisfall with his right hand. Misha translated for him, as Yuri spoke very little Ger-man. The doctor unwound the bandage Yuri had wrapped around his wristand hand. It was very blue and swollen, and Yuri winced as the doctor probedthe area, gently twisting and pulling. It needed to be X-rayed, but certainly ap-peared to be fractured.
The doctor asked Misha, “Is he here legally, illegally, a tourist, what?” Mishaasked Yuri and translated back, “He says he is here not legally, but not illegally.”
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“Is he working here in Germany?” “No,” Misha said. “Not even under thetable?” “No.” “Should I believe that?” “What do you mean? I, I don’t under-stand the question.” Misha tried to look genuinely confused, but failed. Thedoctor chuckled, then went back to her desk to arrange an X-ray.
As this vignette illustrates, undocumented migrants like Misha and Yuriprefer to maintain a certain degree of ambiguity about their presence inGermany. In fact, shifting policies and the rather complicated system of res-idency and work permits can mean that a person’s status is often less thantransparent. Undocumented status may be the result of any number of cir-cumstances: entrance without a valid work visa; continued stay followingentrance with a tourist or student visa4; a rejected application for asylum5;withdrawal of a residency permit following divorce; lack of residency per-mits for family reunification; or human trafficking. Because of increases inlabor migration over the past fifteen years, their numbers have grown, withcurrent estimates suggesting between 500,000 to 1.5 million individuals inGermany. Beyond this figure are also large numbers who possess “semi-le-gal” status. These include European Union (EU) nationals without workpermits and asylum seekers still awaiting their hearing or appeal, who arealso excluded from most services.
The very concept of “illegal migration” did not emerge in Germany untilthe 1970s, coinciding with the end of the guestworker program (Düvell2005). Ironically, the process of European integration is intimately en-twined with the concept of “illegal migration,” since the proposal of freemovement within the European Union relies upon strong enforcement atthe outer boundaries. This is evident in the increased border militarizationand controls, leading some critics to describe this process as the creation ofa “Fortress Europe” particularly against immigrants from developing coun-tries. Like other nations that only reluctantly acknowledge their position asprimary countries of destination for undocumented migrants, Germany hasnot created any clear system of rights for them. Quite the contrary; thosewho seek help at public clinics or hospitals may face arrest or deportation,as I discuss in greater detail below. This issue has come to the forefront re-cently through a series of tragic cases in which medical help was delayedwith fatal consequences or in which migrants were deported after seekingcare at local hospitals. Perhaps unique to Germany is the fact that it is notonly the migrants who face repercussions, but also health care providers.6
CRIMINALIZATION OF MEDICAL AID
Germany’s Aufenthaltsgesetz (Residence Act) contains two specific sectionsthat effectively criminalize the provision of medical aid to undocumented
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migrants. The Act was overhauled in 2004 and implemented anew in Janu-ary 2005. Both laws remained in place despite heavy opposition by themedical and human rights communities.
• Section 877 of the Act mandates that persons residing in Germany ille-gally be reported to the appropriate authorities if they seek services atpublic facilities.8 This initiates the deportation process. Cyrus (2004)identifies this reporting mandate to be the central barrier to adequatetreatment for undocumented migrants in Germany. Stories of compa-triots who were arrested and deported after receiving treatment from ahospital circulate widely. As a result, patients oftentimes opt to flee be-fore treatment is completed (Cyrus and Vogel 2002; Stöbbe 2000), andmistrust in public health institutions becomes reinforced (Alt 2003;Anderson 2003). For example, a Ukrainian migrant worker who suf-fered from an intense cough developed a very high fever and was takento the hospital, where he was promptly arrested and diagnosed withtuberculosis while in detainment. His roommates, who had been ex-posed over the course of many months, adamantly refused testing de-spite assurances of anonymity. Within a few days, fearing that the po-lice would show up, the apartment was abandoned and the formerroommates had sought out new accommodations (Alt 2003). Whilethe public health departments indeed guarantee anonymity and freetesting and treatment, many undocumented persons would rather notrisk contact with official institutions.
• Section 969 of the same Act states that “assisting” such persons—in-cluding for medical purposes, according to one interpretation—is acrime punishable by either a fine or imprisonment for up to five years.This charge can be pursued only on a case-by-case basis; in otherwords, the state must prove that assistance was provided with priorknowledge of the patient’s legal status or that service provision hasbeen repeated. Many physicians’ organizations, along with individualactivist doctors, have spoken out against these laws,10 noting that theyconflict with their Hippocratic Oath to serve those in need. Some havejoined forces with human rights groups to lobby for legislative change.One example is the signature-gathering campaign sponsored by Inter-national Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) urgingfor the provision of legal medical care options for undocumented mi-grants in Germany. The signatures were delivered to the Bun-destagspräsident (President of the Parliament) in 2006.
It should be noted that no health care workers have been convicted un-der these laws, to my knowledge, although several physicians I interviewednoted having been “persons of interest” to the police or having charges filed
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against them that were later dropped. However, there have been cases inwhich patients have been deported.11 Even when administrators do not re-port the patient, one physician related to me, “you can never be too surethat one of the nurses didn’t take it upon themselves to.” Either way, fear,uncertainty, and ambiguity work to reinforce the current situation. This isevident in the ways in which the two have been variably interpreted. Physi-cians and staff I spoke with—including individuals from the same organi-zation—had very different understandings of the legal situation. For exam-ple, some understood that because they are part of a charity organization,the laws did not apply to them. Others preferred to operate under the veilof complete anonymity, without using names, keeping records, and soforth. Hospitals are most directly affected by this law and must shoulder thecosts of treating the uninsured by shuffling funds around internally if theydo not want to apply for reimbursement by the state (as discussed below).
THE PROMINENCE OF THE “THIRD SECTOR”
One of the reasons why the legal situation appears murky is that a clear dis-tinction between “public” and private institutions can be difficult to make.In Germany, most social services are in fact provided by large nonprofit or-ganizations12 in a deliberately complementary relationship with the state.Several factors have historically shaped this relationship, beginning withtensions between secular and religious institutions in the nineteenth cen-tury and culminating in the postwar period as a response to the authoritar-ian regime. The current structure is a product of the decentralized federal(West) German state, where a system of parapublic agencies was set up af-ter 1945 to assist in policy implementation. What has emerged is a pub-licly-funded, highly professionalized, and state-proximal nonprofit “thirdsector” in Germany (Anheier, et al. 1997; Zimmer 1997).
This historical interface between the state and civil society represents avery specific axis of interaction in Germany. Thus, the definition of a “pub-lic institution” becomes ambiguous, even though it has been repeatedlyclarified that the laws criminalizing medical care do not apply to most or-ganizations (Alt 2003; Anderson 2003; Gross 2005). In addition to thelarge, church-based charity organizations, most cities have NGOs that pro-vide medical services to undocumented migrants. This is part of a larger Eu-ropean-wide sans papiers (“without papers”) movement that has been tiedto particular changes in immigration policy during the past decade (Jordanand Düvell 2005). These organizations provide various forms of legal andpractical assistance, including medical care. In many cases, the supportingorganizations are simply liaisons between patients and doctors who arewilling to treat an individual case free of charge, though in a few cases ded-
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icated charity clinics have been established (such as the Migrant Clinic inBerlin; cf. Filc and Davidovitch, this volume). However, while some of theother social services provided by these organizations are subsidized by thestate, services for undocumented migrants are not. This means that organi-zations are becoming increasingly overburdened, and clinic staff often toldme that, “the state thinks the church [which runs the clinic] has an endlessamount of money!” Indeed, regardless of the organizations’ ideological ori-entation, all services for undocumented migrants are financed solely by pri-vate donations.
THE STALEMATE: WHO BEARS THE COST?
Despite the aforementioned threat of criminal prosecution and the ambi-guities surrounding definitions of “public,” cost is the primary barrier tocare for undocumented persons. This is even—perhaps especially—the casefor emergency care. A similar situation regarding payment for emergencymedical services exists in Israel, where it is forbidden to base treatment ona patient’s ability to pay although, as Adout notes, this nonetheless takesplace (2002). In Germany, emergency medical care is also guaranteed bylaw, and legal status becomes an immediate issue for billing purposes, sincehospitalization is not free.13 There are reports of hospital staff seeking apayee (e.g., the patient or a companion) before treatment is assured, al-though this is technically prohibited, as it is in Israel. In Germany, the hos-pital is entitled to reimbursement by the state. To submit the request, how-ever, hospital administrators must also report the patient to theAusländeramt (Foreigner’s Office), based on Section 87 of the Residence Actdiscussed above. Because of the amount of bureaucratic red tape involvedfor the hospital and the fact that this initiates the patient’s deportation,most prefer to simply forgo compensation.
In a non-emergency scenario, the cost of medical treatment may be cov-ered in a number of different ways. Clinics like the Migrant Clinic treat pa-tients free of charge and rely upon volunteer staff and donated medications.For cost-intensive procedures such as births, patients sometimes pay a por-tion of the reduced rates, generally according to income level. Avoiding ordelaying care (along with self-medicating) may represent the most frequentstrategies for non-acute illness for most undocumented migrants. Some re-turn to their country of origin for care; this is especially the case for EU mi-grants because of geographic proximity. Poland, for example, is only a shortdrive from Berlin. Others visit private practices and pay out of pocket or“borrow” someone else’s insurance card.
Many neighboring European countries have found government-initiatedsolutions to the issue of covering the cost of basic medical treatment. One
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of the most common solutions is simply to permit medical treatment inpublic clinics without requiring legal status to be divulged. This is possiblein tax-financed systems such as Spain and Italy and in Great Britain’s Na-tional Health Service, where residence determines entitlement to services.By contrast, the German health care system is complicated by its structure,which relies on the contributions of employers (as opposed to financingthrough the tax base; see Filc and Davidovitch, this volume), making it par-ticularly impenetrable to these types of models because proof of insurancemust be presented. As in other Social Health Insurance systems (e.g., theNetherlands, Belgium), compensation is on a fee-for service basis, unlikeNational Health Service structures in which health care providers are gen-erally salaried, public sector employees (Romero-Otuño 2004). Currently,most analysts in Germany support a solution based on the Dutch model,which uses a dedicated set of public funds to compensate physicians (Alt2003; Braun, et al. 2003; Cyrus 2004; Nitschke 2005). However, experiencefrom the Netherlands suggests significant hurdles related to the overly com-plicated bureaucracy designed to discourage abuse. Political will remainsthe primary barrier to implementation, even at the municipal level. UnlikeGermany and Israel, these nations tend to have specific migration experi-ences in relation to their colonial histories, along with established sans pa-piers lobbying efforts (Jordan and Düvell 2005). Therefore, they have facedperhaps more explicit political pressures in seeking viable solutions, thougharguably with varied success.
ROLE OF LOCAL MUNICIPAL POLICY
Some municipalities in Germany, such as the cities of Freiburg, Munich,Berlin, and Bonn, have been proactive in seeking solutions to the problemof providing services to the “invisible” people living within their jurisdic-tions. Munich has become a sort of pilot site for assessing the extent of thelocal undocumented population, determining the existing and projectedneed for infrastructure, and providing an evaluation component. All partsof the project were funded and initiated by local politicians. The findingshave resulted in very specific actions: the establishment of a fund to covercosts for outpatient and hospital care for undocumented migrants; the ex-tension of a migrant clinic run through an NGO; assurances that childrenenrolled in local schools need not provide proof of legal status; and in-creased attention to the issue of human trafficking by the local Foreigner’sOffice (Alt 2005; Anderson 2003).
These efforts are illustrative of the “state-municipal paradox” (Willen2003; see also Alexander this volume) that confronts migrants. On the onehand, they are actively pursued by the police for deportation, and on the
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other are encouraged to seek out services through local organizations andoffices. In Germany, national-level policies require that undocumented per-sons who seek out services be reported, as discussed earlier. However, ac-tivists and city officials are faced with a much more immediate humanitar-ian concern. The solutions embraced in cities such as Munich and Berlinoriginate in what Filc and Davidovich describe as the local/national axis,which “stems from the public health logic, where the goal is to provide aminimum level of services to all the city residents” (2005: 6). These local-level efforts often appear to run counter to prevailing government policiesregarding restrictions on providing medical care. This should not be partic-ularly surprising given the highly decentralized nature of the German state,as discussed above. Willen discusses a similar scenario for Tel Aviv, in whichthe efforts of advocates have resulted in relatively successful service provi-sion, especially by “identifying and maximizing gaps and loopholes in theexisting policy environment” (2005: 78).
PREGNANCY, CITIZENSHIP, AND AUFENTHALT
Levy and Weiss (2002) argue that comparisons between Israel and Germanycan be valuable for understanding the integration of migrant groups sinceboth nations have descent-based systems of citizenship (also called jus san-guinis). Furthermore, both have granted automatic access to citizenshipprivileges to specific immigrant groups (Joppke and Rosenhek 2002; Levyand Weiss 2002). In Israel, this is made possible through the Law of Return.In Germany, “ethnic Germans” or Aussiedler are allowed to apply for auto-matic citizenship. In the past, these groups have come primarily from East-ern Europe and the former Soviet Union; currently, a trend is emerging inwhich German descendants are arriving from South American countries.14
Analytically important is the distinction between these diasporic groups,considered to belong automatically to the nation, and increasing numbersof labor migrants without such privileges.
In January 2000, a new citizenship law was put into place in Germany.This modified the existing jus sanguinis foundation of citizenship to includesome elements of the territorial or jus soli model. For example, childrenborn of foreigners who have lived in Germany for at least eight years withlegal residency status now have the right to German citizenship. However,when one or both parents are not legal residents, numerous complicationsmay arise. First, prenatal care and delivery must be arranged; neither is cov-ered for undocumented persons unless the father is German and has ac-knowledged paternity before the child is born. In this case, reimbursementcan occur through the social welfare system or via his health insurance, al-though it is retroactive and dependent upon submission of a birth certificate.
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Otherwise, the mother must seek out the services of an NGO or charity or-ganization, which may or may not cover the costs, depending on the or-ganization. Some NGOs have offered reduced “rates” to migrants for ar-ranging a bed in a delivery ward; these are generally the result ofnegotiations with and donations by local hospitals.
The 1968 Maternity Protection Act established a time period (called theMutterschutz) beginning six weeks before and ending eight weeks followingbirth. During this time frame, all women in Germany are accorded certainprotections, such as leave from their place of employment. For an undocu-mented woman, this represents a crucial period during which she cannot belegally deported. It represents the only time she can safely carry out the var-ious types of registration needed for the delivery—i.e., at the hospital de-livery ward, at the residency office of the local courthouse, or to apply forcompensation for the delivery costs. It should be noted, however, that therehave been instances in which the Mutterschutz was not honored by immi-gration authorities. For instance, staff from an NGO working with traffickedwomen told me of a recent case in which the police arrived at their safe-house looking for a Mongolian woman with a ten-day old child (i.e., clearlystill within the protection period) to arrest them for deportation. Fortu-nately, the staff were able to intervene in this particular case.
The issuance of a birth certificate represents an additional hurdle. Insome municipalities this is handled more restrictively than in others. For ex-ample, in Berlin, local agencies recently implemented a policy wherein onlya valid passport would be accepted as the mothers’ identification. Womenwhose passports were expired, lost, or confiscated during the process of traf-ficking were issued generic birth certificates for their children that did notrecord them as the legal parent. This can have considerable implications ifmother and child become separated, for example during arrest and detain-ment.
Fatherhood is established through a formal acknowledgement of pater-nity (Vaterschaftsanerkennung) that, ideally, is registered before the child isborn. This is the usual procedure for all parents, but it takes on an especiallyimportant role for pregnant undocumented women. If the father is Germanor a long-term legal resident, the child has the right to German citizenship.This also provides the mother with a residency permit and access to the so-cial welfare system, both of which are linked to the child’s rights as a Ger-man citizen. This process—acknowledging paternity—along with the bene-fits it bestows on the mother appears to be well-known in undocumentedcommunities. This has likely resulted as a combination of experience, word-of-mouth, and the aid of various organizations. Perhaps not surprisingly, ashadow economy for such paternity acknowledgements has emerged. To il-lustrate some of these issues and their importance, let me introduce the caseof Thi Kim.
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Thi Kim, age twenty-four, left Vietnam in 2002. She spent two years working ina nightclub in Prague before meeting Werner S., a forty-nine-year old truckdriver who lived on the outskirts of Berlin. They “fell in love,” he told me, andhe brought her to Germany. She cared for his four-year-old daughter from aprevious relationship and his elderly mother. Werner was away most of theweek, driving to Prague on a regular basis.
Werner and Thi Kim could not speak to one another. She did not know anyGerman, so Werner talked to her slowly, in a louder-than-usual voice, and em-ployed plentiful hand gestures. I spoke to her through a lay translator who oftenaccompanied other Vietnamese women to the Clinic. Thi Kim’s own account var-ied somewhat; she said she was paid 600 Euros a month (about US$735) whenshe came to Germany with Werner. This was about a third of the cost of Germanlabor, and that would typically have been only for a thirty-five-hour work week.After the first month, he paid her less, and after the second, even less than theprevious one. Seven months after her arrival, Thi Kim was pregnant withWerner’s child. At that point, her pay stopped entirely. She was happy, she toldme, now that she has had her son. She still had to take care of Werner’s familyand missed home sometimes, but she was able to socialize—mostly over a cellphone—with girlfriends who have also moved to Berlin to work.
One Wednesday afternoon she arrived with her infant son, who was deliv-ered with the aid of the Migrant Clinic, for a check-up. Typically she camealone or with a friend who helped her by translating, but the staff had beenurging her to bring the father of the child with her. Even though they had sentnotes to Werner (via Thi Kim) over the course of three months, he still had notsubmitted the proper paperwork to ensure the child’s German citizenship. Thistime, quite unexpectedly, he arrived with her, though his demeanor indicatedthat he would rather be elsewhere. Indeed, the discussion quickly turned to thefather’s lack of initiative in getting the paperwork completed. With this, ThiKim would also automatically receive legal residency status in Germany. HerMutterschutzfrist (maternity protection period) was running out in a week. “Yes,I know,” said Werner, “the police even came by the apartment on Monday andasked if she was still here. They were nice about it, just doing their jobs, I guess.But they’re watching her. I guess she’ll just have to, you know, disappear for awhile.” He shrugged. He complained that the registration offices had sent himback and forth, giving him a run-around, and claiming he was applying in thewrong district. Indeed, now that the baby was born, it was much more difficultto get the paternity issue resolved. The staff cautioned again that he should takesome sort of action immediately or else she would be deported. Irritated, heexclaimed, “Well, then I guess she’ll just have to be deported!” Is this what hewanted, they asked? Werner didn’t answer.
While her case seems to illustrate the worst possible scenario, Thi Kim isvery lucky to have one thing: her passport, with which she was able to “be-come” the legal mother on the child’s birth certificate. As noted earlier,some women have had their passports confiscated during the process oftrafficking15 and fear applying for a replacement through their respective
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embassies. Thi Kim’s case demonstrates a number of themes that are com-mon in the clinics that serve undocumented migrants: the feminization ofmigration, the increasing number of domestic (especially “live-in”) work-ers, the “sexualization of domestic work” that is particularly striking inBerlin (Anderson 2000), and the power of the employer in preventing orensuring deportation. It also illustrates the incredibly risky and complicatedbureaucratic process associated with pregnancy and birth. Since it is almostalways the mother who is the undocumented parent, she must rely on theactions of others to ensure that she is not deported and that her child is ac-corded rights as well. This may provide her with legal residency status,which plays a more important role in Germany than citizenship in ensur-ing access to services.
Willen (2005: 68) describes the forms of care available to pregnantwomen and their newborns in Tel Aviv as “a patchwork of health services[available] for a patchwork of reasons.” This phrase could just as well de-scribe the situation in Berlin, where a combination of NGOs and health de-partments provide various services, sometimes free of charge, sometimes atlow cost. Some organizations have established set rates—e.g., 20 Euros(US$25) for each prenatal visit, several hundred Euros for delivery in a pri-vate hospital that is willing to negotiate a reduced rate. It is not uncommonfor organizations to work together in caring for individual patients, whothen carry around the “pregnancy booklet” used in Germany to documentexams and test results. Each physician or organization records their activities,leaving an official stamp and a signature. Thus women like Thi Kim mightgo to one NGO for monthly prenatal check-ups, to another for laboratorytesting, to a local public health department for the required (and free) HIVtest, and finally, to a private charity hospital for a low-cost delivery.
DISCUSSION
There are indisputable similarities between the German and Israeli immigra-tion regimes that set them apart from other host countries. Current policy inGermany—which has become increasingly more restrictive—views immigra-tion as emerging solely from two sources: the return of “ethnic Germans,” andfamily reunification. In both nations, what Filc and Davidovich (2005) havereferred to as the ethno-national conception of citizenship profoundly determineswho is entitled to health services. Ultimately, the range of services available inboth countries is comparable—from dedicated NGO clinics, to private (butcostly) physician practices, to emergency rooms. Similarly, the case of preg-nancy and childbirth presents a special situation that magnifies the tensionsbetween notions of citizenship, humanitarian aid, and public health con-cerns. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, this chapter has offered
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an on-the-ground look at these processes by presenting some of the dilemmasof undocumented migrants and of the local NGOs that treat them.
Systematic ambiguity appears to both enable and complicate the provi-sion of health services to undocumented migrants in Germany. Accordingto my research, there is often no clear consensus about the application ofthe two laws that criminalize the provision of medical care. Furthermore, itshould be noted that there are many other situations in which ambiguityand arbitrariness come into play. For example, activists have long lamentedthe capricious determination of what qualifies for emergency assistancesince definitions of “acute illnesses” and “pain” can be subjective.16 Morerecently, legal challenges have been issued to clarify the provisions in thenew 2005 laws, which appear to contain more flexibility in the determina-tion of residency permits, including their individual provisions. In Ger-many, as in many other countries, undocumented migrants who have HIVand are undergoing treatment are eligible for residency permits for human-itarian purposes (see Ticktin 2002) for a good discussion of this issue inFrance). However, activists have pointed to several cases during the first yearof the new law’s implementation in which people were arbitrarily given amore restricted kind of permit than the new law actually allows (e.g., a per-mit that limits employment and freedom of movement).
Finally, NGOs providing care to undocumented populations take on a sig-nificant role in both nations. In Germany, the prominence of this “third sec-tor,” located between the public and the private, influences how the legality ofproviding care is interpreted. It may appear that NGOs and other organiza-tions offering medical assistance should not even be tolerated given the lawsdescribed earlier. However, some municipalities have gone so far as to ex-pressly acknowledge the human rights dimensions of providing some meansof medical care for undocumented migrants living within their city bound-aries. This paradox, to return to the model discussed at the beginning of thischapter, is explained through the logic of public health, and implicitly with it, thelogic of cost-containment, since cost issues affect primarily the local level. Ofcourse, this relationship between the state and the third sector has negative im-plications as well; any claims for reform become illegitimate when the privatesector ensures a welfare system without necessitating direct involvement of thestate. I point here to one important similarity between the two states; the Mi-grant Clinic in Berlin feels the same pressures that Adout notes for the Physi-cians for Human Rights-Israel Clinic in Tel Aviv. Both were established todemonstrate a need and call upon the state to take responsibility. However, af-ter years of successfully treating patients with few options, both are now“sometimes used by decision-makers as a fig leaf (and a very small one at that)in order to mask the broader issue” (Adout 2002: 23). In both cases, these areclearly short-term strategies embedded in ideological environments where fur-ther rights are not expected to be extended to undocumented migrants.
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NOTES
1. Department of Anthropology and Department of Family and CommunityMedicine, University of Arizona; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,Halle/Saale, Germany. This article is part of a doctoral study supported by the An-drew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council of European Studies, the DeutscherAkademischer Austausch Dienst, the University of Arizona Social and BehavioralSciences Research Institute, and the Department of Anthropology at the Universityof Arizona. The author is grateful to Rami Adout, Nadav Davidovich, Kate Goldadeand Ida Vase for comments on an earlier draft.
2. The recognition that Germany is indeed a land of immigration was establishedin the reformed Aufenthaltsgesetz (Residence Act) implemented in January 2005.
3. All proper names are pseudonyms.4. The “tourist loophole” remains one of the primary methods of entry, as it is
in Israel (Willen 2003). It is important to note that these individuals enter the coun-try legally, which can affect how statistics are gathered and interpreted. For this rea-son, this (very large) group is often considered “semi-legal,” “formerly legal,” or touse a term popular in Germany, “illegalisiert” (to “be made illegal”).
5. Excluded here, for the most part, are recognized asylum seekers/refugees. Un-like in Israel, where the “refugee” issue does not appear to be a prominent part ofpublic debate (Adout, this volume), quite the opposite is true in Germany. The Asy-lum Seeker Benefits Act of 1993 (Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz) established very specificguidelines for the health care of asylum seekers. However, those who remain in Ger-many after their claims have been denied generally fall in the same category as un-documented migrants, since they no longer have the same benefits and must feardeportation if detained.
6. This type of legal mandate to report undocumented migrants seeking out so-cial services has also emerged in the United States. For example, in November 2004,voters in Arizona approved Proposition 200, which requires that proof of legal sta-tus be provided when applying for certain types of non-federally mandated publicbenefits. It is as yet unclear what the long-term effects of this law will be, but oneimplication is that private medical providers may be required to verify legal status ifthey provide any publicly-funded services. At the federal level, immigration reformbills introduced in the House of Representatives (2005) and Senate (2006) includedmeasures that threatened to criminalize humanitarian aid, including medical treat-ment.
7. Formerly § 76 of the Ausländergesetz.8. This section of the Act also affects school officials. As in Israel, the state faces
a difficult contradiction between compulsory education policies and compliancewith international rights standards, on the one hand, and pursuing undocumentedpersons—in this case, parents—on the other. However, as I note below, some citieshave taken steps to welcome children into the education system, similar to the situ-ation in Tel Aviv (Adout 2002; see also Alexander, this volume).
9. Formerly § 92 of the Ausländergesetz.10. One such statement, for example, was issued at the 108th annual Bun-
desärztetag (National Physicians’ Conference) in May, 2005. In addition, a signature-
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gathering campaign was initiated by International Physicians for the Prevention ofNuclear War (IPPNW) urging the provision of legal medical care options for un-documented migrants in Germany. The signatures were delivered to the Bun-destagspräsident (President of the Parliament) in 2006.
11. See, for example, (Alscher, et al. 2001; Beisbart 2003; Gross 2005; Müller2004; Verbruggen 2001).
12. For example, the German Red Cross or Caritas. 13. In contrast to the United Kingdom, for example (see Adout, this volume).14. Over the past decade, however, this policy has become more restrictive, and
applicants must now pass a language examination and demonstrate that they facediscrimination in their homeland based on their heritage.
15. In Germany, as elsewhere, much of the political attention to “illegal immi-gration” has centered on combating human trafficking. While there is no doubt thatorganized criminal networks exist, many activists and researchers emphasize thattheir actual roles are exaggerated, noting the more likely contribution of informal,“ad hoc relationships” that aid border crossers (Besibart 2003). A number of NGOsfocus on trafficked women, and many organizations in this study had been offeredfinancial support by national and international governments to aid in combatingtrafficking, which they rejected due to their skepticism over donors’ political aims,including collaboration with police. Victims of trafficking, if they are willing to tes-tify in court, do receive a short-term amnesty. After the case has been heard, theymust exit the country or remain in detention. A witness protection program shieldsthem as long as they are in Germany, but not after they return to their home coun-try, which has also been criticized.
16. Adout has noted that in Israel, as well, the “practiced definition of emergen-cies in emergency rooms is becoming increasingly narrow as hospitals face growingfinancial pressure” (2002:22).
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The state of Israel, founded as a home for the Jewish people, has since its searly years employed an immigration policy patently designed to achievethis goal. While Jews and their family members are entitled to automaticcitizenship as soon as they arrive in Israel under the Law of Return,2 otherswho try to apply for status face complicated procedures and hostile atti-tudes at the hands of Interior Ministry officials (Feler 2004).
The large numbers of documented and undocumented, non-Jewish mi-grant workers who have arrived in Israel since the beginning of the 1990shave challenged this traditional Jewish-exclusivist immigration policy, cre-ating the so-called “problem of migrant workers.”3 The Ministry of Interiorhas implemented various methods designed to make legalization, or natu-ralization, possible almost exclusively through marriage to an Israeli citi-zen—an arduous if not an impossible process for non-Jews. In September1996, for example, the Ministry of Interior announced that any undocu-mented alien who married an Israeli citizen would be required to leave thecountry as a pre-condition for the examination of his or her application forIsraeli citizenship.4 Similar methods have been employed by the Ministry inits policy regarding elderly parents of Jewish immigrants requesting resi-dency status in Israel.
The final example noted above shows that this policy is guided not onlyby national-ideological considerations, but also by financial ones, resultingfrom the expense associated with granting a temporary residency permit(A5). This permit grants bearers most of the social benefits provided by thestate, including the very expensive governmental health insurance benefits.5
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8Irregular Migration
Asylum Seekers and Trafficked Women—A Comparative Perspective on Health Care Entitlements1
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Parallel and harsher trends can be discerned since the mid-1990s vis-à-visPalestinians married to Israeli citizens. Both nationalist and “national ex-pense” claims have been cited to justify state policy in these cases, culmi-nating in a controversial law that denies any Palestinian spouse of an Israelicitizen the right to become a resident of Israel.6
These policies culminated in a deportation policy aimed at undocu-mented migrants. While the first stirrings of the policy emerged as early as1996, an official “operation” to this effect has been in place since Septem-ber 2002. That month marked the establishment of an “Immigration Au-thority” charged with the “national mission” of deporting tens of thou-sands of undocumented migrants and Palestinian workers, which marked aqualitative change in the deportation policy. In early November 2002, theImmigration Authority initiated a public campaign representing migrantworkers as an economic burden; as a cause of the rise in unemployment; aspeople who exploit Israel’s welfare system while avoiding payment of in-come tax; and as a threat to the Jewish nature of the state, under the repeti-tious slogan, a Hebrew pun meaning: “It’s not legal—It’s not a worker/Itcan’t work” (Hebrew: “zeh lo khuki—v’ zeh lo oved”).7
Within a short period of time, the activities of the Immigration Police cre-ated a major change in the lives of undocumented migrant communities inIsrael, causing constant fear and destroying community structures. These ef-fects are strongly felt by asylum seekers, many of who were absorbed intolocal undocumented communities, and by trafficked women, all of who areby definition undocumented. In subsequent years, tens of thousands of mi-grants have been detained and deported.8 The media campaign, whichstresses the illegality of employing undocumented workers and threatensemployers, has made it increasingly difficult for non-Israelis to find em-ployment even if they hold some form of documentation, as is the case forsome asylum seekers and trafficked women.
The growing difficulties associated with staying in Israel without a legalpermit have triggered new types of demands, usually made by humanrights NGOs, which stress the right of individuals or groups to remain inIsrael or point to serious humanitarian concerns associated with the pos-sibility of their forced repatriation. Some of these demands represent theinterests of asylum seekers and trafficked women. One such claim re-sulted in the announcement of a special “humanitarian status” for hun-dreds of citizens of African countries in which civil wars are currently rag-ing.9 Another relevant case is that of a trafficked woman, HIV positive andliving with an Israeli partner, who was acting as a witness against her traf-fickers before the court. Her testimony in court was suddenly canceled,with no official reason, and she immediately received a deportation order.Only after appealing to the court was she granted permission to stay(Sinai 2004). Other attempts to promote issues of humanitarian impor-
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tance such as chronically sick children and HIV patients10 have met withserious governmental resistance.
This chapter draws a mixed picture of Israel’s policies regarding twogroups of irregular migrants: asylum seekers and trafficked women, askingwhether these policies stand in contrast to the general “deportation trend.”Israel’s approaches and attitudes are examined, especially with regard to theexpensive entitlement to healthcare that can serve as a good indicator of thegoodwill and actual protection extended to these groups. This entitlementis compared with an example from the West, the United Kingdom, and anexample from elsewhere in the Middle East, Egypt. In concluding, we offera preliminary analytical framework for thinking about asylum seekers’ andtrafficked women’s entitlement to health care.
DEVELOPMENT OF PROCEDURES FOR ACCEPTING AND PROTECTING REFUGEES IN ISRAEL11
The state of Israel and a number of world Jewish organizations participatedin the drafting of the United Nations Convention on Refugees from its ear-liest stages. Early in 1950, the young state, established just a year and a halfearlier, was already represented on the ad hoc United Nations Committeeon Statelessness and Related Problems. Israel ratified the Convention Relat-ing to the Status of Refugees in 1954 and the 1967 Protocol in 1968.12 Is-rael is also a member of the Executive Committee of the United NationsHigh Commission on Refugees (UNHCR).
On a national level, however, Israel has been extremely slow to implementthe Convention. By the end of the 1990s, Israel still had not incorporated theConvention into its legislation and had not established any institutionalframework for the absorption of refugees. In addition, Israel was not a com-mon destination for asylum seekers for many years. Hence, it is impossible tosystematically evaluate how many potential Convention refugees came to Is-rael before the mid-1990s or what their fate has been. On several occasions, Is-rael invited small groups of refugees to receive protection in Israel,13 but thesemoves were perceived as extraordinary humanitarian gestures as opposed tosystematic fulfillment of Israel’s obligation according to the Convention.
Until 1999, the existence of the UNHCR Liaison’s office in Jerusalem wasnot widely known, but those who found their way there could apply for asy-lum. A small staff interviewed the applicants and issued “protection papers”notifying Israeli authorities that the bearers were under UNHCR protection.The applicants’ cases were then sent to UNHCR headquarters in Geneva fora decision on their status. Those who were recognized as refugees (often af-ter a lengthy waiting period of up to several years) were supposed to begranted temporary residency status (Permit A-5) by the Israeli Ministry of
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Interior.14 For the rare few petitioners who have achieved this “happy end-ing,” it has been preceded by years of waiting with no protection whatso-ever other than the right not to be deported.
In addition to Convention refugees, in 1999 Israel agreed to grant tem-porary status to hundreds of African nationals defined as “humanitarianrefugees,” since their home countries were engulfed in civil war. At first,these humanitarian refugees were offered work permits (Permit B-1), whichguaranteed their legal stay in Israel and enabled them—at least on paper—to find jobs in the legal labor market (Fishbein 1999). Their situation iscomplicated, however, by obstacles placed in refugees’ paths by Ministry ofInterior officials, including fines for illegal residence prior to submitting anasylum application and/or conditions that the bearer of a work permit onlywork in certain “needed professions” such as construction and agriculture.The officials refused to listen to refugees’ explanations that they were al-ready residing in cities and could most easily find work in housecleaningand other forms of day labor.
In 1999, the current Honorary Liaison to the local UNHCR office was ap-pointed. This liaison, a former Israeli ambassador and high-ranking ForeignMinistry official, has concentrated his efforts on creating a national systemfor the determination of refugee status, using his personal connectionswithin the Israeli administration and with the support of UNHCR.15 Itseems that his suggestions were readily adopted by the Ministry of Justicethat already had been making concentrated efforts throughout the 1990s toimprove Israel’s public image in the arena of international law. A small gov-ernmental team produced a procedure for the determination of refugee sta-tus in Israel. This “internal” (and unpublished) procedure, which wassigned in 2001 by the Minister of Interior, was initially implemented for aone-year trial period but has remained in place since then.
Under the new procedure, UNHCR continues to play a significant role byaccepting applications, interviewing applicants, and delivering recommen-dations. Each case is then brought before the governmental body, which isauthorized to advise the Minister of Interior, who issues the final decision.Those who are denied refugee status have a very limited right to appeal, andtheir appeal goes directly back to the same bodies that rejected them (i.e.,UNHCR and the governmental body).
The creation of the governmental body has, however, brought two im-provements in its wake: first, extension of the definition of humanitarianrefugees to three more African countries engulfed in civil wars, and second,the granting of work permits (Permit B-1) to all asylum seekers. In 2003, thebureaucratic barriers on the working permit were successfully removed.
Yet serious drawbacks darken this picture, especially regarding the fair-ness of the procedure and the level of protection (not) given to asylum seek-ers. First, the work of UNHCR and the governmental body is devoid of
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transparency and accountability. Despite many requests, UNHCR has notpublished any data regarding asylum seekers since 2001.16 Second, as men-tioned above, a work permit (B-1) does not grant its bearer even minimalsocial benefits. Although it constituted a big step for Israeli policy, the workpermit does not cost the Israeli treasurer (or the taxpayer) anything at all;from this perspective, it is a very cost-effective type of “benefit” to bestow.The temporary residency permit (A-5), in contrast, which lies just one de-gree above the work permit, is much more costly. By granting asylum seek-ers B-1 work permits instead of A-5 temporary resident visas, the state re-lieves itself of the obligation to provide health and welfare subsidies (i.e.,health insurance, unemployment benefits, or child subsidies). This remainstrue even in extreme cases of destitution or terminal diseases such asHIV/AIDS and cancer.17
WOMEN TRAFFICKED FOR SEX IN ISRAEL
This report is being written on the back of a conceptual revolution in Israeli so-ciety [leading to] . . . a strict and harsh attitude towards [the phenomenon of]trafficking in women for the purpose of prostitution.[18] Hence, judges in thehigh court condemn the phenomenon of trafficking [by comparing it to] . . .“the war of Israel and Amalek”. . . a war which bears no truce and no compro-mises.19
This passage appears in a governmental report published in 2002 by Israel’snewly created Inter-Ministerial Committee on women trafficking. The authorof the report uses several key concepts that attest to a shift in discourse andaction with respect to the issue of trafficking in women in Israel.20
Throughout the 1990s, while the face of Israeli society changed as a resultof both massive Jewish migration, mostly from Russian speaking countries,and non-Jewish labor migration, thousands of non-Jewish, Russian speak-ing women were “imported” each year for purposes of employment in thesex industry. The police have estimated the number of women “imported”to be between 1,000 and 3,000, whereas NGOs declare this to be a yearlyfigure and contend that the total number of women trafficked for sex ex-ploitation is closer to 10,000 (Levenkron and Dahan 2003; IMC 2002).
The phenomenon first began to receive international and local attentionin 1997 and 1998, albeit still on a very limited scale. In 1998, the U.N.Committee for the Inspection of the International Covenant on Civil andPolitical Rights reproached Israel for failing to address the matter of sex traf-ficking across its borders.21 During the late 1990s, some Israeli humanrights and feminist groups tried to organize research and public awarenessactivities and wrote an NGO report on the issue (Vanderberg 1997).
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Real change came in the subsequent two years as a result of two develop-ments: first, the initiation of an American-led global campaign against traf-ficking for sex exploitation, and second—and more importantly—the U.S.State Department’s country report on human rights.22 This report, whichranks countries into three tiers in accordance with their degree of commit-ment to combating trafficking, was accompanied by a direct threat, namelythat Tier 3 countries (third being the lowest tier) that failed to improve by2003 would be subject to financial sanctions, thus damaging their eligibil-ity for American grants.
In 2000, not only was Israel classified as a Tier 3 country, but this classifi-cation paralleled the publication of a shocking Amnesty International studyon trafficking for sex in Israel. At that point, almost all trafficked womenwho had come into state custody were held in prison awaiting deportation;law enforcement was poor; and no protections or social benefits were of-fered to women who testified against their traffickers. Prostitution in itselfwas not (and still is not) illegal in Israel, but many actions connected with itwere criminalized. Following some public response,23 the Knesset (the Israeliparliament) passed the first of several amendments to the Penal Code ban-ning trade in women for the purpose of prostitution and setting minimumpunishments (Levenkron and Dahan 2003). Also in 2000, a ParliamentaryCommittee of Inquiry on trafficking in women (PCI) was created. The com-mittee of inquiry and its chairperson, an opposition Member of Knesset(MK) representing the moderate Zionist left, drew public and media atten-tion to the NGO lobby, and the media put pressure on the government. ThePCI’s frequent protocols attest to the dynamics described here.
In 2000, following a district court ruling, the police began releasing traf-ficked women who agreed to testify against their traffickers in court. Thewitnesses were held in specially designated hostels, and the police coveredthe costs of their accommodations and food. No other services—psycho-logical, medical, social or legal—were offered. Instead, women in need re-lied mostly on NGOs for assistance.
By the end of 2000, however, a change was already apparent within gov-ernmental and police circles, at least in the forms of speech and choice ofterms employed by some government officials. Meetings were held and neworders were issued within law enforcement institutions. The most impor-tant development has been the establishment of a special governmentalcommittee on the issue,24 which eventually led to the creation of the first Is-raeli shelter for trafficked women. The chairman of the committee was a po-lice officer who turned into a reformer in practice. In his reports, he hasstressed the need to protect the “victims” and build a shelter, both for moralreasons and as a way of fighting crime.
In 2001, however, Israel was still classified by the United States. as a Tier3 country. At the end of 2001, Israel signed an important protocol supple-
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ment to the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, whichdeals specifically with human traffickers’ punishment and victims’ protec-tion.25 In the following year, Israel was finally upgraded to Tier 2 accordingto the U.S. State Department’s ranking system.
It seems that by 2003, this new discourse—stressing a moral obligationto protect “victims” and the duty to fight trafficking (now depicted as con-nected to international organized crime)—had become prevalent amonggovernmental officials. A governmental decision to found a shelter for traf-ficked women was issued on April 23, 2002, and it became an official gov-ernmental detailed order by December 2002.26 Additionally, in early 2003,a petition to the High Court of Justice on the right to health of witnesses(trafficked women) surprisingly received a positive response from theHealth Ministry, and witnesses have since been granted free access to pub-lic health services equivalent to those received by Israeli citizens.27 We willdiscuss this issue in greater detail in the coming section of the chapter.
In February 2004, the professionally run governmental shelter was finallyopened as a one-year pilot project. Half a year later, the shelter seemed sta-ble and successful. Between July 2004 and October 2004, the number ofsheltered women rose from 23 to 44, probably due to pressures from out-side factors such as the PCI. In March 2004, the Interior Minister issued anorder declaring that witnesses in the shelter should receive work permits forthe duration of the trial, and about half of the women have received suchpermits.
The years 2003 and 2004 thus saw the fruits of the American campaign:28
successful efforts of NGO and feminist lobbies to disseminate the “victim”discourse; success of reformers within the administration; police raids onsex shops and brothels; a more aggressive policy on the part of the StateProsecutor toward traffickers; and a tendency on the part of judges to raisethe average punishment.
Yet 2003 was also the year in which the Israeli government stepped up itsmajor, aggressive deportation operation against non-Israelis residing in thecountry. Human rights advocates stress that most trafficked women appre-hended by the police continue to be held in jails awaiting deportationrather than being housed in shelters. According to information received bythe PCI, about one quarter of all detained women awaiting deportation aresex trafficking victims. In addition, there is evidence that the number ofwomen trafficked via the Egyptian border has risen by more than 200 per-cent since 2002 (Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry on Sex Trafficking2004a).
While these policies—deportation and victim protection—might co-occur under the banner of a successful policy aiming to reduce sex traffick-ing, they seem to reflect substantially different, or even contradictory, dis-courses and tendencies.
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TRAFFICKED WOMEN, ASYLUM SEEKERS, AND ENTITLEMENTSTO HEALTH CARE:A CROSS-REGIONAL COMPARISON
As mentioned earlier, asylum seekers are provided no health benefits in Is-rael, whereas some victims of trafficking—if identified as such and if theyenter the shelter for witnesses—are entitled to free and comprehensivemedical care. How do these policies compare with parallels in other coun-tries? This section of the chapter assembles available information to com-pare asylum seekers’ and trafficked women’s entitlements to medical ser-vices in three countries: Israel, Egypt, and the United Kingdom.(Information on Egypt’s approaches to trafficked women, however, is oflimited reliability). This information is summarized in Tables 8.1 and 8.2.
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Table 8.1. Asylum Seekers’ Health Care Entitlements in Israel, the United Kingdom,and Egypt
(continued)
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Irregular Migration 147
Before delving into specifics, it is important to note one of the criticalconstraints faced by almost all non-Israelis residing in Israel: their depen-dency on, yet only partial access to, Israeli emergency care. Israeli publichospitals offer high quality services in global terms and, as in the UnitedKingdom., emergency rooms are obligated by law to provide emergencycare. Unlike in the United Kingdom, however, emergency care is not free.29
Britain’s definition of emergency care is wider than Israel’s (i.e., includingminor traumas and acute diseases treated in “open walk-in centers”) andfree for all, including undocumented migrants. While the Israeli system isformally open and unconditional in cases of immediate emergency, it is notfree. Prohibitive cost thus impedes the access of all undocumented mi-grants, including trafficked women and asylum seekers, to emergency care(see Tables 8.1 and 8.2). Additionally, hospital administrators tend to place(illegal) conditions on such patients’ admittance—including financial guar-antees signed by Israeli “Good Samaritans” who accompany undocu-mented patients—in order to ensure payment. Except for a few rare cases,however, no hospital has been reported to have refused treatment to a pa-tient whose life was in obvious immediate danger and who was unable toprovide such financial guarantees.
Table 8.1. (continued)
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Asylum Seekers
Unlike in Israel, asylum seekers in the United Kingdom receive full healthcare services. More accurately, their entitlement is equal to that of Britishnationals. Asylum seekers are simply included in the British NationalHealth Service (NHS). The United Kingdom system for asylum seekers iscurrently attracting heavy criticism by NGOs following some “reforms” ini-
Table 8.2. Trafficked Women’s Health Care Entitlements in Israel and the UnitedKingdomi
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tiated by the Labor government. According to the British Medical Associa-tion (2002), asylum seekers experience many difficulties in obtaining treat-ment due to cultural and language barriers. Especially troubling is the im-pact of the infamous Section 55, according to which asylum seekers whodid not apply in the first seventy-two hours after their arrival in the countrymay be denied any form of social support, including healthcare (GreaterLondon Assembly 2004).30 The Medical Practitioners’ Union has launcheda special campaign against Section 55.
Yet the British situation appears to be far better than the Israeli one, inwhich asylum seekers do not enjoy any entitlement to health services, andit is significantly better than the Egyptian situation, in which working per-mits and health entitlements are not even granted to recognized refugees letalone to these further marginalized groups (Brown, et al. 2004).
The situation in Egypt and in Israel regarding the right to primary and sec-ondary healthcare seems quite similar. In both countries, asylum seekers relyon NGOs and UNHCR for social and individual support. In the early 2000s,financial assistance provided by UNHCR-Egypt was severely cut. UNHCR-Is-rael, in contrast, rarely provides financial assistance, possibly due to financialconstraints, yet the local UNHCR liaison and staff make a substantial effort toassist asylum seekers in every possible way, such as through the provision offinancial and humanitarian assistance in specific cases. On the ground, thereappear to be a wider variety of medical NGOs active in Egypt than in Israel,ranging from organizations like Caritas to church and mosque-based clinics.While Israel does grant work permits to asylum seekers which could, in the-ory, enable them to gain better standing in the formal labor market, these per-mits include no health benefits and are effectively quite useless due to mar-ket constraints,31 especially when work in the informal market (i.e., inhousecleaning) tends to pay much better than in the formal one.
Until recently, refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt were typically referredby UNHCR to Caritas, which covered 50 percent of medical expenses (Grab-ska 2006). This arrangement only partially addressed their health needs forseveral reasons. First, there are long waiting lists for Caritas services, and sec-ond, individuals unable to pay the remaining 50 percent were forced to foregomedical care. Some rejected asylum seekers seek help financing medical carefrom relatives or friends who have managed to resettle in Western countries.
An important policy change took place in February 2005 following an ex-tensive period of lobbying by U.N., NGO, and sympathetic governmentbodies (ibid). At that point, the Ministry of Health passed a regulationgranting all foreigners residing in Egypt access to public and primary healthcare services at the same rates paid by Egyptian patients. This arrangementdoes not, however, apply to all forms of medical care. Also, despite the newregulation, recognized refugees received better care at Caritas and, as such,many prefer to wait for care through the Caritas clinic than to wait for care
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through the public health system. Other important factors influencing thepreference for Caritas over public services are Sudanese asylum seekers’ andrefugees’ mistrust of the Egyptian public health services and rumors of dis-crimination at the hands of Egyptian medical professionals (and of organ-stealing; see Kroner 2004, cited in Grabska 2006: 23).
Trafficked Women
The Israeli government has made steps towards improving the specialwitness protections for trafficked women. However, most trafficked womenare still working in the sex industry or are detained and awaiting deporta-tion in special detention facilities for undocumented migrant women. Thegovernmental shelter for witnesses started as a test pilot in the beginning of2004 and seems to have won the support of all parties: the NGO lobby, theParliamentary Committee of Inquiry, and of course the governmental au-thorities. From the point of view of protection given to trafficked womenwho agree to testify, Israel and the U.K. present quite a similar attitude, withbenefits slightly better in Israel.
CONCLUSION
The comparison presented here—of the treatment of trafficked women andasylum seekers in Israel to the general trend of massive deportation of un-documented migrants from Israel, on the one hand, and to the treatment ofequivalent groups in the United Kingdom and Egypt, on the other—maylead one to ask whether specific circumstances unique to Israel explain thesimultaneous “progressive” and “regressive” tendencies described in thischapter. Given these contradictory trends, is a coherent analysis of Israelipolicy towards these specific migrant groups possible?
Assuming that the changes are complex and, in each case, involve a vari-ety of attitudes, considerations, and administrative practices, it seems themost suitable way to examine this situation is through analysis of the dif-ferent discourses used in the public sphere to raise consciousness and effectchange.32 This approach is particularly useful since in both cases, actualclaims for protection have not been made by the interested parties them-selves. Trafficked women and asylum seekers have been almost silent ob-jects of the efforts made on their behalf by other actors, whether local or in-ternational NGOs, state authorities, or others.
Three different discourses appear to be in operation:33
1. A “victim” discourse or a discourse of (altruistic) morality.2. A formalistic-legalistic discourse. 3. A utilitarian or ‘external interests’ discourse.
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The first discourse sees asylum seekers and trafficked women as victimsand entails a moral call for assistance and protection. Sometimes the moti-vation for action stems from notions of solidarity (e.g., feminism) andsometimes from specific values (e.g., leftist support for political refugees).The second, legalistic discourse represents all of the demands and obliga-tions derived from law including, in particular, international law. In itspurest form, this discourse justifies action solely on the basis of a formalobligation—i.e., an international convention or internal legal principle—rather than any specific content. The final discourse, utilitarianism, encom-passes all demands for, and justifications of, actions based on the principleof “external” interest—that is, on considerations unrelated to the specificnature of the problem. This approach is naturally distant from moral claimstargeting specific groups.
Beginning with the third, utilitarian discourse, it is clear that the Israeligovernment’s interest in remaining eligible for U.S. grants has nothing to dowith concern for trafficked women or even with fighting organized crime.Nonetheless, such utilitarian considerations have been a major driving forcein effecting the changes described in this chapter. The second driving forcehas been the effort of human rights and feminist organizations to advance a“victim” discourse based on notions of political solidarity and moral value.As we have seen, this convergence of discourses has proven quite successful.Now, the “victim” discourse reigns even if politicians sometimes still make“utilitarian” claims.34 In contrast, legalistic claims, such as the claim that Is-rael has failed to implement its obligations as defined by the U.N. protocolon human trafficking, have proven neither powerful nor effective in this con-text and, as such, constitute a somewhat lesser consideration.
This situation resembles a parallel process in the U.K. as described byKantola and Squires (2004). In both countries, now-prevailing discoursesregarding trafficking in women started in the feminist lobby and graduallybecame the dominant rhetoric. Nowadays, the main “interest” discussed inthe public sphere is the interest in fighting international crime. This “inter-est” might justify investment in improving the conditions of traffickedwomen witnesses, which can then be expected to increase their willingnessto testify against their traffickers. Two discourses—one moral and the otherutilitarian—thus become aligned around a single goal while their propo-nents still remain intrinsically foreign to one another. While some mightsee this as an alliance of strange bedfellows—i.e., of hypocritical politiciansand devoted feminists—the fact remains that policies really have changed,new laws are being formulated, and powerful images are now circulatingthrough the media.
No such allegiances have emerged, however, with reference to asylumseekers in Israel, if only for the simple reason that people in Israel seldomtalk about this issue at all. Although the number of asylum seekers in Israelis probably close to the number of trafficked women, and although the
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number of asylum seekers holding work permits is much higher than thatof trafficked women witnesses, the “refugee” issue hardly exists for the Is-raeli public. Even activists within the human rights arena are hardly awareof the key issues pertaining to asylum seekers.
While asylum seekers could also potentially be characterized as “victims”and, on that basis, could arouse the same feelings of solidarity as do traf-ficked women,35 no such thing has happened in Israel. The notion of a dutyto protect refugees is seldom mentioned in public discourse and, at thesame time, few utilitarian interests exist that might motivate government ac-tions in this vein. Does this mean that the legalistic-formalistic discoursehas prevailed in this case? Are existing international obligations the drivingforce?
If we trace the formation of the internal refugee procedure and its imple-mentation, it seems likely that the ‘legalistic’ discourse has, indeed, beenthe channel through which messages of change have reached Israeli JusticeMinistry officials whereas the “victim” discourse, sometimes used by hu-man rights advocates, does not seem to have made a major impression.
Even several years after the establishment of the PCI, these remain openquestions. What is the driving force behind the committee, and what is thediscourse motivating it? Could it be that the prevailing discourse within PCImeetings, which are closed to the public, is the xenophobic Ministry of In-terior discourse aimed at achieving external goals—i.e., at stopping non-Jewish immigration—rather than acting for the benefit of asylum seekers?Exposing the governmental body’s work to the public and creating tools foraccountability might put an end to such fears.
It is important to point out that “victim” discourse actually has the po-tential to impede public understanding of the situation of the “other,”sometimes by increasing feelings of guilt and shame at the expense ofanalysis, thereby isolating and depoliticizing a social issue. Miriam Ticktin’s(2002) sharp analysis of two groups of irregular migrants in France—traf-ficked women, who are constructed as “modern slaves,” and undocu-mented economically motivated migrants, characterized in France as sanspapiers (those without papers)—is a good example. Ticktin shows how pub-lic sympathy has been successfully raised for a modern-day “simulacrum”of the sex slave—i.e., a girl brought to France from former colonies—whereas considerably less public sympathy now remains (after a short pe-riod of public attention and sympathy) for the sans papiers. Traces of a sim-ilar process are now appearing in Israel when policy makers respond to thedemands of human rights organizations and other “ideological” actors us-ing concepts of “humanitarianism” and “exceptional cases.” Recourse to thediscourse of “humanitarianism” seems to imply a certain willingness tosolve an individual problem while refusing to acknowledge more basic (hu-man) rights, thereby ignoring a collective moral call, depoliticizing a social
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issue, and hiding the structural factors leading to the problem’s existence inthe first place.
On one hand, the changes in rhetoric regarding the issue of trafficking inwomen in Israel show that change can, indeed, happen and that issues ofhuman rights and moral claims—for example, regarding the asylum seekersissue—should not be thrown quickly into the “humanitarian” trash can.Even with respect to the trafficking issue, however, only small steps havebeen made towards changing public awareness and effecting change in thereal world. Ultimately, as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words
NOTES
1. AcknowledgmentsLarge sections of this chapter are based on studies and work done by Attorney
Anat Ben-Dor of the Tel-Aviv University Legal Aid Center for Refugees. The author isgrateful to Ari Grey for research assistance and to Miri Weingarten for editing theEnglish version.
2. See Section X of the 1950 Israeli “Law of Return.” A 1970 amendment ex-panded the scope of the law to include the spouse and close relatives of any Jew.
3. The term “problem” is commonly used. The name of a parliamentary com-mittee constituted in 1997, “The Special Committee on the Subject of the Problemof Foreign Workers,” and indeed the very existence of such a committee, point in thesame direction.
4. (HC 3648/97 Stamka vs. the Minister of the Interior 53(2) P.D. 724)5. The cost of the range of free health services granted to every Israeli resident di-
rectly by the state and by Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) is about 3000NIS, or around U.S.$600, per year—close to a month’s salary on the basis of Israel’sminimum wage. These 2002 figures are based on official records (Swirski, et al.2001). Since 1995, every formally acknowledged Israeli resident is entitled to gov-ernmental health insurance, which still includes almost all of the primary, second-ary, and tertiary medical services and hospitalizations deemed necessary in Westerncountries.
6. “Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Provision) 5763–2003.”This revised law denied the Minister of the Interior the discretion to grant any resi-dence permit to a Palestinian registered as a resident of the Palestinian OccupiedTerritories. The law was locally and internationally condemned as racist.
7. In Hebrew, “a worker” and a form of the verb “to work” or “to function” aredenoted by the same word.
8. Official figures for the end of 2004 refer to the deportation (or “voluntary de-parture”) of approximately 120,000 people. See Immigration Authority website forupdated numbers at www.hagira.gov.il. Compare with data reported by the Hotlinefor Migrant Workers: www.hotline.org.il.
9. The starting point was a petition submitted by ACRI in 1999 representing sev-eral citizens of Sierra Leone who could not return to their country, which was in themidst of a civil war (Association for Civil Rights in Israel 2000).
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10. To name just two examples addressed issued by PHR-Israel, seewww.phr.org.il.
11. For a detailed chronology and legal analysis, see (Adout and Ben-Dor 2002). 12. The convention and the 1967 protocol are the standard international legal
instruments for the duties a state holds towards refugees and asylums seekers. Forthe Convention, see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/o_c_ref.htm, and forthe Protocol, see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/o_p_ref.htm.
13. In the late 1970s, Israel accepted several dozen Vietnamese (originally Chi-nese) “boat people.” The Prime Minister at the time, Menachem Begin, offered themasylum in Israel, declaring that this was part of the state’s “human-Jewish” tradition(Adout and Ben-Dor 2002; Ha’aretz 1977).
14. As mentioned above, Temporary Residency Permit (A5) grants its bearer theminimum status enabling eligibility for the most important and expensive socialbenefits, such as health care. UNHCR decisions are viewed by the Ministry of Inte-rior as non-binding recommendations. For example, about thirty Iraqi nationalsand other citizens of Muslim countries were held in Israeli prisons for some six yearsdespite having received official recognition as refugees from UNHCR headquartersin Geneva. Their court case led to an important ruling. In 1995, the court orderedthe release of the refugees, since security considerations could not be weighedagainst such long jailing periods. See HCJ4702/94, Al-Tai’I et al vs. Minister of Inte-rior et al 49(3) P.D. 843.
15. The High Commissioner on Refugees visited Israel in May 2000 and met withthe Ministry of the Interior.
16. During the final editing of this article, and after numerous requests by hu-man rights advocates, UNHCR provided one human rights lawyer with statisticssummarizing several years, including 2004 and the beginning of 2005. Later, UN-HCR provided detailed statistics to the Knesset on the occasion of the Knesset’s firstever commemoration of International Refugee Day on June 20, 2005. According tothese figures, the number of asylum seekers fell from 1389 in 2003 to 922 in 2004.This could have been the result of an informal accelerated procedure for rejection ofasylum applications, but the statistics fail to mention this practice and its outcome.Ethiopians remain the largest group, with some 300 applicants in 2004. Again, ifthis number does not reflect rejection “on the spot,” then the actual number ofEthiopian asylum seekers is much higher. The final recognition rate for refugees isextremely low, with only twelve refugees acknowledged during 2004 (i.e., approxi-mately 10 percent). Even more striking is the rate of decisions per applications,which is about 15 percent a year—i.e., some 150 decisions over 1000 applicationsper year. This rate is even lower since there are many pending applications from pre-vious years. Between 500–1,000 citizens from four African countries asked for, andreceived, temporary protection. Members of one of these groups, the SierraLeoneans, have been informed that their lengthy “temporary” protection in Israelwill soon expire and they will have to go back to their war-torn country, from whichthey have been absent for more than a decade and where they will face life ex-pectancies lower than forty.
17. A third of the HIV positive foreign patients known to NGOs and hospitals(where doctors treat them voluntarily (see Rosenthal forthcoming)) are asylumseekers and humanitarian refugees. This estimate is based on fieldwork of the au-
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thor and on data collected by the PHR-Israel Open Clinic in Tel Aviv and the IsraeliAIDS Task Force.
18. The Hebrew word “sachar,” although used as an equivalent of “trafficking,”does not have precisely the same meaning. Its exact translation is “trading,” and itprimarily suggests economic transaction without the additional implication oftransportation over distance and borders that “trafficking” tends to bear. However,its pragmatic usage has become widely accepted, and today it seems to encompassboth meanings: transfer across borders, and sale-purchase.
19. See (Inter-Ministerial Committee for Tackling and Investigating the Phenome-non of Trafficking in Women for Purposes of Prostitution 2002), henceforth IMC 2002.
20. Interestingly the writer, a high-ranking official, relies on a change that hap-pened in “society” or “court”—that is, “out there”—while in fact he and his reportare embodying and perpetuating the change.
21. See http://www.hri.ca/fortherecord1998/documentation/tbodies/ccpr-c-79-add93.htm CCPR/c/79/add.93 paragraph 16.
22. In 2000, the U.S. Congress voted on the Anti-Trafficking Act, of which the re-port and related sanctions form a part.
23. The term “public outrage” would be an exaggeration. Responses were mainlyin the press and drew the attention of politicians and journalists to this “sexy” issue,but they did not involve any public mobilization such as popular demonstrationsor campaigns.
24. The Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) is not to be confused with the par-liamentary committee mentioned above. This committee is a governmental one thatoffers plans for action directly to policy makers.
25. See http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/trafficking_protocol.html. However, Is-rael has yet to ratify the protocol.
26. See www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt.27. Petition HCJ5945/02 was submitted by PHR-Israel and the Hotline for Mi-
grant Workers on July 8, 2002. In March 2003, the state offered this arrangement,which was directly implemented and eventually led to the withdrawal of the petition.
28. On November 10th, 2003, the Internal Security Minister declared before theCommittee of Inquiry that if Israel were again defined as a Tier 2 country in the U.S.State Department report, then he would consider it a personal failure and a failureof the police, meaning that he aspires to no less than the highest tier, Tier 1.
29. The author has been unable to obtain reliable information regarding accessto emergency care in Egypt either in general or specifically in relation to asylumseekers and trafficked women.
30. Section 55 of the Asylum and Immigration Act received royal assent onJuly 22, 2004, and, at time of writing, was the most updated piece of British leg-islation relevant to the matter of asylum seekers’ and trafficked women’s entitle-ment to health services. For the Act see http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2004/20040019.htm. A comprehensive review can be found in http://www.refugeecoun-cil.org.uk/downloads/briefings/ia_act04/ia_act04_brfg01.pdf.
31. Schooling or training is not included in the permit, and most African asylumseekers can only obtain the lowest status jobs.
32. By analyzing discourses circulating in the public sphere, we can avoid hypoth-esizing about the hidden motives of actors working “behind the scenes.” Instead, every
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utterance and expression (speech act) in the public sphere can be treated as a socialfact worthy of examination. It then becomes possible to look for patterns and considersuch changes from a somewhat anthropological perspective, asking question such as:What are the competing meanings (pragmatic definitions) of a “victim” in differentcontexts? Hence, the overall motive of this form of discourse analysis is to seek out so-cially viable “meanings” and the ways in which they change. This project is commonto many theoretical fields in the social sciences. In the present article, our analysis islimited to discourses circulated by one primary set of ‘speakers’—policy makers—inaddition to related actors such as NGOs and media. The approach employed here ismodeled on a similar analysis presented in Kantola and Squires 2004.
33. Our use of the term “discourse” here is distinct from the theoretical meaningsuggested by Michel Foucault. It is much closer to “ideology,” another overloadedtheoretical term. By discourse, we refer to the way in which two people viewing thesame object through different “lenses” effectively operate within distinct universesof meaning and, as such, may in fact use the same words but fail to communicateeffectively. The condition for defining a discourse is therefore that different dis-courses diverge philosophically and ideologically, even if compiled together in a sin-gle person’s speech. We shall use the term “discourse” for lack of a better term, fol-lowing Kantola and Squires (2004).
34. For example, the “victim” discourse was employed par excellence in a speechby Minister of Health Dani Naveh, a right wing politician not famous for being ahuman rights supporter, in a meeting of the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry.(Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry on Sex Trafficking 2004b—November 14).
35. The Medical Practitioners’ Union campaign is a good example from theUnited Kingdom.
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IVSEEKING INHABITABLE SPACESOF WELCOME: ETHNOGRAPHICPERSPECTIVES ONUNDOCUMENTED MIGRANTS’EVERYDAY LIVES
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The terrorists came with the intention of hurting citizens of the world aswell [as Israelis]. . . . We are saving those same people with everythingwe’ve got, as flesh of our flesh. Every person has a right to life, and whatis taking place here, in this hospital, is the answer to terror. . .
—Israeli Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, commenting on adouble suicide bombing that killed twenty-three people,
among them seven transnational migrant workers2
I don’t think any of you strayed into this land. You came purposefully.You knew what you were doing. Do what you want to quickly and gohome. Don’t feel comfortable here. . . . This is not your home. You arehere for a purpose. Once you have achieved that purpose, please go.
—Ambassador Lawrence K. Kodjiku, Head of the Ghanaian Mission toIsrael, at the community organized funeral for a Ghanaian
undocumented migrant killed in the attack
We’re trying to move the heart of God. That is the purpose of the prayer.But we can also try to move the heart of the government if we cannotmove the heart of God.
—Pastor Raymond Hilao,3 Filipino pastor in Tel Aviv, at a municipally organized community leaders’ meeting
held on the day after the bombing
159
9“Flesh of Our Flesh”
Undocumented Migrant Workers’ Search forMeaning in the Wake of a Suicide Bombing
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On January 5, 2003, two bombs exploded on a crowded pedestrian mall inNeve She’anan, a South Tel Aviv neighborhood heavily populated by non-Jewish migrant workers from countries as diverse as Ghana and the Philip-pines, Nigeria and Colombia, China and Romania. Twenty-three civilianswere killed in the attack. Among the dead were seven transnational migrantworkers, several of them undocumented, and dozens of other migrant work-ers suffered physical or psychological injury. While similar in many ways toother suicide bombings that took place during the second Intifada (Palestin-ian uprising), this particular attack was distinguished first, by the high pro-portion of non-Jewish transnational migrants killed, and second, by its tim-ing—less than six months after the initiation of a resource-intensive massdeportation campaign targeting undocumented migrant workers and theirfamilies. In other words, the bombing thrust the city’s undocumented mi-grant communities into the public eye just as its members were beginning toadjust to the heightened precariousness of their presence in Israel.
The phenomenon of economically motivated, non-Jewish transnationalmigration to Israel, as other chapters in this volume elaborate, began in thelate 1980s and early 1990s when Palestinian construction and agriculturalworkers were cut off from their jobs in Israel as a result of Israeli militaryclosures imposed on the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza inthe wake of the first Intifada. Since then, successive Israeli governments haveauthorized the legal recruitment of workers from Thailand, Romania, Bul-garia, and China, among other places, to replace Palestinians. Meanwhile,tens of thousands of undocumented migrants from a separate set of coun-tries in South America, Africa, and Asia began arriving via the “tourist loop-hole” in Israel’s otherwise rigid migration regime (Willen 2003); they ar-rived in Israel as tourists or Christian religious pilgrims and found work inthe Tel Aviv area, primarily in housecleaning but also in childcare, restau-rant work, and other informal market sectors.4
Although other migrant workers had died in earlier suicide bombings,the location and magnitude of this particular attack made its blow to themultiethnic migrant population of Tel Aviv, and to their Israeli friends andallies, particularly intense. The bombing also generated a brief but intensewave of attention from the Israeli media and a number of high-profile po-litical figures.5 Front page headlines in the country’s two main tabloidnewspapers—noticeably similar—emphasized the tragic shared destiny ofthe Israeli and non-Israeli, non-Jewish victims alike; the Ma’ariv newspaperheadline read “One Destiny,” while Yediot Acharonot described the victims as“Blood Brothers.”
As these headlines suggest, this particular bombing, more than any pre-ceding terror attack, momentarily blurred the normative boundaries be-tween ratified Jewish-Israeli citizens and non-ratified, non-Jewish migrantworkers, primarily by casting the two groups as allies—at least in discursive
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terms—in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For that moment, asmainstream Israel characterized Palestinian terrorists as an ultimate Other,the palpable, embodied Otherness of Romanian, Chinese, and Ghanaianmigrants was suddenly reduced by an astonishing degree—nearly to thepoint of full, if fleeting, symbolic inclusion in the Israeli collective.
After the bombing, Israelis and migrant communities alike struggled tomake sense of what had happened and groped for an appropriate languageof mourning. Binyamin Netanyahu, for instance, who was then serving asforeign minister, made headlines during a visit to bomb victims at an areahospital when, as quoted above, he memorably declared migrant workers“basar m’bsareinu”—flesh of our flesh. How deep was this rhetoric of inclu-sion? Were all migrant workers transformed into flesh of Israeli flesh, or wasNetanyahu referring only to the burned and bruised flesh of wounded mi-grants? Moreover, how did undocumented migrants in Tel Aviv respond tothe bombing and to this sudden wave of sympathy? As this chapter aims toshow, and as suggested by the opening quotations, the narrative of com-mon flesh and common humanity articulated by politicians and the Israelimedia in the days after the attack conceals a complicated, dynamic rela-tionship between undocumented migrant workers in Israel and their am-bivalent host society.
Through analysis of this event and its aftermath, this chapter aims toshow how social scientific research on undocumented transnational migra-tion can benefit from an ethnographic approach designed to illustrate howlocal conditions of “migrant illegality” are both configured in ideological,political, bureaucratic, and sociological terms by host states and societiesand experienced in phenomenological terms by individuals and communi-ties. Put differently, this chapter argues that social scientists must take thecondition of migrant illegality as object of ethnographic study rather thaneither using terms like “illegal” and “illegality” uncritically or, alternatively,rejecting them outright because of the negative connotations they bear.6 Tothis end, we must pay careful attention to how local configurations of ille-gality are constituted in discourse, policy, and practice; how they changeover time; and, crucially, how they shape undocumented migrants’ experi-ences of being-in-the-world (Willen 2006; Willen forthcoming). Overall,the chapter is part of a broader effort to link pressing questions in the fieldsof legal anthropology and the anthropology of transnational migration, onone hand, with recent work by phenomenologically oriented scholars in-terested in the anthropology of experience, on the other, with the goal ofdeveloping what can be described as a “critical phenomenology of illegal-ity” (ibid, cf. Desjarlais 1997; Good 1994). Here, I focus on migrants’ ef-forts to find, create, and sustain what can be described as “inhabitablespaces of welcome.” Since the specific form and content of such social“spaces” may vary considerably, I propose this flexible, open-ended concept
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as a tool for gaining ethnographic insight into how undocumented eco-nomic migrants actively pursue—and frequently find—opportunities tofeel existentially grounded, comforted, and safe even within a fraught, andrapidly changing, host society context.
The structure of the chapter is as follows. The first section introduces theJanuary 2003 suicide bombing and the rupture it created in the usual rheto-ric of inclusion and exclusion shaping Israeli public and political discourse.The second section takes a step back to consider the complicated and dy-namic politics of undocumented migrants’ presence in Israel. Here I explorehow, beginning in mid-2002, the generally subtle exclusionary trends thatshaped undocumented migrants’ lives in the 1990s were transformed by themass deportation campaign, which relied on a sophisticated “regime of gov-ernmentality” (Foucault 1991). The campaign, which culminated in thesemigrants’ collective criminalization in support of their mass expulsion, ledto a radical reconfiguration of the condition of “migrant illegality” in Israel(Willen in press-a). The third section addresses migrants’ efforts to find, cul-tivate, and sustain “inhabitable spaces of welcome” within this ideologicallydynamic but generally unwelcoming host society environment.
The remainder of the chapter draws upon ethnographic findings to con-sider how the bombing was represented and mourned at three substantiallydifferent memorial events: first, an official memorial service co-sponsoredby the Israeli state and the Tel Aviv municipality; second, the funeral serviceor “homegoing ceremony” for John Efia Armstrong from Ghana, the firstWest African to lose his life in a suicide bombing; and third, a meeting ofWest African and Filipino community leaders held at the municipally run“Mesila Aid and Information Center” (see Alexander, this volume) in whichorganizers and community leaders together tried to begin making sense ofthis shared tragedy. In the concluding section, I consider how analysis ofthese issues can contribute to broader social scientific conversations aboutthe contextually specific nature of “migrant illegality” and its impact uponthe rhythm, texture, and dynamics of everyday life for undocumented eco-nomic migrants in diverse host society settings.
THE JANUARY 2003 BOMBING
While the high proportion of non-Israeli victims may have distinguished thisparticular bombing from other, similar terror attacks, in other ways it fol-lowed a frighteningly predictable pattern. On a weekday evening, two suicidebombers with explosives strapped to their bodies detonated themselves attwo locations on the busy Neve She’anan pedestrian mall, located squarely inthe heart of Tel Aviv’s—and Israel’s—60,00–80,000 undocumented migrantcommunity (Itim news service 2003; see also Alexander this volume).
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When the first explosion boomed through the city just after 6:30 pm, I wasvolunteering at an Open Clinic run by the local NGO Physicians for HumanRights-Israel just a few blocks away, and most of the patients and staff presentheard both explosions. Within a short period the scene had been cleared, andby the time I reached the area with a number of other clinic volunteers sev-eral hours later, all of the usual suspects had taken up their posts: soldierswith weapons slung over their olive-clad shoulders and police officers in blue;local and international media with television cameras, audio recorders, note-books, and mobile satellite vans; municipal volunteers in fluorescent vests;white-suited, dark-bearded representatives of the ultra-orthodox “Zaka” or-ganization, which collects and disposes of remaining fragments of humanflesh in accordance with Jewish law; and dozens of curious onlookers in-cluding elderly residents of the neighborhood, well-dressed women who hadclearly traveled to the area from other parts of the city, Chinese, Filipino, WestAfrican, and Eastern European migrants, and even a small group of right-wingprotesters taking advantage of the moment to call for greater aggressivenessagainst the Palestinians in response to terror attacks like this one.
While the Israeli authorities, media, and public largely followed theirusual protocols that evening and in the days that followed, things were notso straightforward for illegal migrant workers, for whom the constant pos-sibility of terrorist attack is but one component of a pair of twin threats im-periling their everyday daily lives: terrorism on one hand and the existentialterror of possible arrest and deportation on the other. What I could not seeas I wandered around Neve She’anan on the night of January 5th were thoseindividuals, later discussed in the Israeli media, who refused to seek helpfor fear of jeopardizing their own precarious status within Israel: those whohid in their homes traumatized, bleeding or in pain rather than risking anyform of contact with the Israeli authorities. While no numbers are available,it is clear that at least some undocumented migrant workers avoided seek-ing medical attention for fear of being arrested before, during, or after ahospital visit (Mozginovia 2003). Others brought injured friends and rela-tives to hospitals and left them there unaccompanied (Ha’aretz staff 2003).Still others sought medical attention despite these risks, albeit with reserva-tions. These two sources of fear and anxiety—the terror of death or injuryin a suicide bombing and the deeply engrained fear of being arrested anddeported—run parallel and, in moments like these, become intertwined.
THE POLITICS OF PRESENCE
While arrests and deportations were relatively few and far between in theperiod preceding the mass deportation campaign, migrant workers in Israelnonetheless sought to limit their visibility to the Israeli public and the Israeli
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authorities in order to protect their precarious existence and to minimizethe likelihood of being expelled from Israeli social space, as elaborated be-low. This everyday need for invisibility was expressed in a wide variety ofways including first, avoiding unnecessary travel through public space, andsecond, avoiding non-essential contact with Israeli individuals and institu-tions. Unlike Jewish immigrants, who are embraced by the inclusionarymechanisms of the Israeli state bureaucracy (i.e., services offering housingassistance, health care, social services, and career placement), undocu-mented non-Jewish immigrants in Israel, like their counterparts across theglobe, must fend for themselves and do what it takes to craft a viable life—and, as I will elaborate shortly, “inhabitable spaces of welcome”—at the so-cial, political, and economic periphery. Under these circumstances, few un-documented migrants in Israel dared venture out of the shadows in orderto publicly stake political claims (cf. the chapters by Alexander, Mundlak,and Sabar in this volume). Those who did found it extremely difficult, andat times even dangerous, to collectively organize or articulate political de-mands either informally (i.e., via the media) or formally (via the politicalsystem) (Kemp, et al. 2000; Rosenhek 1999; Willen 2006). Instead, the im-petus to become politically vocal or active is usually trumped by the needto strive for invisibility. Underpinning this need is the fundamental contrastbetween Israeli citizens’—including Jewish new immigrants’—legitimatepresence in Israel, on one hand, versus the illegitimacy of unauthorizednon-Jewish immigrants’ presence, on the other.
The Stakes of Visibility
In 2002, this issue was pushed to the forefront of Israeli public discourseand consciousness with the initiation of the mass deportation campaign.After nearly a decade of relative quiet, during which large, institutionallywell-developed migrant communities sprung up in Tel Aviv and other ma-jor Israeli cities, circumstances changed rapidly and dramatically. The gov-ernment, led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, recast undocumented mi-grants as a group whose physical, social, and economic presence in Israelcould no longer be tolerated. According to the campaign’s architects, ex-ecutors, and widely disseminated media messages, undocumented migrantworkers’ presence was not simply illegitimate in an abstract sense, but nowthreatening to the state’s security in both an economic and a demographicsense.7
Thus the state’s expensive, personnel-intensive campaign, discursivelyconstructed as a remedy for the country’s ailing economy and high unem-ployment rates, effectively reconfigured what it meant to be an “illegal” mi-grant in Israel. Whereas undocumented migrants had previously beenimagined and portrayed in public and political discourse as a population of
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benign but excluded Others, the deportation campaign criminalized un-documented migrants by recasting them as targets of a wide array of disci-plinary and punitive practices. As I elaborate elsewhere (Willen 2006;Willen in press-a), the sophisticated regime of governmentality facilitatingthis radical reconfiguration of the “condition of migrant illegality” hashinged on multiple interlocking techniques, among them 1) biosocial pro-filing; 2) a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize public support andcooperation in implementing the mass deportations; 3) an informationhotline that some citizens have used to “snitch” on undocumented mi-grants; 4) police informers, including migrants as well as Israelis; 5) sys-tematic arrest and deportation of known community leaders; 6) a “Volun-tary Departure” campaign that provided subsidized plane tickets todeparting migrant families; 7) police surveillance of public and private ar-eas; 8) the marking of apartment doors in preparation for late night arrests;9) arrests and deportations, many involving humiliation and psychologicalviolence; 10) the use of physical violence and brutality in the course of ar-rest; and 11) a generalized failure to investigate or punish police brutality(see also Willen under review).
While most undocumented migrants actively strove for individual andcollective invisibility in the years preceding the deportation campaign, thestakes of exposure increased exponentially once it had begun. With thecampaign, agents of the state began looking at these migrants’ bodies witha new, much more aggressive gaze. The increased likelihood of arrest thusled to a heightened sense of vigilance regarding the need to shield one’sphysical body from public view. At the same time, undocumented immi-grants themselves also developed new, deeply embodied ways of looking at,seeing, and attending to the people and spaces around them. In particular,they grew keenly attuned to visual cues that might herald an unwanted en-counter with the Immigration Police, including officers in uniform or incivilian dress, the unmarked white vans that had begun patrolling migrantneighborhoods, bus stops, and travel routes, and the small Xs on door-frames indicating police intentions to conduct late night raids on markedapartments. At the time of the January 2003 bombing, undocumented mi-grants were just beginning to crack this visual code, develop ways of man-aging their embodied fear and panic, and protect themselves and their fam-ilies from the new atmosphere of intensified visibility and risk.
The Stakes of Deportation
While everyday life as an undocumented economic migrant entails nu-merous challenges, many migrants, both in Israel and in other host coun-tries, choose to endure these daily costs in the name of achieving a combi-nation of tangible and intangible, short and long-term benefits. For most
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undocumented economic migrants, the financial, social, and moral stakesof arrest and deportation are extremely high for several reasons. First, dis-parities between the potential wages one might earn in Israel versus in mi-grants’ Third World countries of origin are, of course, enormous. Even uni-versity educated individuals can earn far more working as housecleaners ornannies in a First World country than they might earn working in their pro-fessions in Nigeria, Ghana, or the Philippines (cf. Constable 1997; Ehren-reich and Hochschild 2003; Gamburd 2000; Parreñas 2001). It is these vastimbalances in the global political economy that led nurses and teachers, ar-chitects and journalists, bankers and office clerks from poor countries totravel far from their homes and families to make a living performing theconsiderably less prestigious work of cleaning Israeli toilets. In financialterms, deportation therefore means losing the income that supports oneselfand one’s kin, who often include parents, siblings, children, and other rel-atives and dependents. Moreover, many migrants borrow large sums to fi-nance their travel to Israel. For those who have not yet repaid these loans,deportation may well yield a plunge into inescapable debt.
Beyond the potential loss of livelihood, deportation is often describedby undocumented migrants in Tel Aviv as a deeply shameful fate. In addi-tion to its financial benefits, a successful career abroad often yields a sig-nificant increase in social status, power, and prestige back home. After risk-ing travel abroad with these goals in mind, the possibility of beingexpelled unexpectedly in dirty clothes and with empty pockets—as manymigrants have been—is dreaded. With so much at stake—their families’food, clothing and shelter, children’s educations, relatives’ health, the pos-sibility of a secure future, one’s social standing and good name—the un-documented West African and Filipino migrants I came to know in Tel Avivwere ready to do virtually anything they could to avoid deportation. Forsome, this even meant avoiding medical care after being injured in adeadly suicide bombing.
INHABITABLE SPACES OF WELCOME
Given the perpetual risks and high economic, social, and moral stakes, howdid undocumented migrants in Israel cope with these increasingly inhos-pitable circumstances? In addressing this question, we must look beyondpolitical and ideological configurations of illegality in Israel to considerhow it can shape and constrain migrants’ lived experience, or the rhythm,texture, and dynamics of their lifeworlds. Elsewhere, I have explored howlocal conditions of illegality structure migrants’ lifeworlds in addition toshaping and constraining their experiences of time, space, embodiment, so-ciality, and selfhood (Willen 2006; Willen forthcoming). Here, I examine
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yet another experiential dimension of migrant illegality: the need to find, orcultivate, what can be described as “inhabitable spaces of welcome” withina sometimes sympathetic, sometimes hostile, and always ambivalent hostsociety.
I propose this notion of “inhabitable spaces of welcome” as an inten-tionally open-ended, flexible concept designed to call attention to the dy-namism, creativity, and variability among undocumented migrants’ every-day lifeworlds. Ethnographic investigation of these spaces, I would like tosuggest, can help illuminate how undocumented migrants can, and gener-ally do, succeed in cultivating viable if precarious lives within their host so-cieties by finding small zones of familiarity, comfort, meaning, and safetyeven in the shadow of laws, policies, and practices explicitly designed tomake them feel unwelcome. While my focus here is on the Israeli context, Icontend that this concept has much to offer to ethnographic research onmigrant illegality in other migration settings as well.
The notion of “inhabitable spaces of welcome” hinges on migrants’ cul-turally and individually specific senses of both “welcome” and “inhabit-ability.” These features thus reside not in any discrete or external measure,but rather in the degree to which individual migrants and migrant groupsare capable of finding spaces within which they can feel comfortable,grounded, understood, and safe over a sustained period of time. Such“spaces” may vary widely in form and content. They may involve dyadic re-lationships with spouses, friends, neighbors, or employers or, alternatively,broader social spaces like churches, Bible study groups, soccer clubs, or eth-nic associations. They may also be physical places like one’s own apartmentor the apartment of a friend, a church meeting hall, the home of an em-ployer, or the waiting room of a local free clinic or migrant aid organiza-tion. Within these spaces, migrants are able to cultivate a sense—althoughfrequently a provisional one—of relative inclusion, membership, and exis-tential groundedness in a social realm that includes, but is not over-whelmed by, their host society. Conceived in this manner, the search for in-habitable spaces of welcome is the search for a meaningful social, material,and existential matrix that can ground everyday lives fraught with chal-lenges, hostilities, and dangers.
Rarely are these spaces already in existence immediately upon a new im-migrant group’s arrival; more frequently, individual group members andcommunity leaders must engage dynamically with the people, discourses,and institutions of their host society—as well as with other migrants—in anongoing effort to cultivate such meaningful and sustainable social fields. AsSabar’s chapter in this volume illustrates, for instance, undocumentedAfrican migrants who arrived in Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990ssought out the handful of existing churches in search of potential inhabit-able spaces of welcome. Alienated by these churches’ unfamiliar religious
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idioms and their failure to address the fundamental matters at stake in theirdaily lives, some migrants chose instead to cultivate an alternative set ofphysical and social spaces—the African Initiated Churches Sabar de-scribes—that were able to provide a much stronger and more durable senseof social, spiritual, and existential groundedness. On a related note, Rosen-thal’s chapter in this volume shows how the combined economic and so-cial nature of the relationships between domestic workers and their Israeliemployers may involve fluctuating (or even simultaneous) and contradic-tory sensations of welcome and unwelcome. As the juxtaposition of thesetwo examples suggests, inhabitable spaces of welcome may be found in re-lationships with other community members, with members of the host so-ciety, or both.
To emphasize undocumented migrants’ subjective senses of inhabitabil-ity and welcome, however, is not to deny the significance of structural con-ditions. To the contrary; the attitudes, policies, and practices of a host soci-ety (as well as the degree of consistency or inconsistency among them) canplay a powerful role in shaping whether, when, and how undocumentedmigrants find opportunities to craft what they can comfortably identify asinhabitable spaces of welcome. Moreover, unexpected events like the massdeportation campaign and the January 2003 suicide bombing can test theresilience of these fragile zones of phenomenological security.
Much can be learned from this bombing and its aftermath about both thecomplicated politics of undocumented migrants’ presence in Israel and theprofound difficulties they confront in finding and sustaining inhabitablespaces of welcome. The remainder of the chapter elaborates upon this pointby exploring how the bombing was discussed, experienced, and mournedat three memorial events: first, the official memorial sponsored by the For-eign Ministry and held at Mesila; second, the community organized funeralservice for the sole Ghanaian victim; and third, a community leaders’ meet-ing held at Mesila on the day after the bombing.
TERROR AND MOURNING AT THE CENTER: THE ISRAELI MEMORIAL SERVICE
The first of these events is the official Israeli memorial service organized bythe Israeli Foreign Ministry, a national-level government unit, and held atthe Mesila Aid and Information Center, a branch of the Tel Aviv munici-pality. This brief ceremony, held on relatively short notice and with littlepublicity, struggled to reach a tricky three-way balance among the pathos ofthe moment, the Tel Aviv municipality’s commitment to serving migrantworkers’ basic needs, and the state’s commitment to deporting a maximumnumber of undocumented migrants as quickly and efficiently as possible.
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At this event, migrant victims were rendered visible primarily through Is-raeli eyes, and the memorializing discourse had less to do with the lives ofthe deceased than with official Israeli struggles to achieve two tasks: first, tocarry out the formal work of mourning in a quick and succinct manner, andsecond, to bridge official, sometimes contradictory discourses of Jewish na-tionalism, on one hand, and universalist humanism, on the other.
Mesila, described by the city’s Director of Social Services at the memorialservice as “an open, warm, concerned home for the foreign community,” isone of the only official Israeli institutions (as opposed to the diverse col-lection of non-government organizations) to look favorably upon undocu-mented migrants. Whereas state-level policies aim to prevent undocu-mented migrants from entering the country and to arrest and deport themonce they have arrived, the municipality has chosen a different approach(Alexander this volume, Kemp and Raijman 2004). “We will not interferewith government policies,” I heard Mesila staff reiterate repeatedly and invarious ways. “But,” they would continue, “as long as migrant workers arehere, they are entitled to a basic standard of dignity, respect, and social wel-fare which it is our duty to provide.” To this end, Mesila explicitly aims toserve as “both a door and a window”—i.e., a door through which migrantsmay safely pass in search of help, and a window for Israeli policymakersonto Tel Aviv’s migrant communities.
The Politics of Performative Mourning
The memorial ceremony, which lasted only twenty-minutes, took placein Mesila’s small South Tel Aviv office on January 14th, nine days after thebombing. Speakers at the event included representatives of the municipal-ity and the Israeli Foreign Ministry as well as the Ambassadors of China andGhana, two of the countries that lost citizens in the bombing. Approxi-mately fifty people crowded into the cramped office space for the event in-cluding the Deputy Mayor of Tel Aviv, members of the Tel Aviv City Coun-cil, Mesila staff and volunteers, relatives and friends of the four Chinesenationals and one Ghanaian killed in the bombing, a few representatives ofother migrant advocacy organizations, and a pack of equipment-laden ra-dio, television, and print journalists. The ceremony began with a processionthat brought three plain wooden coffins, containing the remains of three ofthe Chinese victims, into the room and placed the coffins on a raised plat-form draped in black.8 Speakers addressed the gathering from a micro-phone positioned next to the coffins.
The early afternoon ceremony was striking in a number of ways. First, thevictims remained anonymous; other than brief mention of their names, thedeceased were essentially memorialized as symbols rather than as individu-als. Second is the matter of language. While more than half of those present
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were non-Hebrew speakers, nearly the entire ceremony was conducted inHebrew. Third, the event’s planning and organization suggested a compli-cated set of relationships among the various sponsors. Although held atMesila and emceed by its supervising municipal official, the event was actu-ally planned and coordinated at the state level by the Foreign Ministry. Thusthe state, represented by the Foreign Ministry and the Interior Ministry, or-ganized a memorial service that, one could argue, was possible only becauseMesila—the sole organization capable of both bringing generally opposingcamps under the same roof and still broadcasting the desired moral and ide-ological message—was willing to collaborate and serve as venue.
While the deceased were rendered visible primarily through Israeli eyes atthe memorial service, the content of the speakers’ solemn remarks variedsubstantially. These variations illustrate how different branches of the Is-raeli state “see” transnational migrant workers in very different ways. Themunicipal Director of Social Services, a traditionally observant Jew, de-scribed the memorial service as an expression of the municipality’s “com-mitment to solidarity between people,” an obligation derived, in his view,both from “the collective memory of the Jewish nation” and from the reli-gious obligation, mentioned in the Hebrew Bible a total of 36 times, to carefor “the stranger living among us.” The most commonly cited verse reads,“And thou shalt not oppress a stranger, nor shall you oppress him, for youwere strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). In his view, collectivememory and religious obligation merge in the aims of Mesila, which, thedirector continued, “waves flags of social justice, brotherhood, solidarity,and human rights”: an array of modern, liberal legal and ethical principles.
When the Deputy Mayor spoke, in contrast, his remarks were formal andofficial rather than personal or emotionally charged. He, too, expressed anacceptance of migrants’ presence consistent with current municipal politicalideology and program objectives and extended condolences to the familiesof the deceased. Yet the Deputy Mayor’s remarks included one brief but no-table violation of protocol. Not only did he highlight the moral foundationsof Mesila, but he also explicitly called attention to the usually deep gulf be-tween municipal and state-level attitudes toward migrant workers; “The mu-nicipality does all it can—without help from the state—to support the com-munity of foreign workers, who constitute one-fifth of Tel Aviv-Yafo,” “whowant nothing more than to go to work and return home in peace,” andwhom the municipality regards as “residents with equal rights.” Thus theDeputy Mayor, at this public event in the presence of journalists and foreignambassadors, foregrounded the ongoing rift between the Tel Aviv munici-pality and the state. In so doing, he mobilized the raw pain of the day’stragedy as evidence of the justness and humanity of his administration’spolicies in juxtaposition with the callousness of the state. Given the ongoingtensions between the two levels of governance as well as the municipality’s
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constant efforts to avoid being perceived as a thorn in the side of state-levelauthorities, the Deputy Mayor’s candidness was noteworthy.
What was even more noteworthy, however, was the government’s role inthe event. Two ministries were involved, at least in theory: the Foreign Min-istry and the Interior Ministry. The role of the Foreign Ministry was clear;since the ceremony constituted an official memorial and foreign ambassa-dors were invited, official representation on the part of the state was neces-sary. The role of the Interior Ministry was notably different. Although men-tioned as an official sponsor of the event, no Ministry representative wasactually present. After the attending dignitaries laid wreaths on the threecoffins toward the end of the ceremony, the emcee announced that a repre-sentative from the Interior Ministry would come by later to lay a wreath.(This did not, however, take place.)
The Foreign Ministry, however, did send a representative. Speaking inEnglish, he conveyed a message quite similar to those of the two municipalspeakers in describing the event as a chance “to pay tribute and pay farewellto four innocent men and women who came to Israel to make their livingand to send [money] to [their] families and instead have to be sent [home]in coffins.” Even more than Foreign Minister Netanyahu, who had de-scribed wounded foreigners in another context as “flesh of our flesh,” theminister’s official representative expressed sympathy for the human plightof wounded migrants and described them not merely as victims of terror,but also as peace-loving, rational, and comprehensible: as honest, honor-able economic migrants whose primary goal was to improve the lot ofthemselves and their families. What distinguished his remarks was the factthat this position—wholeheartedly accepted at the municipal level but typ-ically rejected at the national level—was articulated by a representative ofthe national government. For once, while the blood was still drying on thestreets, government representatives chose to humanize rather than demo-nize migrant workers.
Like the municipal officials who spoke before him, the Foreign Ministryrepresentative thus portrayed this particular bombing as a shared, collectivetragedy in which Israeli citizens and the non-Israeli non-citizens residingalongside them constituted a single community mourning together. Echo-ing the Director of Social Services’ words, he described Israelis and transna-tional migrants as common victims united against the unquestionable evilof Palestinian terrorism: as “children of light” united against the “childrenof darkness.” This explicit marking of lines in the sand alludes to a neces-sary condition undergirding the state’s decision to mourn these migrants inthe first place. Importantly, the government harbored clear assumptionsabout migrant workers’ political sentiments in relation to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Migrant workers are generally assumed to possess no alle-giances to the perceived Palestinian “enemy” and are even assumed to side
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with Israel in the conflict. Indeed, many Christian migrant leaders do, infact, express such religiously-based allegiance in their communications withIsraeli individuals and groups (see Sabar this volume, Kemp and Raijman2003).
Thus two main messages were conveyed by Israeli officials, at both thestate and municipal levels, during this brief, formal event. The first message,put bluntly, was that “terror doesn’t discriminate” and that all are equallyvulnerable. Second, this particular bombing was cast as a collective tragedyin which Israeli citizens and the non-Israeli non-citizens residing alongsidethem constituted a single community, mourning together as common vic-tims united against Israel’s “real Others”: its Palestinian enemies.9 Overall,this memorial event, like the flurry of newspaper articles published after thebombing, was part of a fleeting and provisional expansion of the socialbody and a brief interruption in normative Israeli “cultural anesthesia”(Feldman 1994) vis à vis the everyday tension and fear consuming undoc-umented migrants’ lives. Importantly, it occurred without effecting any last-ing changes in the contours of the body politic.
TERROR AND MOURNING AT THE PERIPHERY: THE“HOMEGOING CEREMONY” FOR JOHN EFIA ARMSTRONG
The second mourning event took place at one point on the periphery: thecommunity funeral, or “homegoing ceremony,” held to memorialize JohnEfia Armstrong, the single Ghanaian victim of the bombing.10 In sharp con-trast to the short, largely symbolic Israeli event, the Ghanaian homecomingceremony provided a rare opportunity for members of Armstrong’s Fantecommunity—and the Ghanaian and West African communities morebroadly—to achieve three goals: first, to convene without fear of being ren-dered visible and vulnerable to the police; second, to reflect on their exis-tential situation as a community; and third, to collectively contemplatetheir fraught relationship to their host state and society. Indeed, only a tinyhandful of West Africans (or other migrant workers) were even aware thatthat the Israeli memorial ceremony had taken place.
The funeral, held just under two weeks after the bombing, was organizedby the Fante Club of Tel Aviv, an ethnic association of which the deceasedwas a prominent member, and took place in a manufacturing space-turned-event hall near the Central Bus Station in South Tel Aviv. One of the event’sorganizers estimated that one thousand Ghanaians and other West Africanswere in attendance, along with a smattering of Israelis and others, and thatthis was the largest gathering of African migrants ever to take place in Israel.People from the kin group of the deceased wore the traditional mourningcolors of black and bright red, and many other mourners wore red bands of
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cloth around their arms, foreheads or necks. The event, conducted in Eng-lish and Fante, was emceed by an eloquent, bilingual Fante woman, and thedistinguished keynote speakers included a retired high ranking reverend inthe Ghanaian Anglican Church and the Ghanaian ambassador to Israel.
The funeral ceremony was divided into two parts. The first part, whichlasted just under an hour and a half, was a Christian memorial service thatincluded Bible readings, hymns and songs performed by the choir at the lo-cal Ghanaian Presbyterian Church, the reverend’s sermon, and remarks bythe ambassador. The second section, which lasted about five hours, includedwhat were described by the emcee and mourners as “traditional” Fante fu-neral practices. All those present greeted each and every one of the mourn-ers and honored guests in a long, winding line; representatives of various so-cial and religious organizations offered donations to the family of thedeceased; community members led a high energy performance of “tradi-tional” drumming and chanting followed by hours of enthusiastic commu-nity dancing; and the widow, surrounded by women mourners, made a slowtearful procession around the center of the hall in a “widow’s dance.”
Speakers used the gathering as an opportunity not only to mourn the de-ceased, but also to reflect upon the terms and conditions of Ghanaian lifein Israel and to offer practical advice about protecting both individual andcollective interests. As is customary at West African funerals, the speeches,readings, and rituals during the lengthy ceremony evoked complementaryemotions of sadness and joy: sadness at a life cut short, and joy at the factof the deceased’s having lived in the first place. In the analysis that follows,I concentrate on two themes expressed by the keynote speakers during thefirst half of the funeral: first, the practical lessons to be learned from Arm-strong’s violent death, and second, the precariousness of the Ghanaiancommunity’s presence in Israel.
The Anglican Reverend: “We Are All Taking Lessons From This”
The first of the two keynote speakers, a retired Anglican reverend fromGhana (whose wife works at the Ghanaian embassy), conveyed a collectionof spiritual, political, and moral messages in his half-hour homily. Citingrelevant Biblical passages, the first part of his sermon encouraged mourn-ers, and especially the widow, to remember that nothing can separate themfrom God’s love, not even the tragedy of a young husband’s and father’s lifecut short. He noted the ethnic diversity within the Ghanaian community inTel Aviv and called for unity, love, and mutual support.
The second half of his speech was framed as a set of messages directed to-ward three collective interlocutors. First, the reverend applauded the effortsof the Ghanaian embassy to accompany and assist the family of the de-ceased, and he exhorted government leaders to heed the conflict between
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the Israelis and the Palestinians and regard it as a warning of what mighthappen should a similar form of conflict erupt in Ghana. Second, he calledupon the handful of Israelis present to advocate on Ghanaians’ behalf whileinsisting on the temporary nature of their presence in Israel:
I am begging and praying [to] the people of Israel that they should look at ourpeople mercifully. I am praying that each one of you will get your police chiefsto understand that our people came here to get something to go back. Theydon’t want to live here. Because if the population makes their voice heard,maybe the politicians will understand.
The Reverend’s third and final message was to the Ghanaian community. Ina few brief sentences, he managed to praise the community, to encouragemembers to formally register their presence in Israel at the Ghanaian em-bassy, to exhort them to love one another, and to scold those who had en-gaged in the dubious practice of informing on other community membersto the police. Overall, his message to the community focused less on thedeath they had gathered to mourn than on the practical obligations of com-munity members toward one another and toward themselves. “I beg you,”he exhorted the congregation, “we are all taking lessons from this.”
The Ghanaian Ambassador: “Don’t Feel Comfortable Here”
The second keynote speaker, the Ambassador of Ghana to Israel, also fo-cused his remarks on issues of practical concern to the Ghanaian commu-nity. First, after mentioning the great shock brought about by this event andhow it brought the community together, he reiterated the reverend’s exhor-tation to community members to register at the embassy. Second, he inter-preted this event as confirmation that the Ghanaian community is not im-mune to local conflict. “I think from now on,” he said, “we know we arepart of this community. Anything that will happen here will touch us all.”His final message was the strongest:
The most important thing—I don’t think any of you strayed into this land.You came purposefully. You knew what you were doing. Do what you want todo quickly and go home. Don’t feel comfortable around here. . . . This is notyour home. You are here for a purpose. Once you have achieved that purpose,please go.
Whereas the Reverend’s message combined theology, politics, and moral in-struction, and while his words were directed toward the Ghanaian commu-nity as well as their Israeli hosts, the ambassador’s message was more tightlyfocused. For both, however, Armstrong’s tragic and unexpected death pro-vided an opportunity to take a step back and reflect on questions that tran-
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scended the everyday demands of community members’ lives at the precar-ious margins of Israeli society.
Clearly this event was substantially different from the memorial held atMesila. While the Israeli ceremony was a small, non-publicized, largely sym-bolic event held quite deliberately in the liminal space of Mesila, the funeralwas a highly publicized, traditionally structured community event held byand for the community at a well-known venue. Also, the Israeli event oper-ated first and foremost at the levels of rhetoric and symbolism, expressingsympathy and solidarity without humanizing the victims and without any ac-companying commitments to practical action, whereas personal mourning incombination with moral and practical concerns were central to the Ghanaianceremony. Third, the funeral was as rich with culturally appropriate expres-sions of emotion as the first event was devoid of affect; unlike the Israeli me-morial, which took place in languages many of those gathered could not un-derstand, the lengthy, bilingual funeral ceremony was designed and equippedto perform the cultural and emotional “work” of proper mourning. Finally,during this moment of tragedy and loss, community members flocked to theceremony without fear of being seen, or arrested, by the Immigration Police.Indeed, the event hall was crowded so far beyond capacity that the crowd ofmourners, many standing shoulder to shoulder, flowed out into the stairwell.
Still, the threat of arrest and deportation—conspicuously absent from theIsraeli memorial event—emerged in subtle ways at the funeral. Although itplayed no part in the event’s foreground, the indeterminacy and perpetual ter-ror of arrest and deportation were integral, taken-for-granted background di-mensions of the event. “Don’t feel comfortable around here,” the ambassa-dor advised. Also, the officiating reverend appealed to the handful of Israelispresent to act as advocates for the community and ask their leaders to “lookat our people mercifully. . . . Because if the population makes their voiceheard maybe the politicians will understand.” Even in mourning, therefore,desperation and pleas for mercy were on the tip of the community’s collectivetongue. Although attention was focused momentarily on the bloody after-math of one kind of terror, the specter of a second terrible fear hovered omi-nously above the gathering. For those in attendance, lofty rhetoric like Ne-tanyahu’s comments about being “flesh of our flesh” rang false and hollow.Instead, migrant mourners remained keenly aware of the precariousness oftheir existence and the magnitude of their unwelcomeness within Israel.
TERROR AND MOURNING IN A FRAGILE SPACE OF WELCOME: THE COMMUNITY LEADERS’ MEETING
Despite these increasingly palpable exclusionary forces, many Christian mi-grant workers living in Tel Aviv in 2003 nonetheless came to think of their
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own destinies as intimately entwined with that of the Israeli nation.11 Morespecifically, and with the encouragement of local church pastors and layleaders, many had begun to conceive of their own relationship to, and po-sition within, the Israel state and Israeli society in Biblical and religiousterms. Migrant leaders, for instance, often encouraged their congregants andconstituents to think about their relationship to Israeli employers, neigh-bors, landlords, and others—whom they characterized as members ofGod’s “chosen people”—in the context of their own religious obligations asChristian believers, as elaborated below.
The strength and depth of such theologically framed commitments be-came especially clear during the community leaders’ meeting held on theday after the January 2003 bombing as part of an ongoing leaders’ forumorganized and facilitated by Mesila. There, nearly twenty West African andFilipino leaders—mostly Christian pastors along with a handful of secularleaders—gathered to discuss the previous day’s bombing and its implica-tions. At this previously scheduled meeting, all items on the agenda werecast aside in order to discuss, and try to begin making sense of, the previ-ous day’s tragedy. A central topic of discussion was whether in this painfulmoment, when Israeli voices were describing migrants as “flesh of ourflesh,” the leaders’ group should organize a public memorial event to rec-ognize the wounded and remember the dead within their communities. Inother words, the leaders asked themselves whether it would be safe—orworthwhile—to organize an event that would put themselves and theircommunities in the public spotlight. Like the Mesila memorial, the leaders’meeting sheds considerable light on the politics and pragmatics of visibil-ity and, at the same time, on the difficulties undocumented migrants facein their efforts to create and maintain inhabitable spaces of welcome withina tense and dynamic political atmosphere.
The Politics of Invisibility and the Stakes of Exposure
At the beginning of the meeting, community leaders and Mesila facilita-tors sat in a large circle and expressed their shock and horror at the bomb-ing and its quite literal closeness to home. Many participants lived in ornear the neighborhood in which the bombing took place, most had beenwithin earshot of both explosions (as had one of the Mesila facilitatorsand I), and many were actively involved in responding to the bombing’saftermath. Other leaders—as Patrice, a Sierra Leonean representative of thesecular African Workers’ Union, pointed out—would have volunteeredtheir assistance but were afraid that doing so might have put them in dan-ger of arrest.
Early in the meeting, participants described where they had been andwhat they had done the previous evening. Arnold, a prominent secular Fil-
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ipino leader, had spent the night in a local hospital with an injured friendundergoing major surgery. Raymond, a Filipino pastor, explained he hadanswered “tons of phone calls” from journalists whose goal, he said, was,“to convince Israelis that foreign workers are more scared of deportationthan bombings, and that is true.” The group responded to Raymond’s com-ment with a round of cynical laughter; to most leaders, the need to balancethese competing fears was disturbingly self-evident.
Fear of arrest and deportation was also at the top of leaders’ minds asthey reflected on the larger significance of the bombing and debated thepossibility of organizing a community-wide public gathering to supporttheir injured and mourn their dead. A public event of this sort would notonly offer an opportunity for communal mourning, but it would also belikely to capture the attention of the Israeli media and authorities. Forsome leaders, the precariousness of their own and their communities’ sta-tus was a strong deterrent to crafting any sort of public response, even withmunicipal sponsorship; from their perspectives, the risks of visibility weresimply too high. A few of the more optimistic participants saw a potentialsilver lining to the day’s dark cloud; the flurry of media attention theircommunities were receiving, along with public statements like Ne-tanyahu’s characterization of injured migrants as “flesh of [Israeli] flesh,”might in fact offer a glimmer of hope. This handful of optimistic leadersspoke of the tragedy as an opportunity for positive change and increasedacceptance of their presence in Israel, and they supported the idea of apublic memorial gathering.
Most leaders, however—including some who supported the idea of amemorial gathering and others who opposed it—expressed deep frustra-tion with Israeli government policies. Whether their criticisms were lev-eled at particular leaders or at the government as a whole, however,nearly all were tempered with a strong belief that Israeli actions—indi-vidual and collective, personal and political—are always part of a largerdivine plan. For this diverse group of leaders, Israeli politicians and mi-grant housecleaners, Jews and Christians are all part of a single, ongoing,Biblically anchored tale of divine involvement in, and judgment of, hu-man affairs.
The evening’s discussion thus highlighted three fundamental aspects ofthese leaders’ basic mode of being-in-the-world: first, their fears of becom-ing the center of public attention; second, their ever-present fears of arrestand deportation; and third, the profound role of leaders’ religious beliefs inframing and helping them negotiate their everyday experiences as individ-uals, as community leaders, and as Christian strangers in the Jewish “HolyLand.” In other words, Christian belief was central to their efforts to createfor themselves, and their congregants and constituents, an “inhabitablespace of welcome” in Israel.
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Leaders’ Perspectives: Where Theology Meets Politics
Despite the cultural diversity within the group, and consistent with mybroader ethnographic findings, these leaders’ everyday experiences of beingillegal are collectively framed by a powerful, shared model of theodicy andjustice anchored in Christian doctrine. Throughout the meeting, nearlyevery issue that arose was refracted through this lens. “These people won’tlisten to us,” Nathaniel, a Nigerian pastor, told the group. “Yet God hasmade a promise, and everything is part of God’s plan.” For Nathaniel,among others, belief in a divine plan that includes citizens and “foreigners,”Jews, Christians and Muslims, provides considerable hope and strengthboth in everyday life and in times of anxiety, desperation, and terror.
A second element of this divine plan is protective blessing against harm,embodied in God’s covenant with believing Christians. Raymond, the Fil-ipino pastor, highlighted this point by invoking an Old Testament passagecited frequently—if creatively—in church sermons and personal testimoni-als as a scriptural heuristic for managing everyday interactions with Israelis.In Raymond’s words, “As God said to Abraham [and here Abraham ismetonym for the people of Israel, or Israelis] I will bless them that bless youand I will curse them that curse you.” For undocumented Christian mi-grants whose livelihood and safety from arrest lie in the hands of their Jew-ish Israeli employers, landlords, and neighbors, this Biblical verse provideda powerful incentive to acquiesce to Israeli wishes and avoid taking firm orpublic stands against personal or institutional Israeli actions.
A third dimension of the Bible’s cosmic plan is divine retribution, im-perceptible in the immediate sense but, according to this logic, inevitablein the broader span of divine observation and judgment. For the religiousas well as the secular leaders present, this Biblical passage foreshadowed di-vine retribution against both Palestinian terrorists who harm God’s Jewishchosen and Jewish Israelis who bring suffering to God’s Christian chosen.
Significantly, at least some group members were prepared to consider or-ganizing a public, community-wide event to pray for the injured andmourn the dead. In other words, tragedy made it possible to contemplate astep into the visible public realm, in both physical and symbolic terms. Inall, leaders concurred that the oppressive laws and policies affecting themcould best be challenged, in this and other moments, within a Christian re-ligious framework. After some debate, the group agreed in principle to or-ganize a prayer rally—“not a demonstration,” as Miriam, one of the con-frontation-wary Mesila facilitators insisted and as the groupconcurred—focusing on two Biblical verses suggested by one of the moresenior Ghanaian pastors and approved with a rousing “Amen.” His first sug-gestion was I Timothy 2:2, which calls for “supplications, prayers, interces-sions and giving of thanks [to] be made for all men, for kings and for all
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that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all god-liness and honesty.” The second verse was Psalm 122:6: “Pray for the peaceof Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.”
In selecting these two verses, leaders reached consensus on several points.First, they agreed it might—though would not necessarily—benefit theircommunities to respond collectively, and publicly, to the suicide bombingso deeply affecting them. Second, they agreed upon a message. The versefrom the Psalms insists on the historical and theological dependence ofChristianity on Judaism and, as a corollary under the present circumstances,of Christians on Jews. Praying for the peace of Jerusalem—a familiarmetonym for both the people of Israel and the land, or in this case the state,of Israel—was understood as a way of incurring favor both publicly in theeyes of Israeli leaders and privately toward God. The verse from I Timothy,similarly double-voiced, conveys a substantially different message focusedon personal and collective deliverance from suffering and hardship. Ray-mond, the Filipino pastor, explained the complementarity and double voic-ing of these choices in explicit terms: “We’re trying to move the heart ofGod. That is the purpose of the prayer. But we can also try to move the heartof the government if we cannot move the heart of God.” The leaders’ choiceof these passages also highlights a third point of consensus, namely that anypublic event they might organize should be framed not in political butrather in religious terms. Mistakenly, they assumed their Israeli interlocu-tors—including both political leaders and the broader Israeli public—would find a religiously framed message more compelling than an explic-itly political one.
Overall, the leaders were afraid to stage any public event without Mesilasponsorship, support, and protection. Still, despite what they understoodto be firm, good faith commitments from Mesila staff to protect partici-pants from police harassment, they were ultimately reluctant to test the lim-its of the municipal organization’s power. In the end, while leaders appre-ciated the existence of the leaders’ forum as a rare experience of collegial,respectful, and dignified treatment by important members of their host so-ciety, its potential to “empower” was severely undercut by Mesila’s periph-eral structural position and its political fragility in the grand scheme ofthings. In other words, despite their belief in the good will and good inten-tions of their municipal supporters, leaders were afraid that Mesila backingwould be insufficient to inoculate them against the danger of public visi-bility—i.e., against the danger of entering the antagonistic gaze of the state-run Immigration Police.
The leaders’ forum thus stood in a border zone shaped by migrants’structural liminality vis à vis the host state and society, on one hand, andMesila’s structural liminality vis à vis the national branches of state power,on the other. In political terms, the leaders’ ultimate voicelessness and
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powerlessness stemmed not only from these structural constraints, butalso from a fundamental disjuncture between their own and the Israelistate’s understandings of the relationship between them. For the leaders,Christian religious belief offers multiple tools that might help them find,and cultivate, an inhabitable space of welcome in Israel: a framework forpolitical action, a set of everyday coping strategies, an array of interactionalheuristics and, most fundamentally, a compelling historical and theologi-cal map of the relationship between themselves as Christians and theirhosts as Jews.
Based on my own acquaintance with these leaders, regular attendance atchurch services, and ongoing interactions with migrants, I contend that theviews sketched out here are not merely rhetorical tactics, but rather deeplyheld convictions about how the state apparatus currently governing the“Holy Land” should treat Christian migrants, including those the state de-fines as “illegal.” Israeli officials, however—whether national or local, secu-lar or religious—have been unwilling to engage migrants’ religiouslyframed claims. Instead, Israeli national policies are framed in discourses ofstate sovereignty, municipal policies rely on a fragile, precarious frame thatweaves a pragmatic social work approach into a dilute ideology of humanrights, and at both levels of state authority, religion—absolutely central tomigrant leaders’ mode of interpreting and being-in-the-world—is flatly re-jected as a potential mediating framework. Aware of these weaknesses intheir tentative plan to make a public symbolic and political statement in thewake of the January 2003 bombing, the leaders instead decided to protectthemselves, and their communities, by choosing the only path they felt wassafe: a return to invisibility.
CONCLUSION: TOWARD A COMPARATIVE ETHNOGRAPHY OF “MIGRANT ILLEGALITY”
Each of the events analyzed here casts a somewhat different light on thecomplicated politics of undocumented migrants’ presence in Israel. So, too,does each event shed light on how dynamic, and contested, local configu-rations of migrant “illegality” have impeded undocumented migrants’ ef-forts to cultivate and sustain inhabitable spaces of welcome within Israelisocial space. First, the official memorial service, sponsored by the ForeignMinistry but held at Mesila, shows how different agents of the Israeli statetend to view transnational labor migrants through substantially differentpolitical and moral lenses. Under less dramatic circumstances, the govern-ment tends to view them through the lenses of nationalism and demo-graphic anxiety, on one hand, and, of labor market concerns, on the other.The municipality, in turn, tends to rely more heavily on the lens of hu-
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manitarianism and, on occasion, the lens of Jewish ethics and values. In thewake of the January 2003 suicide bombing, however, these national andmunicipal perspectives briefly—if superficially—converged in the pathos ofa fleeting moment.
Second, the funeral for John Efia Armstrong, organized by the Fante Clubof Tel Aviv, shows how despite the state’s increasingly aggressive efforts toexclude undocumented migrants from the Israeli body-politic, dynamic mi-grant communities nonetheless emerged and flourished within this com-plicated political and ideological context. Like the African InitiatedChurches described by Sabar in this volume, community events like thisone offered undocumented migrants opportunities to escape from an in-creasingly antagonistic outside world into comfortable spaces within whichlife’s sorrows, as well as life’s joys, could be confronted in a familiar culturaland religious idiom. At the funeral, however, the instability of these cir-cumstances was emphasized by the Ghanaian ambassador, who cautionedthe assembly of mourners not to feel welcome in Israel. For those whofailed to heed the ambassador’s cautionary words and chose to stay in thecountry, the increasingly fraught politics of undocumented migrants’ pres-ence in Israel, and the increasing fragility of the inhabitable spaces of wel-come they had managed to cultivate, became eminently clear as the depor-tation campaign intensified in subsequent years (Willen in press-a).
Finally, the community leaders’ meeting at Mesila highlights three keyfacets of the condition of migrant illegality in Israel. First, the forum itselfembodies the complicated politics of migrants’ presence; it represents oneconcrete strategy by which the municipality has sought to render Tel Avivinhabitable and extend a “helping hand”—one of its original slogans—tothe city’s undocumented migrant communities in the shadow of national-level policies of criminalization and expulsion. Second, the evening’s dis-cussion shows how religion has provided many migrants and migrant lead-ers with both an epistemological framework for thinking about therelationships between Christian migrants and their Jewish host society and,simultaneously, a pragmatic—albeit politically neutered—moral code fornegotiating those interactions. Third, it reveals the effective limits of theseinclusionary municipal trends and religious coping strategies. More specif-ically, the meeting shows how the impulse to avoid unnecessary attentionand strive for invisibility prevailed even when a shared experience of terrorand tragedy—defined as such by national-level as well as municipal offi-cials—created the possibility of a momentary and fragile yet potentiallyproductive space of welcome.
In concluding, I would like to elaborate briefly upon how the present dis-cussion can contribute to broader social scientific conversations abouttransnational economic migration in general and the condition of “migrantillegality” in particular. As Smith and Guarnizo (1998) contend, and as
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noted in the introductory chapter, scholarly research on transnational mi-gration must attend to the dynamic interactions and interconnectionsamong three levels of analysis: first, the micro-level of migrants’ experience,second, the meso-level of state and institutional policies and practices, andfinally, the macro-level of global political economic trends and processes.Such a vast and multidimensional research task, as anthropologist SarahMahler (1998) points out, is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary,and anthropologists must join sociologists, political scientists, geographers,and other scholars in shaping this pressing global conversation. Moreover,as Nina Glick Schiller (2003) contends and as the present chapter hassought to demonstrate, anthropological research grounded in the method-ological strategy of long-term ethnographic fieldwork has a unique and im-portant contribution to make to this ongoing research project.
Second, I argue that social scientists—not only ethnographers—shouldneither employ the language of “illegal” migration and migrant “illegality”uncritically nor reject it outright on putative moral grounds.12 As anthro-pologists Josiah Heyman and Alan Smart rightly point out in their discus-sion of the interrelationship among legality and illegality,
Social scientists, as with people at large, use relatively unloaded terms in the le-gal sphere, but take up a moral discourse as soon as they enter the topic of il-legal activities. Morality is important; but jumping right to morality prevents usfrom using strong analytical terms. (1999: 20, emphasis added)
Instead of either recapitulating or refusing to investigate the moral under-pinnings of discourses of migrant illegality, it seems wiser to give analyticcenter stage to the varied, conflicting and contested moral positions es-poused by agents of the state, by migrant advocates, and by undocumentedmigrants themselves as they attempt to negotiate the challenges of theireveryday lives.
Finally, the comparative ethnography of migrant illegality will requiremobile concepts and models that are flexible enough to be relevant withinmigration settings as diverse as Western Europe, North America, SoutheastAsia (especially Japan), the Persian Gulf, and the Levant. On this point, Iwould like to offer two final comments. First, I contend that the critical phe-nomenological approach employed here (and developed elsewhere; see es-pecially (Willen forthcoming, Willen in press-a)) offers a productive start-ing point. At the heart of this approach is a commitment to simultaneouslyinvestigating how illegality is ideologically, politically, and bureaucraticallyconfigured and, at the same time, how it shapes what phenomenologistswould describe as undocumented migrants’ experiences of being-in-the-world. Second, and more specifically, the flexible, open-ended concept of“inhabitable spaces of welcome” offers a useful ethnographic frame for the
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comparative investigation of how illegality is configured and experiencedacross migration settings. Not only does the notion of inhabitable spaces ofwelcome give ethnographic center stage to migrants’ practical efforts to“make life work” within complex and shifting grids of opportunity, chal-lenge, and constraint, but it also demands careful attention to migrants’ ca-pacity for individual and collective agency within such changing grids. Toexplore such spaces, therefore, is to consider issues of both structure andagency, and external conditions as well as subjective experiences.
As the aftermath of the January 2003 suicide bombing demonstrates, nei-ther configurations nor experiences of migrant illegality remain constant,even within a single migration setting. Nor do the precarious spaces of wel-come grounding migrants’ lives necessarily remain equally inhabitable overtime. Through the vehicle of ethnography, as this chapter has sought to il-lustrate, social scientists can gain considerable insight into how undocu-mented migrants nonetheless can, and generally do, succeed in cultivatingviable—if precarious—lives within ambivalent host societies.
NOTES
1. This chapter is based upon a larger study supported by Fulbright-Hays, the Na-tional Science Foundation (No. 0135425), the Social Science Research Council, theWenner Gren Foundation, the Lady Davis Trust at the Hebrew University ofJerusalem, and the Department of Anthropology and Tam Institute for Jewish Stud-ies at Emory University. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendationsexpressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of fundingagencies. Earlier versions were presented at the 2003 American Anthropological As-sociation Annual Meetings (Chicago, IL), the 2003 Israeli Anthropological Associa-tion Annual Meetings (Neve Ilan, Israel), and the Migration and HomecomingWorking Group at the Van Leer Institute for Advanced Study in Jerusalem (2004),and a Hebrew adaptation will be published in Visibility, Social Identity and Home-coming, eds. Tamar Rapaport and Edna Lomsky-Feder. Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute.The author is grateful to Peter J. Brown, Don Seeman, Robert Desjarlais, JenniferHirsch, Erin Finley, Anat Rosenthal, Heide Castañeda, and Tamar Rapoport for theirhelpful feedback on earlier drafts.
2. Quoted in (Freilich and Eichner 2003); original translation.3. With the exception of public figures, all individuals mentioned in the chapter
are identified using pseudonyms. 4. For more on the circumstances that contributed to the mass influx of transna-
tional economic migrants into Israel, see (Bartram 1998; Raijman and Kemp thisvolume).
5. (Chaim, et al. 2003; Eichner, et al. 2003; Ha’aretz staff 2003; Mozginovia 2003;Sinai 2003a).
6. While some scholars reject terms like “illegal” migration and migrant “illegal-ity” as necessa.rily implying some form of collusion with hegemonic, and oppres-
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sive, ideological forces within host societies, I join a small but growing group ofscholars (Coutin 2003; De Genova 2002; Suárez-Navaz 2004) in arguing that thereare compelling reasons not to reject them outright but, instead, to take them as ob-jects of ethnographic investigation and analysis. My goal is not to dispute the factthat undocumented migrants are, indeed, defined by host states as “illegal,” butrather to problematize both the motives for defining and treating them as such andthe lived implications of the category itself. See (Willen forthcoming) for a more de-tailed discussion of this issue.
7. See (Willen under review) for a more detailed discussion of the many faces of“security” and their interrelationship in this context (cf. Rosenhek, this volume;Fassin 2005; Ticktin 2002).
8. The fourth Chinese victim had died earlier that day, after the event had alreadybeen planned, and relatives of the Ghanaian victim did not consent to have hisbody moved for the ceremony.
9. See (Willen under review) for more detailed discussion of this distinction.10. Other transnational bombing victims were memorialized in other settings.
For instance, a memorial mass was held at one of the Catholic churches in Jaffa fora Romanian migrant worker who was killed (Sinai 2003b).
11. Cf. (Sabar 2004a; 2004b, this volume). This was also true for many SouthAmericans in Tel Aviv (Kemp and Raijman 2003).
12. See (Willen 2006) for more detailed discussion of this issue.
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We don’t come to Church any more. . . . We are afraid. . . . We only go out towork and then back home . . . . If we want to pray, we do it in our house, alone.. . . We can’t risk being caught . . . .
The words of Dennis, a thirty-three-year-old Ghanaian worker in Tel Avivexpressed in 2004, reflect the fear and despair shared by all undocumentedmigrant workers in Israel when their lives were drastically changed by theintensified deportation campaign initiated by the Israeli government in July2002. Dennis arrived in Israel in 1997 as part of a group of trainees in farmmanagement skills sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and heoverstayed his visa in search of work. Like many other African migrants inIsrael, he found employment as a house cleaner and soon joined one of theAfrican Initiated Churches in Tel Aviv. About the changes in his life, he said:
It is hard to believe that less than a year ago I used to go to church three or fourtimes a week . . . to pray, to meet friends, to hear news about home . . . to getinformation about rooms to rent. . . . It was the most important thing in my life.. . . It gave me so much power. . . . I could never imagine such changes . . . butyou see, sometimes God tests us . . . and fear is stronger than anything else.
Dennis’ words show the enormous importance of the church in his life.For many African migrants in Israel, religious and community life con-verged in ways that helped them endure the hardships they faced, both intheir personal lives and as migrants in a foreign and not entirely welcom-ing land. Like Dennis, most African migrants to Israel joined a church soon
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10The Rise and Fall of AfricanMigrant Churches
Transformations in African ReligiousDiscourse and Practice in Tel Aviv
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after their arrival and found there succor of all sorts: spiritual, of course, butalso social, economic, and political. The churches became the center of thelively, though heterogeneous, African community. Pastor John, a Ghanaianfrom the Ashanti region who was one of the first Africans to arrive in Israel,described the role of churches as follows.
In Israel we are all part of a big community of Africans. . . . Our churches arethe most important part of our community, and for me going to church is ofgreat magnitude. . . . I meet other people from Africa . . . some come from myown area and I even know their families, but others come from different coun-tries all together. . . . We don’t always understand each other, and we even prayin very different ways, but still we are all brothers. . . . If we will not be together,who will support me? . . . Here we don’t have our families, our clubs andchurch communities like back home . . . That is why we come here so manytimes a week.
In his own words, Pastor John emphasized the central role of the church inhis life and its role as his—as well as others—community.1
This chapter analyzes the role of the Israeli-based African InitiatedChurches (AICs)2 in the lives of African migrant workers in Israel. At theirpeak, more than forty congregations functioned in the southern part of TelAviv in an area of about 1,000 acres. In 2003, one by one, the Africanchurches closed down, either because their pastors and lay leaders were de-ported or because people were afraid to come. By the beginning of 2004,only a handful of churches were left, and even those were unstable andmembers lived in daily fear of their closure. It seems that the closure of thechurches signified in the eyes of many Africans the dismantlement of theirlives as individuals and as part of a larger community.
Religion has long been recognized as a central component in the lives ofmigrant communities.3 Recent literature emphasizes the role of religion inprocesses of identity formation among migrants4 as well as migrants’ use ofreligious institutions to gain legitimacy within their host country.5 Whetheras a spiritual force or a source of social identity, belonging, and recognition,religion is a powerful component of people’s lives, especially in times of un-certainty, change, and crisis, as migration may be.6 Habermas has describedreligion as, “the last refuge of unadulterated difference, the last reservoir ofcultural autonomy” (2002: 1). Moreover, religion, especially Christianity,has been acknowledged as an important component in the lives of manyAfricans, and religious organizations throughout Africa serve as a majorchannel for political and social expression.7 It is therefore only natural thatAfricans would draw upon their religious practices and beliefs within theircountries of migration. Hence, this chapter examines the role of AICs in Is-rael from the period of their establishment, through their prosperous years,until their more recent underground period. The chapter focuses in partic-
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ular on the significance of these churches in the lives of the African migrantworkers in Tel Aviv from the perspective of Africans themselves.
METHODOLOGY
This study is based on 265 open-ended, in-depth interviews conducted inIsrael and over one thousand hours of participant observation in differentchurch-related activities at a variety of African churches in Israel between1999 and 2004. Churches of different religious orientations, nationalities,and ethnic groups were studied. Several in-depth interviews were also con-ducted in Ghana, Cameroon, and Kenya between 2002 and 2004 with peo-ple who had lived and worked in Israel and returned home, as well as withrelatives and friends of migrants still in Israel. Interviewees in Israel werelocated through snowball sampling, beginning with a Ghanaian friendwho introduced me to many other members of the African community.The interviewees consisted of men and women, more or less half and half,ranging in age from 20 to 40, from 20 different countries including Nige-ria, Ghana, Kenya, South African, Sierra Leon, Liberia, Congo, Cameroon,and Uganda, among others, and from over 50 different ethnic groups.Most, however, were from Ghana and Nigeria. Most interviews were con-ducted in English and French and a few in Twi and Kiswahili. Within theGhanaian community, I interviewed people from five different regions:Ashanti, Greater Accra, Northern, Central and Eastern Ghana. The Niger-ian interviewees were mainly from Igbo and Yoruba speaking areas. Mostof the interviews were conducted in churches during and after services.Each lasted between one-and-a-half and four hours, and the longer inter-views were usually spread over several meetings. Once the interviews wereunderway, interviewees were encouraged to talk freely about their dailylives in Israel, with minimal interference, other than requests for examplesand clarification. It soon became clear from interviewees’ accounts that thechurch and religious activities were major elements of their quotidian re-alities and a center of their lives as part of a larger group of African mi-grants in Israel. It was only then that I began to ask about these in issuesspecific.
Participant observation began shortly after the first interviews and wasconducted throughout the interviewing process. At first, observation fo-cused on both church and non-church related activities, but church-relatedactivities gradually took center stage.
Interviews were transcribed during the course of the conversation or im-mediately afterwards. The transcripts and notes from the interviews and ob-servations were analyzed using the constant comparative method (Straussand Corbin 1998). The names used here are all pseudonyms.
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AFRICAN COMMUNITIES IN ISRAEL
Driven out of their own countries by economic hardship and political in-stability, Africans, mainly from West Africa, began migrating to Israel in thelate 1980s. The first to enter Israel as workers came in the employ of Israelifamilies returning from Africa. Others arrived as trainees in various voca-tional training programs organized by the Israeli Foreign Office and stayedon. The majority came as pilgrims on tourist visas. Israel was an attractivedestination despite the exclusiveness of the Law of Return, the risk of Pales-tinian terror and, beginning in 1996, the government’s policy of deportingundocumented migrant workers. Entering Israel on a pilgrim or tourist visawas easy; hourly wages for the housecleaning work that Africans could findwere relatively high; and after the first wave of migrants, those who fol-lowed had a good support system to help them find employment, housing,and friends.
For many interviewees, Israel had special significance as the Holy Land,and this was frequently mentioned along with practical considerations as areason for choosing Israel as their destination of migration. Some gave theimpression that Israel’s being the Holy Land was a primary motive and thatinstrumental incentives were only secondary. For all their enthusiasm, how-ever, it seems unlikely that more than a very few, if any, chose Israel solelybecause of its biblical identity; the practical benefits of migrating to Israelwere kept firmly in mind. Nevertheless, this identification with the HolyLand seems to have infused Israel, for all its imperfections, with uniquespiritual value and created a bond beyond that formed by the experience ofliving in the country.8
In contrast to most other migrant workers, Africans were not recruited bymanpower agencies, but instead tended to arrive on an individual basismuch as they do in other countries. As a result, they were relatively free tochoose their housing and employers, negotiate their terms of employment,and leave their jobs if they were not paid or if they were otherwise abused.Yet their illegal status put them at risk of arrest and deportation. The ma-jority settled in the poor neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, mostly around the oldCentral Bus Station, where they found relatively cheap housing, discountshops and food markets, good bus transportation to all parts of the city andthe country and, above all, the company of other migrant workers, includ-ing Africans.
Most Africans in Israel were employed in menial jobs in the service sec-tor as house cleaners and child minders. A few created their own busi-nesses, mostly to meet the needs of other migrant workers. These includedbabysitting services and nursery schools, dressmaking, and alterations.There were also photographers, computer experts, transporters, handymen,painters, and importers of food and other commodities from Africa. Many
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of these entrepreneurs combined a paid job with their independent busi-ness activity.
The African migrant community was distinct from other migrant laborergroups in Israel in a number of ways. Most visibly, they were black in a pre-dominantly white country, and though they suffered from fewer of the neg-ative stereotypes to which blacks are subjected elsewhere, most experienceda sense of difference and exclusion, both as blacks and as Christians. As oneinterviewee, John, put it in a 1999 interview, “I am black, Christian, and Idon’t belong here . . . and I shall never belong here.” Naturally, their colormade them particularly visible to the deportation police, a fate also sufferedby Asian migrants.
Of the various migrant communities in Israel, the Africans were the mosthighly educated; several studies reported that a high percentage had collegedegrees or professional training (Mesila 2000). Needless to say, the menialwork they did in Israel represented a lowering in social status and was con-sidered demeaning.
One of the most important features that distinguished Africans fromother migrant groups in Israel was their vibrant and well-organized com-munity life. A similar tendency to organization is found among African mi-grants in Europe and North America, as well as among other migrant work-ers in the West (Attah-Poku 1996a; Attah-Poku 1996b; Owusu 2000; Peil1995). To some extent, this tendency may be attributed to the exclusion anddeprivation suffered by migrants worldwide, but it also owes something tothe rich tradition of associational life in Africa, which dates back to the pre-colonial and colonial era and enhanced after independence as Africansgrouped together in civil associations in the face of tyrannical rulers and thecollapse of the state (Sabar 2002).
There are no official figures for the number of Africans in Israel. Figurescollected by various bodies, however, put the number between 10,000 and14,000 at the end of the 1990s.9 Most came from Nigeria and Ghana, withsmaller numbers from almost all other African countries. However, due tomassive deportation in 2003–2004, that number dropped to between 4,000and 8,000. By the beginning of 2004, the estimated number of Africans wasbetween 2,000 and 4,000, including several hundred Congolese, SierraLeoneans, Liberians, and Ivorians recognized as refugees by Israel followingthe recommendations of the United Nations High Commissioner forRefugees (UNHCR) (see Adout, this volume).
Within a short time, Africans in Tel Aviv created an impressive network ofassociations of all types, including national, ethnic, and religious groups, ro-tating credit associations, labor unions, sports clubs, and women’s organiza-tions. These organizations—being the foundation of the African commu-nity—catered to the social, economic and cultural needs of Africans and alsoplayed an active role in lobbying for amelioration of Israeli policy toward
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migrant workers. This African community was from its very beginning a con-glomerate of small associations, therefore: heterogeneous and fractioned,but nonetheless a viable arena for Africans in Israel. At the heart of this richcommunity life were the many independent African Christian churches.10
THE RISE OF AFRICAN CHURCHES IN ISRAEL
When the first African migrants to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990swanted to pray or join a religious congregation, they went to one of the ex-isting mainstream churches. Some joined special prayer meetings conductedby the Catholic Church for Filipino migrant workers, and others joinedchurch services held for foreign diplomats. As the number of professingAfrican Christians was small, none of the existing churches offered special ser-vices for African members, and there was little effort to modify the prayers,despite some shy requests. As a result, many Africans who joined these main-stream churches soon left to create their own. Some left because they were theonly blacks in the congregation, while others spoke of differences in style andatmosphere as a source of spiritual frustration or social discomfort and alien-ation. For instance, Ezra, a twenty-year-old Fanti from Ghana, indicated in a2000 interview that: “When we pray we shout and sing out loud. . . . Hereeverybody was so quiet that I could not be myself and I did not feel I wasreaching God.” For George, a thirty-two-year-old Ashanti speaker also inter-viewed in 2000, “They had their own way and we had ours, and althoughback home I was a member of the Anglican Church, here I felt odd.”
Moreover, the sermons in the existing churches did not relate to the dailyreality of most Africans. In particular, they failed to address either the ter-rorist attacks to which they, like their Israeli neighbors, were exposed andwhich sometimes struck directly at the area where most of them lived ortheir situation as foreign, undocumented workers in a strange land (cf.Willen, this volume). Relevant sermons about day-to-day issues were some-thing Africans had come to expect from their churches in Africa, and theirabsence left them feeling disappointed and unfulfilled. Mike, a Kenyan in-terviewed in 1999, expressed these sentiments as follows.
I think that the pastor did not even know what we were doing in Israel, wherewe were working or living. . . . Not that he did not care . . . but it is very dif-ferent [from Africa]. He never related to issues of foreign workers, although wewere there and we thought he ought to. . . . One day our picture was in the pa-per and even then he did not mention it in his sermon.
Since most of the Christians in Israel are Arabs, many interviewees spokespecifically of their feelings of linguistic, social, and cultural alienation
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from the Arab congregations. For instance, Grace, a thirty-six-year oldKenyan woman, explained in 2000 that, “They have their own language,they dress differently, and they are very different in their behavior duringthe service. They are very reserved.” For many Africans, this cultural alien-ation was amplified by strong religious and political feelings. Abraham, athrity-one-year-old Ghanaian from the Coastal region, said in 2001, “Wedon’t like the Arabs. . . . In Ghana there is actually a war between the Chris-tians and the Muslims and we see all Arabs as being Muslims. . . . We reallydon’t like them . . . not here and not anywhere.” Africans’ alienation wasamplified by their inability to come to terms with the fact that most of theChristian Arabs in Israel are Israeli citizens. This seemed to them an anom-aly. Lydia, a twenty-eight-year-old Ghanaian from the Greater Accra region,spoke about a clear link between Arabs and Islam and could not toleratetheir presence within the local Christian arena. She said in 2000, “This isthe Holy Land of God. . . . He chose you people [the Jews] as His sons anddaughters and gave the land to you, and you should not give it away to any-body . . . especially not to the Arabs.”
Africans’ alienation and their consequent drive to establish their ownchurches led to the creation of an African initiated Christian space. In thisunique space, migrants could feel connected to home and to other Africans,worship in ways more fulfilling to them than in the mainstream churches,and feel that their spiritual and other needs were met. Acutely aware of theimpossibility of ever gaining citizenship in Israel and painfully aware oftheir “otherness” in almost every respect, African migrants established theirown churches not as a bridge to the host society or as a way of gaining le-gitimacy or residency, but as an arena of self-definition and self-expressionin a foreign land.
The first congregations were small, informal fellowships and home-pray-ing communities, usually established by people from a single country.There was no formal leadership, and the congregants had little or no theo-logical training. There were no hymn books or pre-planned services. Ses-sions were conducted—or rather conducted themselves—in the expressive,emotional style of most of the AICs. Initially, some five or six praying fel-lowships were established in southern Tel Aviv. They were rather small, butthe level of commitment and religious zeal was extremely high. Most mem-bers were born-again Christians who strictly forbade alcohol, pre- and ex-tra-marital sex, and smoking.
Gradually a process of institutionalization set in, and the small fellow-ships grew into official churches with names, affiliations to existing GlobalChristian denominations, and designated leaderships. The newly estab-lished churches rented small halls, basements, and old warehouses for theirmeetings. Clear hierarchical structures were created, generally including apastor, a general secretary, a treasurer, a choir, and a handful of committees
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such as welfare, budget, discipline and Bible study. Maintaining the newchurches required greater financial resources. As a result, fixed membershipfees were collected, and donations were solicited at every church gathering.
A few churches brought pastors from Africa, but because of financial lim-itations the vast majority trained and developed a leadership from withinthe community of Africans in Israel. As a result, most local leaders workedduring the day as house cleaners, then put on a pastoral gown in theevening. As in Africa, most of the clergy were men. In some churches therewere deaconesses, but they usually occupied the back benches of theirchurch leadership.
Together with institutionalization and expansion stemming from thegrowth in the number of African migrants, there was also a process of frag-mentation. Members created new prayer forums, usually because of ethnicdivisions, personal rivalries, and/or disagreements within the congregationon such matters as membership fees, budgets, and the role of women. Onepastor interviewed suggested that the greed of would-be church leaders mo-tivated some of these splits. These patterns echo similar trends in the cre-ation of the AICs in the late 19th century as well as recent splinters withinAfrican Christianity on the African continent.
GLOCAL SACRED SPACE
In their structure, content, and conduct, the African Initiated Churches inIsrael were part of three worlds: the world of transnational PentecostalChristianity, the world of African Initiated Christianity, and the local worldof Israel, in which they created what may be termed a unique African-Is-raeli-Christian arena.11
Administratively, the African churches in Israel can be classified intothree groups. The first included local branches of international churchessuch as the Assemblies of God. The second included churches originally cre-ated in Africa, such as the Resurrection Power and Living Bread MinistriesInternational and the Beth-El Prayer Ministry, to name but two. Both ofthese churches were headquartered in Ghana and had many branchesworldwide. The third and most prevalent were the churches founded byAfrican migrant workers themselves such as the Charismatic Catholic Con-gregation of Tel Aviv, Come and See, and others. Some of the more suc-cessful churches opened branches back in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Somesought recognition and affiliation with international Christian associations,while others maintained their autonomy.
Theologically, the African churches in Israel can be identified with allthree types of churches within the AIC: African-Ethiopian churches, ProphetHealing churches (also called Spiritual or Zionist churches), and New Pen-
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tecostal churches (sometimes called Charismatic churches). As in Africa andother parts of the African diaspora, the distinctions between the churches inIsrael were not always clear, and some churches did not quite fit any singlecategory.
Most of the interviewees maintained that theological affiliation was im-material, but termed their church “Pentecostal” and, indeed, most of theAfrican churches in Israel did fit the New Pentecostal model. They empha-sized the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit, were concerned primarily withthe experience of the Holy Spirit, acknowledged the existence of witchesand spirits, emphasized narrative theology, and proclaimed a pragmaticgospel that addressed practical concerns like sickness, poverty, unemploy-ment, and loneliness (Anderson 2000; Meyer 1992; Van Dijk 2000). Heal-ing and deliverance were key concepts and practices. The Gospel of Pros-perity, which views wealth and material success as signs of God’s love, wasboth preached and believed.
Church services were carefully planned yet created an atmosphere thatwas informal, consciously warm and upbeat, and reminiscent of home.Most of the congregants knew one another, and newcomers were warmlywelcomed. Spontaneity was combined with an orchestrated build-up to astate of ecstasy expressed in dancing, strongly emotional prayer, speaking intongues, or trance. As in Pentecostal churches worldwide, the services pro-vided release and a feeling of community and togetherness. At any point inthe service, members could make personal requests, for example, for prayersfor particular people. Towards the end of the service, time was sometimesleft for personal testimonies. Healing and deliverance sessions were held tocure members who were ill or to deliver them from different types of evils,whether spiritual or social. Some such services were planned in advanceand some were held in response to a member’s request or observable stateat the moment.
Fundraising was usually a major part of the service and was invested withsubstantial emotional and symbolic significance. At every service, tithes werecollected as well as additional sums both to support church activities in Is-rael and, where relevant, to send back to sister churches in Africa or to sup-port development projects there. For example, in 2001 the Tel Aviv branch ofResurrection Church bought a bus for its sister church in Kumasi, Ghana, de-spite the fact that not all church members were from Kumasi, some were noteven Ghanaians, and even the pastor was from another part of Ghana.
THE ROLE OF AFRICAN INITIATED CHURCHES
In both the spiritual and the secular realms, the African churches expandedtheir role in the community by assuming functions and taking on respon-
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sibilities that made them increasingly important not only in the lives oftheir members, but also in those of the entire African migrant communityin Israel. In the spiritual realm, the churches came to replace the extendedfamily and traditional community leaders in key lifecycle rituals, such asmarital and death rites. The churches adapted key traditional rituals, inwhich they had never previously been involved, and created new ones inwhich church members filled in for relatives by performing duties in thetraditional garb of the family and collecting money for the families. Thechurches also gradually assumed an important role in the worldly lives ofAfricans in Israel. Like places of worship in other diaspora contexts, theAfrican churches in Israel offered new arrivals a warm embrace, which in-cluded not only friendship and solidarity but also practical assistance.Church members helped new arrivals find housing and work, showed themaround and explained the bus routes, and shared their newly-acquiredhouse cleaning skills along with tips about wages, hours, work conditions,and how to get along with Israelis.
Not only did church members organize traditional church events likeweddings, baby namings and dedications, and funerals, but they also cele-brated events which, back home, would usually be celebrated by the ex-tended family and/or by social associations such as birthday parties,farewell celebrations, and the launching of CDs and books produced bychurch members. For new mothers, members prepared the house for thenewborn and substituted for them at their places of work. They visited thesick and collected funds to help members pay their hospital bills or to bailthem out of jail or deportation centers when they were arrested for over-staying their visas. They acted as arbitrators in members’ disputes and in-tervened in cases of domestic violence or other marital problems therebystanding in for the chiefs or elders in Africa. The larger and better organizedchurches had formal social and welfare committees for this purpose; in thesmaller churches, the members and clergy performed these tasks informally.
The churches also became the locus of economic activity and served as aforum for the dissemination of information and education. Before and af-ter church services, members could buy and sell imported goods, home-made food, made-in-Israel African clothes, religious books, cassettes, andjewelry. They could rent apartments, register their children in home-basednurseries, and look for jobs. On occasion, churches hosted lectures by Is-raelis on subjects ranging from childrearing skills and AIDS prevention tothe history and politics of Israel.12
The churches also helped their members maintain connections withAfrica and the rest of the Christian world by organizing lectures and semi-nars on politics in their home countries. Some raised money for Africanpoliticians or for political and social causes at home. Many fostered tieswith the international Christian world through modern telecommunica-
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tions and personal exchanges, which somewhat ameliorated the lonelinessand isolation of Africans in Israel. Such ties were also an important sourceof dignity, belonging, and self-respect for people who were marginalizedand largely powerless within the Israeli public arena. Keeping connectionswith the global Christian world was seen as a means for attaining a betterfuture. Many African migrants expressed their desire to be accepted withinone of the African Christian communities in the West after leaving Israel.
Finally, the churches assumed something of a political role in the lives ofAfrican migrants. Although lacking direct political influence, church leaderslobbied at both the municipal and national levels to improve the living con-ditions and legal status of Africans in Israel and worked to improve relationsbetween the community and the police. Leaders met with politicians andwith deportation officials and other police, and they circulated petitions,complaints, and policy proposals to the press, members of parliament, andlocal NGOs. Some of their activities were public, others behind the scenes.In the mid-1990s, the churches joined with a variety of Israeli NGOs to bringthe plight of African migrants to the attention of the Israeli media and aca-demia by inviting representatives of NGOs to speak, distribute written ma-terial, and listen to congregants’ complaints. Between 2001 and 2004, somechurch leaders cooperated with church leaders from other migrant commu-nities, especially the Latin American and Filipino churches.
This involvement in so many spheres of African migrants’ lives helped theAfrican churches in Israel attract and maintain congregants. Most memberscame to church at least three or four times a week, and some more often.As in African churches elsewhere, they could attend a variety of programs.Many interviewees reported that although they were church members inAfrica, the church became much more important to them in Israel and theirchurch attendance greatly increased.
Many of the activities described above are not unique to African churchesin Israel. Migrant communities in many other host societies tend to estab-lish socio-religious organizations that meet a combination of spiritual andpractical needs (Rex, et al. 1987; e.g., Vertovec 2004). What is unique to Is-rael is the particularly significant place the African churches occupied in thelives of the African migrant community. African migrants in Israel had farfewer alternative anchors of belonging and sources of social, economic, andpolitical support than in other, mainly Western, areas of the diaspora. In Is-rael, the African churches were virtually the only places where African mi-grant workers could celebrate their identity as Ghanaians, Nigerians, or sim-ply as people coming from Africa. Given this lack of effective alternativeframeworks of assistance, the churches remained the bodies that best re-lated to their material and emotional needs on a daily basis.
African migrants’ lack of legal status in Israel also served to augment therole of the churches. In most African diasporas in Europe and America, the
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community consists of a mix of documented and undocumented migrantspossessing a variety of ways of obtaining work permits and often citizen-ship. In Israel, virtually all African migrants were undocumented and theirstay was “illegal.” There were very few ways for undocumented workers inIsrael to obtain work permits and, with very few exceptions, citizenship re-mained out of reach, even for their Israeli-born children.13 This made it im-possible for migrants to exert political influence as actual or potential vot-ers. Their undocumented status also made it extremely difficult for them toobtain state insurance to cover accidents, health care, maternity leave, andother benefits that Israelis pay for and obtain through the state (see Filc andDavidovitch, this volume). In addition, it exposed them to the constantthreat of deportation. Against these hardships, the churches’ political activ-ities—ranging from education and advocacy through intervention with de-portation officers—were tremendously important, as were seemingly banalacts like serving as an address for their members who, fearing deportation,were afraid to give their names and addresses to banks, schools, and healthclinics.
Finally, Israel’s character as a Jewish state with a very small Christian mi-nority also augmented the importance of the African churches. In contrastto African migrants in Europe and North America, Africans in Israel did notfind a large variety of existing churches of different denominations or withheterogeneous memberships. This led them to create their own churchesand rendered those churches the only ones available.
The contribution of the African churches in Israel to the quality of lifeand to African migrants’ emotional and spiritual well-being does not meanthat these churches were unblemished or wholly beneficial institutions.One of the preachers interviewed for this study, along with a number ofchurch members, claimed that some church leaders viewed the church pri-marily as a good source of income for themselves. Others complainedabout the constant pressure to contribute from their meager earnings. Somefelt that the churches were coming between them and their families evenmore than was customary in the Pentecostal churches they had known backhome.14 There were also complaints that the churches promised more thanthey could deliver in the way of assistance and could not be relied on in acrunch.
BLACK CHURCHES WITHIN A JEWISH STATE: AICS ADAPTING TO LOCAL CONDITIONS
Over the years, the African churches in Israel adapted to the local condi-tions. The changes adopted distinguished them from churches in Africa,from other AICs in the diaspora, and from other migrant workers’ churches
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in Israel. These adaptations stemmed from a variety of sources having to domainly with constraints in Israel and the specific needs of their member-ship. One major accommodation was the switch in the Sabbath servicefrom Sunday to Saturday to accommodate the workweek in Israel, thus al-tering the practice adopted by the early Christians to distinguish themselvesfrom the Jewish world and the Jewish roots from which they came. Not allChristian migrant groups in Israel made this accommodation; some, likethe Romanians and the Polish, did, but the large Filipino and smaller LatinAmerican migrant communities generally did not.
Other changes were made to conform to the laws and norms of Israel.The churches refrained from missionary activity, thus giving up a practicewidespread among Pentecostal churches elsewhere, both because prosely-tizing is prohibited under Israeli law and because they feared it might raiseIsraeli anger and thus endanger their status in the country.15 In addition,most African churches—again, unlike other migrant churches like the Fil-ipinos’ and Latin Americans’—did not put identifying signs outside thepremises they rented so as not to offend Israeli sensibilities. The Africanchurches thus relinquished the most effective means of identifying them-selves to prospective visitors as well as the means by which they could pro-claim their power, prestige, and vitality in the public sphere.
They also refrained from holding parades and processions, even thoughsuch externalization is commonplace among the registered Christianchurches in Israel (both Arab and others), among Christian pilgrims to theHoly Land, and among African Christian communities in other Western di-aspora contexts. In most Western countries, public celebration of migrants’religion is an act of self-assertion that serves both as a means of making mi-grants “feel at home” and as a way of claiming recognition and legitimacywithin the public sphere in their host country (Benjamin 2002). In keepinga low profile, most African churches in Israel relinquished the claim to berecognized and accepted in their host country as a worthy and legitimate re-ligious group.
Substantial changes were also made to accommodate the membership inIsrael. Most Christian churches in Africa are fairly homogeneous; they aretypically attended by persons of a single national, ethnic, and linguisticgroup. In Israel, the membership of some African churches consisted of per-sons of different ethnic groups and languages. Thus varied and often com-plex strategies were adopted to make it possible for all members to partici-pate, including elaborate systems of translation into as many as fourdifferent languages.
Similarly, services were modified to appeal to the relatively young age ofmost members of the migrant community and included more singing andmore disco, rap, and Afro-pop music. Key rituals were adapted, and othersinvented, to accommodate the varied national and ethnic backgrounds and
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previous denominational affiliations of the church members. For example,since there were many more marriages in Israel than in Africa betweenAfricans of different ethnic groups, as well between Africans and non-Africans (mainly Filipinos), the churches negotiated diverse traditions withrespect to the prerequisites of marriage and the marriage ceremony itself.
Whereas Pentecostal churches in Africa tend to be morally strict in en-forcing behavioral codes, usually applying sanctions to members whoopenly violate the taboos, the African churches in Israel tended to be lessstrict, mainly because they lacked the power to stem the impact of the lib-eral currents to which their communities were exposed. Many churcheswere also less strict with regard to African traditional non-Christian prac-tices and beliefs. For example, persons who went to traditional healers or“witchdoctors,” as my interviewees termed them,16 or who engaged in an-cestor worship, could remain active church members even when theirchurch formally forbade these activities. Moreover, under certain circum-stances (as, for example, in marital and death rites), non-Christian practicesthat would not be accepted in Africa were included in church rituals. As onepastor, Pastor Tie, explained in a 2001 interview, “Sometimes I close myeyes so as not to see things. . . . If I am too strict with these people . . . theywould live in complete sin in Israel.”
Church services underwent a variety of modifications in response to thehardships, distress, and concerns of the African community in Israel. In aneffort to channel and provide an acceptable outlet for their members’ pent-up anguish, the services incorporated more healing sessions, trance, andfree prayer evenings than was common in analogous African churches. Thesermons and prayers devoted much time to political issues—both global,such as terrorism and the global economy, and local—like the Israeli-Pales-tinian conflict, deportations, human rights issues, and the rightness of Is-rael’s stand against terror. This relevance to local issues parallels services inEvangelical churches established by migrant workers from Latin Americathat, “allow them to bring their day-to-day lives into the religious arena”(Kemp and Raijman 2003).
As mentioned earlier, many interviewees spoke of Israel as the Holy Landand intimated that this gave them a sense of belonging. Many expressed thefeeling that as devout Christians, they had the inalienable right to remainin Israel and to enjoy a variety of vaguely specified rights in the country.However, in spite of this Evangelistic discourse claiming rights in the HolyLand, they made a cognitive distinction between the Holy Land and themodern state of Israel. Beginning in 2000, sermons often analyzed and crit-icized Israeli government policy toward migrant workers, and particularlythe practice of deportation. Since the deportations were so traumatic, wholeevenings were devoted to the matter, with prayers and the use of prophetichealing techniques to stop the deportation police. Yet church leaders were
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careful not to make public claims challenging Israel’s self-definition as aJewish state, the norms that expressed it, or the laws designed to maintainit. Due to a clear understanding of Israeli local politics and of their mar-ginality within the state of Israel, the churches kept a low profile andavoided public disputes with state authorities. By operating within a varietyof constraints and adjusting to the needs of their diverse memberships,these churches were able to flourish within a generally tolerant but,nonetheless, alien and restrictive state-orchestrated climate.17 The churchesbecame islands of dignity, self-respect, and pride for their members, withbridges to home and to transnational Christianity and, though to a muchlesser extent, to Israeli society. Here, members were safe and empowered.The one thing that the church could not provide was legitimacy and recog-nition within Israel’s predominately Jewish public sphere.
THE FALL OF THE AFRICAN CHURCHES IN TEL AVIV
The stepped-up deportation of undocumented migrant workers beginningin 2002 greatly reduced the number of African migrants in Israel and un-dermined the rich community life they had created. According to the Im-migration Police website in 2004, some 123,000 foreign workers had left Is-rael since the operation began on September 1, 2002, including 50,000 byexpulsion orders.18 The head of the Immigration Police estimated recentlythat fewer than 50,000 illegal workers remained in the country,19 and thathis goal for the coming year would be to remove all illegal workers.20
The impact of the massive deportation on Africans in Israel has been se-vere. In fact, since 2004, practically no public community life remains, andthe little non-public community life that exists has been driven under-ground. Church attendance has dropped dramatically and one by onechurches have closed down. Since 2002, an interesting process of regroupinghas been taking place among the churches as formerly independent churcheshave grouped together to create one large viable church. Though some lead-ing African clerics and lay members made public statements about “Christ-ian unity,” it was clearly the combination of financial difficulties and the di-minishing numbers of Africans willing to come to church that fostered thisprocess. There is one exception to this state of affairs: churches whose pas-tors and most of whose members received refugee status from the state of Is-rael following the recommendation of UNHCR (see Adout, this volume).With a temporary visa, these Africans feel free to go to church and maintainsome degree of community life. Yet the number of African refugees is rela-tively small, and their ability to maintain a community is limited.
The brutality of the deportation campaign has been so severe that for thefirst time since Africans came to the Holy Land some twenty years ago, an
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official African clergyman spoke out publicly against the deportation police,accusing it of mistreating and humiliating foreign workers and violatingtheir human rights and freedom of religion. He said:
Israel has lost its values . . . this country was established because all over theworld Jews were not granted the freedom of worship. Now you do the same tous. Every country in the west deports its migrant workers that have no visas,this is legitimate and this is how it should be. But the way you do it is ap-palling: you are brutal, rude, with no respect to people’s dignity. Your policehave hit bottom rock.
The head of the local Church of Pentecost was especially furious andshocked because the deportation police came to the entrance of a localAfrican church in the southern neighborhoods of Tel Aviv on a Saturdayand arrested people on their way to church. “To arrest people on Shabbat?”he said.
I did not believe my eyes when I saw it. I don’t understand. You people are notallowed to light light or drive on this day. How can Jewish policemen arrest onShabbat? . . . . your deportation officers have raised themselves beyond the ac-cepted norms. Nothing is sacred for them. What is next? Will they come to ar-rest us on the Day of Atonement? (Pastor Paul, quoted in Ha’ir newspaper, Oc-tober 28, 2004)
One by one, African churches were closed down, either because their pas-tors and lay readers left “voluntarily” or were deported or because peoplewere afraid to come. By the beginning of 2004, only a handful of churcheswere left, and even those were unstable and in danger of closure. When Iasked Mary, a thrity-one-year-old woman from Uganda in 2005 whethershe still goes to church despite the intensified deportation, she said, “Ofcourse I go to church. . . . God is protecting me from the police . . . . if I willnot go I will not be able to live . . . This is my life.” The fight to keep thesechurches open and to continue attracting believers has become the daily re-ality of both pastors and devoted members.
Most of the activities organized by the churches in the past have ceased,and most churches now strive to maintain only the main weekly service. Afew churches, mainly those connected to international Christian organiza-tions such as The Church of Pentecost, maintain some sort of weekly cal-endar including Bible classes, free prayer nights and Saturday services. Someof the remaining pastors have begun organizing home-based prayer servicesto avoid the need for members to leave their homes and thus enable themto keep out of sight of the Immigration Police. The social and economicsupport that the church communities provided in the past has collapsed, ashas the community overall, and for the first time in years Africans in needhave practically nowhere to turn within their own community except to per-
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sonal friends and relatives. For the first time, African clergy have pointed anaccusing finger at the Jewish leadership and issued a direct plea for action.As one pastor told a local newspaper,
Your society is still barbaric . . . I don’t blame the Israeli government for that,rather your rabbis. They are supposed to protect the right of every human be-ing to enter the house of God with no fear. But they are silent, they say noth-ing. What does it mean to attack people on their way to church? It is the sameas the anti-Semitic do to the Jews on their way to pray. It is the same as a ter-rorist exploding in a synagogue. (Ha’ir newspaper, October 28, 2004)
Deportation of undocumented migrant workers is not unique to Israel,and undocumented African communities worldwide suffer a similar fate.“Hopefully, after some time, when they will get tired . . . or the governmentwill change . . . things will change,” said Beatrice, a thirty-eight-year-oldGhanaian woman on the eve of her departure from Israel after living in TelAviv for ten years. Many members of the community expressed the samehope that following the current period of shrinking and the return to small,home-based fellowships, the situation might change. Minutes before beingdeported from Israel in June 2004, Charity, a recently ordained Ghanaianpriest, said,
By the grace of God and the Power of the Holy Spirit, the African churches willnot be closed down . . . . We shall be united and stronger . . . maybe for somemonths we shall disappear . . . even a year . . . but we Africans are not easily beaten. . . We shall come back and our churches will be as big and lively as before.
NOTES
1. Pastor John, who came to Israel with a pilgrim’s visa and overstayed, was in-terviewed in September 1999, a few months after he left the church he initiated inthe early 1990s to build a new church. The split was over issues of authority, funds,and the language of prayer. Nonetheless, he continued to relate to the differentmembers of the church as “my community.”
2. AIC is the familiar acronym for “African Independent Churches,” “African Ini-tiated Churches,” or “African Instituted Churches.” It usually refers to churches thatwere “founded in Africans and primarily for Africans” as defined by Victor Turner(1967). Pobee and Ositelu (1998) expand Turner’s definition and emphasize thatwhat is unique about AICs is their character as African initiatives and, therefore, inaccordance with the African genius and culture and ethos. Common to most AICsis that they do not operate according to the Anglo-Saxon system. As these authorsexplain, “Their means of communication are not statements but stories, not theo-logical arguments but testimonies, not definitions but participatory dance, not con-cepts but banquets, not systematic arguments but songs, not hermeneutical analysisbut healing. For further discussion, see Anderson (2000; 2001).
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3. (e.g., Glazer and Moynihan 1963; Gordon 1964; e.g.,4. (Frerichs 1993; Poewe 1994; Ranger 1993; Smart 1999; Ter Haar 1998; Tweed
1997; Van der Veer 1996; Vertovec 2004; Warner and Wittner 1998)5. (Basch, et al. 1994; Baumann 2000; Burghart 1987; Corten and Marshall-
Fratani 2001; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Glick Schiller, et al. 1992; Kim 1991; Kim1994; Marshall 1991; Meyer 1992; Ojo 1988; Roof 1998; Smith and Guarnizo 1998;Van Dijk 1993; Van Dijk 1997; Van Dijk 2002; Vertovec 2004)
6. (Beyer 1994; Cohen 1997; Gibb 1998; Patterson and Kelley 2001; Ter Haar1998; Vertovec 1999e.g.; Vertovec 2000)
7. (Gifford 1993; Hansen and Twaddle 1995; Haynes 1994; Sabar 2002).8. On the concept of the “Holy Land” in the eyes of African migrants, see (Sabar
2005). 9. Sources: the African Workers Union, the General Federation of Trade in Is-
rael, African church leaders and other NGOs.10. For a historical study of the African community in Israel, see (Sabar 2004a;
Sabar 2004b).11. For a detailed discussion of “Afro-Israeli Christian space” see (Sabar 2004a:
418-423).12. For example, a lecture by Dr. Ron Sabar on AIDS prevention methods was
held at Resurrection Church in April 2000 and attended by about 150 African mem-bers of various churches as well as non-church members. In July 2000, Professor Al-lie Dubb, an anthropologist, gave a lecture on Jewish and Zionist history at the samechurch.
13. See (Willen 2005) as well as (Rosenhek, this volume) for an update on rele-vant, recent policy changes.
14. For a detailed discussion of the penetration of Pentecostal churches into pri-vate and family domains and the tension this created in Ghanaian Pentecostalchurches, see (Van Dijk 2004).
15. In other African diasporas in the West, these missionary activities are very im-portant. According to Van Dijk (2001), they represent one of the latest expressionsof African Pentecostalism and are an extension of the popular method of tent evan-gelism pioneered mainly by North Americans in the 1940s and 1950s (with rootsin the nineteenth century revivals).
16. All of my interviewees used this term when I asked them to elaborate on thehealer, his/her methods etc. I am aware of the debate on the lack of analytical pre-cision of this term, and I agree that there are good reasons for a moratorium on it.Yet my interviewees used this term, and it seems appropriate to use it without fearof evoking an image of backwardness or of exotic and fundamentally different “oth-ers.”
17. For further analysis of this seemingly contradictory state of affairs, see(Rosenhek 1999).
18. http://www.hagira.gov.il/ImmigrationCMS/About/19. Uri Maayan, Globes Daily newspaper, December 30, 2004.20. Tami Zilberg, Globes Daily newspaper, December 29, 2004.
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Migrants’ incorporation into host societies has been a subject of great in-terest for anthropologists concerned with immigration and its social andcultural meanings. Consequently, an effort has been made to explore theways in which migrants and locals associate and communicate in thefields of culture, politics, and work. Migrants employed in domestic workin host societies offer an interesting starting point for the exploration ofsuch relationships, as they are positioned within closer relationshipsthan those usually found between migrants and citizens (Anderson2002; Ehrenreich 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo2003).
Moreover, the social moment in which migrants employed as domesticworkers interact with their employers can shed light on the process bywhich migrants are integrated into host societies. Under such circum-stances, migrants’ daily experiences and stories about their lives provide in-sight into the social reality in which both migrants and employers take part.A conversation I had with Alya,2 a West African undocumented migrant liv-ing in Tel Aviv, while sitting in her home with a neighbor, a fellow WestAfrican woman, provides an example.
I hate working on Sundays. Working on Sundays always includes cleaning themess made over the weekend,3 you know, all the guests, and you can alwaysknow who was there. . . . and the meals and the employers always leave all thedishes and pots and there is a lot of work to do.
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Undocumented Domestic Workers and their Israeli Employers
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Alya and her neighbor laughed out loud, and I smiled with embarrassmentas she continued:
The best way to handle burned Saturday pots is to put avkat kvisa [laundry de-tergent] in them and let it stand until everything is clean and every time myemployer comes home on Sunday afternoon and sees all the clean pots sheburned yesterday shining she asks, “how did you do that?” and I tell her I stoodin the kitchen and scraped everything off. I have no intention of telling her mysecret, she might find more work for me to do!
We all laughed.Undocumented migrants employed as domestic workers in Israeli homes
participate in complex relationships with their employers. While the natureof these relationships encourages intimacy and familiarity, it also reflectspopular attitudes that objectify and exclude non-citizens of the state. Underclose examination, these relationships in the private sphere may seem attimes paradoxical, marked by a tension between great closeness, on onehand, and great remoteness, on the other. This chapter explores the natureof these relationships and attempts to explore this paradox in which the“private” place, the site of the closest and most intimate relationships be-tween migrant workers and Israeli citizens, is also a place in which “public”popular attitudes that objectify and exclude migrant workers are mani-fested, often in a harsh manner. To this end, I open with a short overviewof labor migration in Israel in the past decade. I then examine the conceptsof public and private spheres, the nature of domestic work as a social inter-action, and the blurring of the private/public dichotomy the domain of do-mestic work entails in order to anchor the discussion in theoretical context.More specifically, I argue that the domain of domestic work is framed as aneconomic, hence, “public” interaction marked by “private” qualities. Thethird part of the chapter is dedicated to the ethnographic exploration thatstands at the heart of this analysis. Here, I consider how the complex rela-tionships between Israeli employers and migrant domestic workers simul-taneously are characterized by closeness and remoteness. These themes areexplored in the context of social interactions and instances of public dis-course that facilitate and reinforce domestic workers’ objectification and re-placeability by examining the impact of such statements on migrants’ livedexperiences. In concluding, I return to the paradox of closeness and re-moteness in the Israeli private home and reflect on its broader significancefor research on transnational migration and domestic work.
This chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tel Avivbetween 2001 and 2003. During those two years, I explored the lives ofwomen migrant workers of African descent living with HIV/AIDS in Israel.As I was busy trying to understand the life world of “illegal” migrant work-ers living with HIV/AIDS, I had the opportunity to take part in these
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women’s lives, meet their families and friends, and learn more about theirexperiences, including those not centered around HIV/AIDS. In our conver-sations we discussed women’s hopes and dreams, thoughts and feelings,labors and pleasures. For women who immigrated to support their familiesand worked six or seven days per week, often in more than one place, workwas in many respects more central to daily life than health. Yet there wassomething more to our talk about work; it is easier to talk about employ-ment in the company of friends and neighbors than about living withHIV/AIDS.4 Consequently, many of our conversations dealt with work, em-ployers—and laundry detergent.
LABOR MIGRATION AND DOMESTIC WORK IN ISRAEL
The Israeli labor market changed dramatically when the legalization oftransnational labor was approved in 1993 (see Raijman and Kemp, this vol-ume). Non-citizens were not new to the Israeli labor market, as Palestinianshad been employed in Israel since 1967. Nevertheless, the first and secondPalestinian uprisings (Intifada) resulted in Israeli limitations on the en-trance of Palestinians workers into Israel, who were now perceived as a se-curity risk. The new limitations caused what was seen in Israel as a “short-age in working hands” (machsor be’yadayim ovdot) for which the legalizationof transnational labor was seen as a temporary solution.
As a result of the new policy, documented migrants were recruited fromThailand, the Philippines, Romania, Turkey and China. It is important tonote that the Israeli immigration regime strictly defines migrants’ right tocitizenship as limited to Jews or people of Jewish origins. Thus it was madeclear that by no means were the (non-Jewish) migrant workers “invited” towork in Israel entitled to citizenship. In addition to the increasing numberof documented migrants, the 1990s also saw the growth of communities ofundocumented migrant workers (ovdim zarim lo chukiim) as a result of both“illegal” entrance to Israel and the expiration of temporary work permits(Bartram 1998; Borowski and Yanai 1997; Kemp and Raijman 2003a; Raij-man, et al. 2001; Roer-Strier and Olshtain-Mann 1999; Rosenhek 1999;Willen 2003). During the period of fieldwork, Israeli Statistical Bureau re-ports claimed that 240,000 migrant workers were living in Israel, of whom100,000 were documented and 140,000 were undocumented (Israeli Sta-tistical Bureau 2002).
While there is consensus around the number of migrant workers em-ployed in the construction and agricultural sectors, the numbers regardingdomestic workers are vague.5 This vagueness is largely the result of the do-mestic sector’s reliance on “undocumented migrants.” In Israel, domesticwork has frequently been performed by Latino and African migrants who
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arrive in Israel via the “tourist loophole” (Willen 2003)—i.e., as tourists orreligious pilgrims—and are incorporated into the workforce through infor-mal channels (Raijman, et al. 2003).
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE, IN AND OUT: SOCIAL SPHERES AND DOMESTIC WORK
A common construction in the study of social relationships is that of pri-vate and public spheres. These two spheres, and their roles in social life,have been contested by various social scientists. Nevertheless, the idea ofseparate social spheres operating under different social rules can be helpfulin investigating social relationships, as the separation and overlap betweenthese spheres are both part of day-to-day life. Investigation of the relation-ships between undocumented migrants and their domestic employers,therefore, may benefit from an understanding of both the construction ofthese two spheres and its critique.
The model of the liberal state presumes a clear separation between thepublic and private spheres (see Benn and Gaus 1983). This separation, de-signed to limit the state’s power and involvement in the lives of its citizens,is often described as the foundation of modern citizenship. The belief thatpublic and private are organized around contrasting principles (individualvs. community, rationality vs. sentiment, impersonal vs. personal, eco-nomic activity vs. non-economic activities, etc.) has resulted in expectationsof the “home” as a private sphere and the relationships within it as de-tached from the forces of the public sphere.
Voices critiquing the model of separate public and private spheres havecome from both Marxist (Kamenka 1983) and feminist perspectives (Gal2002; Pateman 1983), who have asserted that the separation of spheres isat best an illusion (Marxist) and at worst an act of dominance (feminist). Itis not just the “male nature” of the public sphere that is criticized by femi-nist theorists, but also the assumption that these spheres are by definitionseparate and conflicting in character. Feminist critiques of the public/pri-vate distinction conclude that the public and the private are actually inter-related and cannot be seen as based on dramatically opposed cultural no-tions. This understanding of public and private as interconnected disruptsa dichotomous viewpoint, instead stressing the blending of the spheres andthe blurring of their boundaries.
The public/private distinction and the Marxist and feminist criticism un-dermining it represent only one layer in the complex relationships betweenundocumented migrant workers employed as domestic workers and theirIsraeli employers. Thus inquiry into these relationships can also benefitfrom social scientific scholarship that analyzes paid domestic work as a
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complex social phenomenon. Domestic work has often been differentiatedfrom other contractual economic relationships due to perceptions of suchwork as “not really work” first, because it is performed in the private home,and second, because it is associated with women’s “natural” expressions oflove and care (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001). Such perceptions tend to ignorethe element of power embedded in these relationships, presuming that do-mestic work is by its very nature more intimate than other forms of em-ployment.
Yet domestic work is deeply entrenched in status relationships affected bysocial categories such as gender, nationality, race, and class as it is first andforemost a social relationship (Anderson 2002). In other words, domesticwork is more than a mere economic process; it can also be seen as mirror-ing other social relationships. Thus domestic workers are subject to thestrictures of existing power relations, ranging from the demand that they re-main invisible (Rivas 2003), to the employer’s insistence that they performdegrading tasks, to maternalistic behavior from the employer, who maytreat the worker as a child under her care (Anderson 2002). Such behaviorsinfuse employer-employee relationships with forms of power associatedwith society’s hierarchies.
Romero (1998) has suggested that the historical and economic shift frommistress-maid to employer-employee relationships in domestic work—thatis, the move to a clear contract of employment that is not based on fixed so-cial hierarchies—ultimately reduced existing asymmetries in power. Otherprocesses, however, have acted to sharpen such distinctions. In accordancewith other political and economic shifts, the past several decades have beenaccompanied by the globalization of childcare and domestic work (Ehren-reich and Hochschild 2003). These political and economic processes havecontributed to the creation of social relationships marked by “stratified re-production,” or the growing stratification of reproduction, childcare, anddomestic work along lines of social status, ethnicity, gender and migrationstatus (Colen 1995). As a result of the wide penetration of transnational la-bor into domestic work, one can argue that the asymmetry once reduced bythe shift from mistress-maid to employer-employee relationships has beenreintroduced by the arrival of citizenship as a marker of access to citizen’srights and privileges. In other words, lack of citizenship has become a newa social criterion providing employers with additional leverage in their re-lations with undocumented domestic workers. Thus the existence of “pri-vate sphere” relationships between migrants employed as domestic workersand their employers, a notion already contested by the critique of a privatesphere in which such relationships can occur, is now dually contested bythe understanding that the public and private spheres in a global world ul-timately cannot be separated, as both are part of the global economy andthe social relationships it entails.
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Awareness of the blending of the public and private spheres and theproblematic nature of domestic work can help illuminate the relationshipsdiscussed in this paper. The contested divide between the public and privatesphere, as presented above, makes it harder for us to see “out of the home”and “in the home” as operating under different social rules. Put differently,the relationships between migrant domestic workers and their employersdo not fit perfectly into the definition of the private sphere, as they are eco-nomic by nature and, as such, both turn the home into a public sphere inliberal terms (Bakan and Stasiulis 1997) and extend the definitions of “thefamily.” Nevertheless, as I will argue, a claim can also be made regardingprivate and public “qualities” and, in particular, circumstances in which“public” relationships can be seen as having “private qualities” due to theirintimate character and the environment in which they exist.
The model of public and private as analytical tools helps shed light onthe complex relationships between migrants employed as domestic workersand their Israeli employers, as the roots of the paradox in these relation-ships lies in the juxtaposition of the two spheres.
ON CLOSENESS AND REMOTENESS IN EMPLOYER-EMPLOYEE RELATIONSHIPS
In my fieldwork, the private sphere of the home frequently encouraged in-timacy and familiarity in a manner unique among relationships between Is-raelis and migrant workers. The women I met had very intimate knowledgeof the households in which they worked, and the transfer of knowledge wasnot as one-sided and limited by the hierarchical nature of the relationshipsas one might suspect. Many women shared stories of warm or even close re-lationships with their employers, mostly by describing friendly interactionswith their employers, a sense of partnership based on the common experi-ence of motherhood, or both. This was true, for example, for Mary, Abigail,and Alya, African undocumented migrants living in Israel and employed asdomestic workers in Israeli homes. A conversation I had with Mary, whomade the following comment while pointing at her daughter, who waswearing a new bathingsuit, is illustrative.
She wanted a bathing suit and my employer wanted to know what to buy forher for the new school year . . . so I told my employer to buy a bathing suit andthis is what she bought. It’s a bathing suit you buy in [the upper-middle classneighborhood of] Ramat Aviv . . . . she is nice, this employer, and is always in-terested in my daughter and buys her presents . . .
Mary’s description of her employer’s interest in her daughter on the basis oftheir shared motherhood is reflected in other women’s stories about their
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special relationships with employers, including the following story re-counted by Alya.
My employers always ask me to bring Lili [her daughter] to visit. Some of themknow her since the day she was born and send gifts, clothes and toys for her,sometimes they give me things for my other children at home. Look what I gotfrom my Sunday employer [Alya pulls out a bag of silk scarves]. She brought itfrom Europe and gave them to me to sell and make more money. She said Ican keep all the money and I think I can sell each one for 80 or 100 shekelsand that’s almost a day’s work. I know she does it because she cares about Lili,she is a mother too you know . . .
The interest expressed by the employers as mothers was only a part of thesense of closeness interviewees described. In many cases it was woven intothe shared experience of the responsibilities of motherhood, a theme re-peated in stories women told about their employers. One example is thefollowing story, told by Abigail.
One of my employers has a real problem with her daughters. One of them is areally good girl and I can see it when I enter her room to clean it. . . . the olderone is a different story, she does only what she wants and her room is alwaysa mess . . . I told my employer that because of her mess her room takes longerto clean and I can’t make it to the other rooms and she said she talked to thegirl but she doesn’t listen and makes a lot of problems and she doesn’t knowwhat to do with her. That’s children you know, it’s not easy . . .
Mary, Alya, and Abigail talk about their employers as friends who share giftsand interests based on familiarity and on their common experience ofmotherhood. In their stories, the employers are first and foremost womenand mothers just like they are—or at least as they used to be before they mi-grated.
On one hand, the close relationships between employers and workersmay follow familiar lines of intimacy or interest in one’s family, children,and other “womanly affairs,” thereby facilitating personal ties atypical ofmost interactions between Israelis and “foreigners.” At the same time, I wassurprised to hear the extent to which undocumented domestic workers weresubjected to harsh demonstrations of remoteness by the same employersthey described in such close terms. These contradictions between “close-ness” and “remoteness” made me wonder how such tendencies toward “re-moteness” penetrate the private Israeli home and set themselves against themanifestations of closeness and care.
The answer was all around me: on television, in newspapers, and in offi-cial government publications. In the following discussion, I consider twoways in which remoteness is exhibited in the private home and in publicdiscourse. Many examples exist in both public discourse and public policy;
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for instance, “criminality,” “transparency,” and “exoticization” can all beseen as expressions of remoteness. The following inquiry into the nature ofrelationships between migrant domestic workers and their Israeli employ-ers focuses on two: first, objectification, and second, women’s resulting ex-periences of “replaceability” in both the private and public spheres.
Objectification
Objectification is the social process in which a person is regarded as anobject and, as such, is seen as lacking feelings, opinions, and rights. Whenstudying social relationships, it is clear that objectification can be a mean-ingful representation of power relations when the act of objectification isinitiated by people of higher social status against those with lower socialpositions. In these cases, objectification acts as a tool for disempowerment,as it targets those who are already weak and denies them the attributes of aperson with free will, thoughts, and rights.
Acts of objectification are not necessarily severe or obvious. In manycases, the more subtle and insidious manifestations of objectification occuron an everyday basis and go almost unnoticed in ordinary social life. An in-cident recounted by Alya in a conversation about her recent experiencesprovides one illustration.
Alya: Last week I was locked inside my employer’s house.
Anat: How can that be?
Alya: I don’t have keys; I get there in the morning when my employer is athome and leave after she returns at noon. That day she left the house andlocked the door and left me locked inside. I couldn’t get her on the phone soI called a neighbor and she called my employer’s husband so someone wouldcome and get me. I thought maybe my employer forgot I was there. I was therefor many hours before she came for me and it was unpleasant and I kept think-ing she might forget me and I’ll be late taking my daughter from the babysit-ter because she forgot I was there. . .
Alya’s experience of being locked inside her employer’s house repeats itselfin stories of being a subject of conversation while in the room (“they talkabout me like I’m not there”), being “sent” to work for other family mem-bers and friends (“like they own me”), and being referred to as the Ozeret(the “helper”) even after long periods of employment (“as if my name issomething you can’t pronounce or remember”).
The objectification of Alya and her friends has a familiar sound to thosewho read Israeli newspapers or listen to the news, as migrant workers aretypically represented in public discourse as objects or commodities andonly rarely as people. This manifestation of remoteness is clear in the fol-
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lowing advertisement, which was distributed by a company that recruitsagricultural workers from Thailand:
We have an advantage compared to other companies, because we work with acompany that has a “strong back” in Thailand, and this company picks onlythe best and the most serious [workers]. The company in Thailand binds themhard, so it won’t pay to run away. It is to be noted that no worker from ourcompany has ever run away. (Sinai 2002)6
During my fieldwork, the most common form of objectification of mi-grant workers in both public policy and public discourse was embedded inthe “binding arrangement,” whereby documented migrants were “bound”to a specific employer as a condition of their employment in Israel (formore on the policy, see Raijman and Kemp, this volume; Kemp and Raij-man 2003; Rosenhek and Cohen 2000; Zohar 2002).7 Though most ofthose employed as domestic workers did not hold work permits and, assuch, were not bound to one “legal” employer, the “binding arrangement”had nonetheless contributed to the production of forms of judicial andpublic discourse in which migrant workers are perceived as “belonging” toa single employer. While this arrangement governs the employment ofworkers who are “legal,” the system entails many irregularities. For example,many employers withhold pay or confiscate passports illegally and with im-punity.
The objectification of migrant workers in public discourse reached newheights with the launching of a mass deportation campaign in mid-2002,which has included a radio-newspaper-TV campaign with the catchy slogan,“Employing foreign workers? It’s not legal and It’s not working” (emphasisadded; in Hebrew: “ze lo chuki ve’ze lo oved”). The messages in this campaignthreaten Israeli citizens who employ migrant workers lacking permits withcriminal punishments and heavy fines. Recently, concerned citizens wereinvited to inform the authorities of cases involving the illegal employmentof migrants. The message of this campaign is clear: If you don’t want trou-ble, get rid of “it”—that is, “your” illegal migrant worker.
Once objectified in these ways, migrants working as domestic workers,like other migrants, can be ignored, fired, or replaced without any explana-tion. In other words, they may be perceived as household objects to be usedor excused.
Replaceability
Objectification as an expression of remoteness is accompanied by the ex-perience of replaceability. I use the term replaceability to convey a sense oftemporality derived from living under the constant threat of replacement.
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At the core of being replaceable lies the recognition that one is perceived byothers as lacking the attributes that make a person unique and desirable byvirtue of his own personhood. Replaceability impedes a person’s sense ofsecurity, as her own qualities and identity are not considered meaningful inher day-to-day social experiences.
The experience of being replaceable and the lack of security that accom-panies it can be seen as complementary to the process of objectificationdescribed earlier. In both cases, a person is denied personhood in a socialinteraction. Moreover, in both cases, underlying social roles and power re-lations are taken for granted in a way that implies that no justifications orapologies are needed. Alya’s communication with her employers high-lights this experience of replaceability, as she described over the phone onemorning.
I arrived at work this morning and my employer told me that they give a10,000 shekel fine [approximately US$2,200] now to people who employ ille-gal workers. I don’t have a visa, never had, and my employer knew it when Istarted working but now she is suddenly worried because she doesn’t have themoney to pay the police so she said I should clean today and go home and notcome back. But she couldn’t decide so she went to work and said that we’ll talkwhen she gets back.
Later that day when her employer got home, she said that Alya could con-tinue working for her for now, but that if the police really began looking forpeople in private homes she would fire her. For now, the employer in-structed, she should not open the door. When I asked Alya if she ever toldher employer about her health (i.e., her HIV status), she said, “You are kid-ding right? As soon as I tell anyone that I have a problem she will fire meand because I’m illegal she doesn’t owe me anything . . . Why would shehave me if she can take any other foreign woman to clean her house?”
Replaceability was a common experience for the migrant workers I met,but it had particularly strong significance among the women in my studybecause of their precarious health status and the secrecy so profoundlyshaping their lives. At any time, without notice, and with no compensation,one might be asked to leave and another could come in one’s place. Al-though a brave person can try to demand severance pay, it was explained tome that those who are smart or have a secret such as illegal status or ahealth problem will just walk away. I heard one such explanation fromMary.
When there’s work I work . . . If you were sick you don’t get paid, for instancewhen I was hospitalized last year I didn’t work for almost a month and gotnothing. . . I’m not a resident here, I don’t have any rights and if you don’tcome to work they will find someone else and you will be left without a job.
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While being sick highlights the threat of replaceability, it is present evenwhen one is well. The women I met made it clear that if you are a migrantworker, especially if you are illegal, you can be fired, arrested or deported atany time and someone else will be hired to do your job. The revolving doorof labor migration is a clear-cut fact to both migrants and employers.
In many ways, Mary’s and Alya’s experiences in their employers’ homesreflect common policies and discourse in Israeli society, in which migrantworkers are treated as interchangeable “working hands” (yadayim ovdot)lacking a distinct body and personhood or at best, owning a body and per-sonhood which are not valued by others. Thus, when Mary and Alya de-scribe their experiences of being replaceable in their employers’ eyes, onecan hear echoes of Israeli public discourse as it appears between the lines inthe local media, including the following newspaper article.
According to the Ministry of the Interior, there are at least 2000 “illegal” Thaisin Israel, ones that were brought with a permit and left their employers for nu-merous reasons: withholding of pay, harsh living and working conditions, ortempting offers from other employers. The Minister of Industry, Commerce, andEmployment Ehud Olmert, who is in charge of finding employment for Israeliunemployed . . . had just authorized bringing 2000 workers from Thailand toreplace those 2000 “deserters.” So while the human resources companies makemillions from the Thais they bring to Israel to replace the 2000, the Immigra-tion Police will conduct a “man hunt” after the “runaways.” (Sinai 2003b)
The use of the terms “illegal Thais,” “deserters,” and “runaways,” along withthe spirit of the policy encouraging the replacement of workers to benefitmanpower companies with no regard for the needs of the workers, are twoexamples of public discourse and policies highlighting the replaceable na-ture of migrant “working hands.” Another expression of the perception ofthe replaceable nature of migrant work can be seen in the circumvention ofpolicies banning the “importation” of new “working hands” to replace old“working hands,” as illustrated by the following quotation from a typicalnewspaper article.
While at the end of September 2002 [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon or-dered that no more workers be allowed entrance, almost until the end of theyear workers kept coming. . . All through the past year thousands of care work-ers, whom Sharon had not banned, kept coming and lately after a period ofstanding up to the farmers and the contractors the government renewed theimportation of workers in those fields as well. All in all, while the police de-ported more than 16,000 migrant workers, at least 7,500 others entered Israel.. . . . in the coming months this number might be doubled as, according toDeputy Minister Michael Ratzon, until the end of 2003 the number of permitsin agriculture, building, industry, hotels and restaurants will grow from 59,000to 88,000 (Sinai 2003a).
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The common practices represented in the media—of “importing” workersto “replace” “deserters,” investing millions in chasing “runaways,” and de-claring a “closed skies” policy toward the importation of migrant workerswhile continuing to bring in more workers—emphasize the replaceable“nature” of labor migration in Israel. Migrant workers are merely yadayimovdot and, as such, can always be replaced by other yadayim ovdot.
The similarities identified here between the experiences of migrants em-ployed as domestic workers in the private sphere of the home and the ex-pressions of public discourse in the media are not accidental. Alya’s com-ment emphasizing how easily she may be replaced is derived from a feeling,mentioned by many people I met, that migrants come and go and otherswill always replace them. Consequently, the ethnography presented here ex-plores the experience of objectification and replaceability both in publicdiscourse and in private relationships. The inseparability of these twospheres helps explain the dynamics of the relationships between migrantsemployed as domestic workers and their Israeli employers, in which inti-macy and closeness are juxtaposed with harsh expressions of exclusion andremoteness.
CONCLUSION
Relationships between undocumented migrants employed as domesticworkers and their Israeli employers present a complex reality in which eco-nomic relationships penetrate the home and take on characteristics of a so-cial relationship, thus creating an economic “public” association with “pri-vate” qualities. The overlap between the social and economic nature ofthese relationships shapes a complex, and sometimes paradoxical, em-ployer-employee relationship.
Under the liberal model of the private and public spheres, the relation-ships between migrants employed as domestic workers and their Israeli em-ployers should be shaped, unlike other social relationships, by the limitedinfluence of formal institutions determining policy and public opinion. Assuch, and as shown in the ethnographic material presented here, these re-lationships have the potential to allow closer association between migrantworkers and Israelis than one tends to find between Israeli employers andmigrant employees in other labor sectors. Following liberal assumptions,the complex relationships described here seem, to some extent, paradoxi-cal.
However, when taking into consideration the critique offered regardingthe liberal public/private dichotomy, which emphasizes the interpenetra-tion of public and private, the tension between closeness and remotenessmust be understood in relation to the ongoing stream of ideas and notions
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in a public discourse to which not only Israeli employers, but also thewomen cleaning their homes are exposed.
Beyond the penetration of public discourse into private homes, however,there is also another issue that must be considered as well: how the incor-poration of Third World women into First World households is changingthe public/private sphere division. As this chapter has shown, there are im-portant similarities between the working conditions faced by migrant do-mestic workers in Israel and in other host countries (Ehrenreich 2003;Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2003). These similarities derive, in particular, from the centrality ofimmigrant status—especially “illegal” status—within relationships betweenmigrant domestic workers and their employers. Other shared themes in-clude “objectification” and “replaceability.” Although the specifics may varywidely among host societies, a common exchange of perceptions and ideasexists between the public and the private spheres, and this exchange affectsemployer-employee relationships in host societies.
The uniqueness of the Israeli case lies with the nation’s ethno-politicsand the fact that according to the current laws and policies, migrant work-ers have no chance of ever becoming citizens or changing their place withinthe local social status hierarchy.8 Thus power relations between migrantsand employers, and between migrants and the state, are more structuredand power-laden in Israel than in many other host countries. The Israelicase is thus an important “test case” in which power relations are obvioussince migrant workers are construed as nothing more than temporary work-ing hands.
Overall, this chapter has argued that domestic employment relationshipschallenge liberal assumptions regarding the private sphere since they are in-evitably shaped by a combination of “private” and “public” features, values,and dynamics. In addition, it is important to note that the ambiguity andcontradictions characterizing these relationships are in many ways builtinto the structure of the global political economy in which both employeesand employers participate. In the complex reality described in here, the ex-clusion and remoteness within these relationships appear to be as signifi-cant as the expressions of inclusion and closeness they also contain. Inother words, the private sphere of the Israeli home is turned into a micro-cosm of Israeli society, mirroring—as well as reproducing—its views andnotions of labor migration.
NOTES
1. The Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Hebrew University ofJerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905 Israel. An earlier version of this article
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was presented at the 2005 Association for Israel Studies twenty-first conference (Tuc-son , AZ). The author thanks the Department of Sociology and Anthropology andthe Shaine Center for Social Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for theirsupport and Sarah Willen, Zeev Rosenhek, and Erin P. Finley for their comments onearlier drafts.
2. All names have been replaced by pseudonyms3. The Israeli weekend is marked by the Jewish “Shabbat,” or Sabbath, from sun-
down on Friday until sunset on Saturday. Consequently, Friday and Saturday aredays of rest while Sunday is the first day of the working week.
4. The need to keep illness a secret from friends and relatives for fear of stigmaand deportation plays an important role in the lives of migrants with HIV/AIDS(Rosenthal 2003).
5. Excluding Filipinos employed as caretakers, for whom statistics are more ac-curate as most of them are documented.
6. All newspaper excerpts were translated from Hebrew by the author.7. The Israeli Supreme Court canceled the “binding arrangement” in March 2006
as a result of a petition, and lengthy legal struggle, initiated by a coalition of Israelihuman rights organizations.
8. See (Rosenhek, this volume) for discussion of a recent exception regarding asmall number of migrant workers’ children.
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The transformation of Israel into a major destination country for labor mi-grants is one of the most significant changes to have occurred in Israeli soci-ety and the Israeli political economy in the past two decades. To be sure, it isnot immigration per se that is new; Israeli society and the Isfraeli state havebeen constituted by successive waves of immigration that have been ideolog-ically, institutionally, and legally constructed as the “return” of the Jewishpeople to its historical homeland.1 In profound contrast to this formulationof “ethnic immigration,” the influx of non-Jewish labor migrants that startedin the early 1990s and their continued presence in the country are regarded,and publicly depicted by most political actors and state agencies, as a signifi-cant threat both to Israeli society and to the ethnonational foundations ofJewish nationhood and statehood. As clearly shown by the chapters in thisvolume, this restrictive and exclusionary formulation of membership, whichdefines the inclusion of labor migrants as legitimate members of Israeli soci-ety and the Israeli polity as categorically inconceivable, is the fundamentalfactor underlying the ideological, institutional, and political setting for labormigration in Israel. This does not mean, however, that the mode of incorpo-ration for labor migrants is determined exclusively by the exclusionary natureof the Israeli migration regime. Nor does it mean that political space is com-pletely closed off to actors striving for the adoption and institutionalizationof more inclusionary practices or for the recognition of migrant workers asrights-bearing subjects. On the contrary, the chapters in the volume employvarious analytical perspectives and draw upon multiple levels of analysis toexamine and reveal the ambiguities, contradictions, and contingencies that
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12Challenging ExclusionaryMigration Regimes
Labor Migration in Israel in Comparative Perspective
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affect the political dynamics of labor migration, the Israeli state’s varied prac-tices towards migrant workers, and the phenomenology of their experiencesin the country and those of their families.
My aim in this concluding chapter is to bring a comparative perspective tobear on several key issues raised by the previous chapters including, in par-ticular, those pertaining to the politics of exclusion and inclusion of labormigrants in Israeli society and the Israeli polity. In the next section, I con-sider the origins of labor migration in Israel and its relationship to the dy-namics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to changes in the Israeli state’sstrategy for managing the occupation regime. Thereafter I discuss the ex-treme exclusionary nature of the Israeli migration regime and its impact onthe positioning of labor migrants in the social field. A central focus of analy-sis in this section is the intensive xenophobic politics conducted by a largearray of mainstream political actors and their unexpected consequences. Inthe final section, I examine several questions related to the extension ofrights to labor migrants, focusing on the sources and character of the politi-cal dynamics that create openings for the incipient recognition of labor mi-grants as rights-bearing subjects and as potential members of society.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LABOR MIGRATION SOURCES
An important feature of the political economy of labor migration in Israel,examined by Rebeca Raijman and Adriana Kemp in this volume (see alsoRosenhek 2003), is its crucial connection to the dynamics of the nationalconflict with the Palestinians and the Israeli occupation regime’s manage-ment of the Palestinian territories and population. This connection is par-ticularly interesting from a comparative perspective. In advanced capitalistcountries, the origins of labor migration have been rooted mainly in the po-litical economy of labor markets and in the interests of certain employersand state agencies in constituting an unprotected and flexible labor forcethat can be channeled into the least desirable positions in the secondary la-bor market, especially where the expansion of the welfare state has effecteda considerable degree of de-commodification for local workers (Freeman1986). In contrast, migrant workers in Israel have not been incorporated asa substitute for a partially de-commodified labor force enjoying citizenshipsocial rights, but rather as a replacement for unprotected non-citizen Pales-tinian workers under military occupation.
The recruitment of considerable numbers of migrant workers began inlate 1993, when the Israeli government decided to implement a policy ofhermetic closure between Israel and the Occupied Territories as a deterrenceand punishment measure against the perpetration of terrorist actions insideIsrael by Palestinian organizations opposed to the recently inaugurated
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Oslo process. As a result of this policy, the inflow of Palestinian workersinto the Israeli secondary labor market came to a halt. This led to severe la-bor shortages in the construction and agriculture sectors and precipitatedintense pressure on the government from employer organizations in thesesectors, which demanded a solution through the importation of “foreignworkers” (Bartram 1998). These demands, in combination with pressurefrom within the state apparatus exercised by the Ministries of Constructionand Agriculture, led the government to authorize the recruitment of mi-grant workers from abroad.
The recruitment of migrant workers thus represents a response to de-mand-side forces in the secondary labor market caused by the scarcity ofcheap and unprotected Palestinian workers. Yet this was only one aspect ofthe process that transformed Israel into a destination country for labor mi-grants. The complete picture emerges only upon considering the politicalcontext of the decision to allow the recruitment of migrant workers and itslink with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see Bartram 1998). Like the deci-sion to encourage the employment of Palestinians from the West Bank andGaza Strip in Israel after their occupation in the 1967 war, the decision toallow the inflow of labor migrants was also related to political considera-tions linked to the Israeli state’s management of the occupation regime andthe national conflict. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, these considerationspromoted the incorporation of non-citizen Palestinians in the secondary la-bor market as a means of containing potential active opposition to the oc-cupation regime and as a tool for advancing the de facto annexation of theOccupied Territories through economic “integration” into Israel. After the1993 accords, the new political setting promoted the replacement of Pales-tinians with migrant workers (Rosenhek 2003).
The Israeli state’s new considerations emerged from a basic modificationof its strategy for regulating the national conflict. A basic premise of formerPrime Minister Yitzhak Rabin government’s was that a stable new scheme ofrelations with the Palestinians should be based on separation between Israeland the Palestinian entity. The replacement of Palestinians with migrantworkers was conceived, therefore, as part of a general strategy of curtailingthe economic “integration” between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Re-flecting this political logic, Rabin declared in 1995 that, “We need to bringthousands of foreign workers to reduce the number of Palestinians walkingaround in our streets.”2 Moreover, a basic concern of the state was to avoida situation in which its political interests would conflict with the interests ofemployers in the secondary labor market, who desired a large and securepool of unprotected workers. By providing this labor force through labor mi-gration, the government attempted to neutralize potential opposition to theOslo process from those employers most directly affected by the barriers im-posed on the transit of Palestinians to worksites inside Israel.
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From a strict structural dual labor market perspective, migrant workers eas-ily replaced non-citizen Palestinians in the construction and agriculture sec-tors. Yet from a broader political perspective, their presence in Israel entails anew situation that abounds with tensions and conflicts both within the stateapparatus and between the state and diverse societal actors and, moreover,that poses a serious challenge to Israeli society and the Israeli polity. Withtheir arrival, the profitable situation for the Israeli state and employers—in-volving access to a large and secure reservoir of unprotected non-citizenworkers without the necessity of confronting the social and political conse-quences of labor migration—came to an end (see Semyonov and Lewin-Ep-stein 1987). The substitution of Palestinian border workers (who commuteddaily or weekly from their communities to workplaces in Israel) with migrantworkers (who sojourn in the country for extended periods of time) has cre-ated an unprecedented situation: the presence and potential settlement ofsignificant numbers of non-Jewish immigrants. Within this new setting of la-bor migration, both the politics of labor market segmentation and the modeof incorporation for subordinate workers have been affected by the ideolog-ical and institutional premises of the Israeli migration regime in fundamen-tal ways. This development has engendered a new type of politics—promi-nent for a long time in many other countries but previously unknown inIsrael—in which the politics of labor market segmentation have become em-bedded within the politics of immigration with its intricate connections toquestions of nationhood, membership, and rights allocation.
LABOR MIGRATION AND THE ISRAELI MIGRATION REGIME
As is well known, the Zionist colonial project was from the start foundedon immigration flows, and the existence and consolidation of a Jewish-Zionist community in Palestine was entirely the result of successive wavesof Jewish immigration. After the establishment of the state, Jewish immi-gration continued to play a fundamental role in the demographic makeupof Israeli society. Even today, sixty years after its establishment, the Israelistate continues to define the demographic ratio between the Jewish andArab populations as a matter of national security and survival, and puta-tively Jewish immigration remains the main tool for maintaining the de-mographic superiority of the Jewish population over the Palestinian mi-nority (see Joppke and Rosenhek 2002; Lustick 1999). Accordingly, stateand quasi-state agencies actively encourage and support Jewish immigra-tion; Jewish immigrants and their relatives are granted Israeli citizenshipautomatically upon their arrival in the country by law; and special pro-grams of social and economic assistance are in place to facilitate their eco-nomic and social integration.
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As illustrated by the chapters in this volume, the politics of labor migra-tion in Israel stands in complete contrast to the political construction ofJewish immigration not only as imperative for Israel’s survival, but also asits raison d’être as a Jewish state. The ethnonational formulation of nation-hood and statehood dominant in Israel entails a clear-cut dual migrationregime along ethnic lines that distinguishes between Jews and non-Jews.With respect to Jews, this is a “settler regime” that actively seeks to attractnew members through immigration; regarding non-Jews, however, Israelrepresents an extremely restrictive and exclusionary migration regime. Asposited by a senior official in the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, “Is-rael is not an immigration country,” referring obviously to the immigrationof non-Jews (quoted in Rosenhek 2000). Thus the influx and continuouspresence of non-Jewish labor migrants pose a significant challenge to theideological and institutional basis of its migration regime and to the hege-monic articulation of membership in exclusionary ethnonational terms.
The articles in the volume examine different ways in which the exclusivistethnonational conception of Israel as a Jewish state and society, and the re-strictive migration regime deriving from it, decisively influence the mode ofincorporation of migrant workers in every sphere of social life. The formu-lation of membership in an ethnonational idiom, and its institutional andlegal manifestations, result in migrant workers’ subordinate position in thelabor market and their vulnerability to extreme exploitation, their exclusionfrom the welfare state, the disregard for their human rights, their precariouslegal status, and their harsh experiences as communities, families and indi-viduals living under the constant threat of arrest and deportation. Indeedfor most state agencies, labor migrants exist only as objects of control andrestrictive and exclusionary practices. Neither documented nor undocu-mented migrant workers are recognized in principle as potential membersof Israeli society, as legitimate participants in its social and political spheres,or as rights-bearing subjects. Furthermore, the presence of migrant workershas been politically constructed as a serious social problem. In fact, theterm widely used in public discourse by the media, politicians, and state of-ficials to refer to their presence is “the foreign worker problem.” Moreover,the “foreign worker problem” is frequently portrayed as a “ticking timebomb”3—a metaphor whose connotation of extreme and immediate threatand danger is readily apparent within the Israeli context.
A prominent aspect of the politics of labor migration in Israel is the prop-agation of extreme xenophobic messages in the public arena, albeit not byrelatively marginal or anti-establishment political forces as is typical inmany Western countries, but instead by key mainstream political actorsranging from ministers to senior officials in state agencies and spanning thepolitical spectrum. While speaking in their official capacities, these govern-ment officials have thus introduced into the public arena a form of rhetoric
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reminiscent of the crude anti-immigrant discourse of the radical right inWestern Europe. Not surprisingly, a central theme in this campaign hasbeen the claim that migrant workers are a major factor contributing to highrates of unemployment among Israeli workers. This connection has beentouted on countless occasions by Ministers of Finance, other ministers, andsenior officials in state agencies.4 Migrant workers are not only a scapegoatfor high unemployment; they have also been depicted as a source of crime.For instance, former Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Eli Yishai declaredduring his term in office that, “The foreign workers bring prostitution,crime and drugs.”5 Likewise, a senior official at the Ministry of Interior, theCommissioner of Visas, stated that, “The foreign workers bring criminalnorms.”6 Furthermore, migrant workers have also been portrayed as asource of disease. Former Minister of Health Eliahu Matza, for instance, sug-gested that, “The foreign population is the source of the dissemination ofAIDS in Israel.”7 Besides specific accusations like these, numerous publicstatements by leading politicians have constructed the presence of migrantworkers in Israel as a general threat to Israeli-Jewish society, and they havewarned in particular about the potential for migrants’ permanent settle-ment and efforts at family reunification. For instance, Ora Namir, the Min-ister of Labor and Social Affairs when the recruitment of migrant workersbegan, declared that, “The foreign workers will cause severe social and eco-nomic phenomena. They bring their families here, and we don’t have anycontrol over them.”8
Statements that define the presence of migrant workers in terms of“plague” and “infection” are extreme, but in no way exceptional, examplesof the radical xenophobic rhetoric disseminated by establishment politicalactors. For instance, former President of the State Ezer Weizman declaredthat, “The plague of foreign workers worries me very much… The wholecountry is full of foreign workers.”9 The definition of migrant workers as athreat has frequently been accompanied by exaggerated estimations of theirnumber and by alarmist predictions concerning the future. For instance, af-ter stating that the estimations of 400,000–500,000 migrant workers in thecountry are not exaggerated, former Minister of Labor and Social Affairs EliYishai declared, “If nothing is done, in one or two years there will be onemillion foreigners.”10 In the same vein, the Director-General of the Em-ployment Service at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs declared twoyears later that, “If the government does not act immediately to resolve theforeign workers problem, their number will reach one million in a fewyears.”11
What is striking given the intense xenophobic rhetoric voiced by a largeproportion of the incumbent political elite is the total absence within Israelof anti-immigrant political mobilization from below in any of its typicalmanifestations. In remarkable contrast to most Western European countries
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(see Betz 1994; Bjorgo and Witte 1993; Eatwell 2000; Koopmans andStatham 1999; Merkl 1995; Pettigrew 1998), there have not been incidentsof violent attacks against migrant workers in Israel, nor have there beendemonstrations against their presence in the country. No political organi-zations or movements have been established on the basis of opposition tolabor migration, and the issue has not been employed as a basis for politi-cal recruitment by either established or emerging political parties at thefringes of the political system. In other words, antagonism to labor migrantshas not led to the constitution of anti-establishment political actors or tothe strengthening of existing marginal actors’ capacity to mobilize publicsupport.
According to many studies, the characterization of immigrants as a threatto society by the political establishment—or at least as a heavy burden—isan important factor that encourages the emergence of xenophobic politicalmobilization from below. When incumbent political elites problematizeand criminalize immigrants and emphasize the negative effects of immi-gration on society, they provide credibility and legitimization to the farmore radical claims and political actions, including acts of violence, con-ducted by anti-establishment xenophobic political actors that emerge at thefringes of the political field (Green, et al. 2001; Hargreaves 2001; Karapin2000; Koopmans 1996; Pettigrew 1998; Thranhardt 1995; von Trotha1995). The Israeli case, however, challenges this claim, or at least calls forits qualification. The absence of anti-immigrant mobilization from belowin Israel suggests that beyond some threshold, the xenophobic rhetoricvoiced by the political establishment can have the opposite effect of effec-tively closing off the political space available for the constitution and mo-bilization of anti-establishment political actors on the basis of antagonismto migrants (for a similar argument see Kitschelt 1997; Koopmans andStatham 1999). Within the field of anti-immigrant rhetoric, the political es-tablishment in Israel thus positions itself in a place typically occupied inWestern Europe by the radical, anti-establishment, and xenophobic right. Ina setting in which extreme xenophobic motifs are advanced by incumbentpolitical elites and state agencies, they cannot be used by anti-establishmentchallengers as tools for mobilization. Put simply, when the public state-ments of ministers and senior officials in state agencies make Le Pen’s andHaider’s anti-immigrant rhetoric appear moderate, opposition to migrantworkers is neutralized as a potential basis for the constitution of anti-es-tablishment political actors.
In sum, most state agencies and political elites in Israel engage in rigid ex-clusionary practices towards migrant workers at the institutional, legal, andrhetorical levels. In this way, they reflect and seek to solidify the fundamentalethnonational principles upon which Israeli nationhood and statehood arebased. Yet the chapters in this volume go far beyond simply documenting and
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examining the subordinate and marginal position of migrant workers in Is-raeli society and the Israeli political economy and its ideological, institutional,and political determinants. Instead, they provide dynamic and complex analy-ses of the positioning and repositioning of labor migrants in society. Theseanalyses demonstrate that even in the case of an extreme exclusivist ethnona-tional migration regime like Israel’s, there are factors that can create openingsfor the emergence of at least partially inclusionary discourses and practices re-garding rights extension to unwelcome migrant workers.
THE POLITICS OF RIGHTS EXTENSION
Labor migration flows to Western countries have raised important ques-tions concerning the distribution of social and other rights and the consti-tution of distinct and perhaps new categories of membership in democraticpolities. A central topic of research and discussion in this context involvesthe political and institutional processes that determine whether migrantworkers are entitled to social rights and, if so, to what extent. Due to theclose connection between the consolidation of the nation-state, the institu-tionalization of the concept of citizenship, and the emergence of the wel-fare state (Marshall 1950), access to social services and benefits has gener-ally been articulated in terms of membership in the national polity,reflecting the coupling of the two primary components of citizenship: iden-tity and rights (Soysal 1994). The presence of labor migrants, however,poses a basic challenge to this articulation, thereby raising the political is-sue of the allocation of social rights to non-citizens and making the closedcharacter of the welfare state increasingly difficult to maintain (Bommes1995; Faist 1995; Soysal 1994).
At least until the 1990s, there existed a general trend in advanced capi-talist countries toward gradually extending social and other rights to non-citizen residents based on states’ assumption of responsibility for the livingconditions of these populations. Notwithstanding the significant variationamong countries, among the diverse legal categories to which migrants areassigned, and among different types of welfare programs, it is possible togeneralize that Western welfare states grant substantial social rights to mi-grants (Dorr and Faist 1997; Faist 1995; Heinelt 1993). Although they arenot granted formal citizenship and hence do not enjoy full political rights,they are nonetheless entitled to social rights that are almost identical tothose of nationals. Tomas Hammar (1990) conceives of this inclusionarydynamic as signaling the emergence of a new category of membership inWestern democratic polities: denizenship. Moreover, some scholars haveconceptualized this process as indicating an incipient but significant trans-formation in the institution of citizenship, whether in terms of the gradual
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denationalization of citizenship (Sassen 2006), or in terms of the emer-gence of post-national membership (Jacobson 1996; Soysal 1994). Thistransformation serves as ground for the recognition of migrants, includingthose lacking any legal status, as rights-bearing subjects.
Although the extension of social and other rights to migrants is far fromcomplete or irreversible, it has had a significant impact upon their posi-tioning within societies and polities. Since the welfare state domain is oneof the most important sites at which membership in the polity is consti-tuted and actualized, the extension of social rights tends not only to con-tribute to an improvement in their living conditions and life chances, butalso to have broad effects on their political status. Once migrants are recog-nized as bearing rights in the domain of societal resource distribution, thepath is open for their recognition as legitimate participants in the polity.Their inclusion in the welfare state has thus enhanced their ability to par-ticipate in the political sphere through practices of claims-making upon thestate that are formulated in the language of rights (Hollifield 1992; Sassen2006).
While there is wide consensus among scholars regarding the existence ofa significant trend toward the extension of rights to migrants in Westerncountries, an important debate has emerged concerning the political andinstitutional factors upon which this dynamic is grounded. One approachidentifies states’ strengthening accountability to transnational human rightscodes and institutions as a major factor leading to the recognition of mi-grants as rights-bearing subjects. Within this context of normative global-ization, the institutionalization of the concept of universal personhood asthe basis for recognizing individual rights, as opposed to national citizen-ship, provides growing opportunities for non-citizens and other politicalactors to raise claims on the state that are legitimized by this emergingtransnational regime (Soysal 1994). While acknowledging the transforma-tive power of the transnational human rights regime, Saskia Sassen (2006)emphasizes that like other aspects of globalization, this regime does not actupon the nation-state as an external force that imposes the adoption of in-clusionary concepts and practices, but rather introduces a set of conceptsand standards that are endogenized into the local political field and the in-stitutional grid of the state via the actions of local actors. Such actors in-clude the judicial apparatuses in Western countries, which have been keyplayers in promoting the recognition of migrants’ rights by internalizingnormative transnational principles of human rights into local fields (Ja-cobson 1996).
In contrast to the globalist approach, an alternative line of analysis em-phasizes the crucial importance of the normative and institutional featuresof local political fields and the nature of particular migration regimes in thepolitics of rights extension to migrants. Christian Joppke (1999a; 1999b),
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for instance, recognizes the key role played by the judicial branch in the ex-tension of rights to non-citizens, but he considers it to be grounded in thedomestic legal regimes and liberal constitutional principles of specificcountries. An additional factor embedded in the local political field that af-fects the politics of migrant inclusion and exclusion is the state bureaucraticand professional apparatus including, in particular, state agencies that de-velop institutional and organizational interests in extending rights to mi-grants (Guiraudon 1998). In these cases, inclusionary practices are formu-lated and legitimated not in terms of universal human rights, but rather inprofessional and bureaucratic idioms of concrete problem-solving (Rosen-hek 2000).
Given the extreme exclusionary character of the Israeli migration regimeand its firm roots in an unambiguous formulation of nationhood and state-hood in exclusivist ethnic principles of membership, Israel represents a par-ticularly fertile case for assessing the sources and dynamics of rights exten-sion to unwelcome migrants in comparative perspective. Several chapters inthis volume provide fruitful examinations of this dynamic. Guy Mundlak(this volume), for instance, examines the role of judicial litigation in the pol-itics of rights extension to migrant workers in Israel as well as the instru-mental role of local human rights organizations in initiating these processes.He points to the potential for the judicial apparatus to play a significant rolein transforming the notion of Israeli citizenship by moving it away from theclassical, dichotomous formal distinction between citizens and non-citizenstowards a more inclusionary formulation that recognizes multiple modes ofmembership in society and polity. While noting the significant, albeit par-tial, success of the litigation strategy in Israel in incrementally extendingrights to migrant workers, Mundlak also notices and theorizes its limitationsand its possible unintended contradictory effects. One effect of this strategyof piecemeal and partial extension of rights to non-citizens may involve anarrowing of the political opportunity structure in a manner that impedesmore basic struggles for the full-fledged inclusion of labor migrants as citi-zens. In the Israeli case, as his chapter demonstrates, the full extension of cit-izenship to labor migrants would entail the dilution of the exclusivist ethniccharacter of membership, nationhood, and statehood.
Several other chapters examine the second dynamic of rights extensionnoted above, which develops primarily within the bureaucratic and profes-sional apparatus of state agencies and is grounded in these agencies’ specificinstitutional and organization interests. In their chapter on health policiestowards migrant workers, for instance, Dani Filc and Nadav Davidovitch(this volume) identify five institutional logics that underlie the local dy-namics of exclusion and inclusion: the conception of citizenship, the logicof the labor market, the logic of public health, the logic of cost-containment,and the logic of rights. While the logic of exclusionist citizenship is the ma-
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jor factor determining the overall exclusionary practices toward migrantworkers in the health care domain in Israel, the logic of public health alsoplays a key role as a major factor creating openings for a dynamics of rightsextension. In a similar vein, Michael Alexander (this volume) interprets theinclusionary practices implemented by the Tel Aviv municipality as beingrooted mainly in instrumental-bureaucratic considerations of problem solv-ing that do not signal the recognition of migrant workers as rights-bearingsubjects or as members of the community, even at the local level.
A general conclusion to emerge from these chapters pertains to the rela-tive weakness of the transnational regime of human rights as a factor thatmight impose constraints on the state or compel it to adopt more inclu-sionary practices. The main dynamics of rights extension appear to havebeen determined by the institutional interests of different state agencies,and they generally have been formulated not in the idiom of universal per-sonhood and human rights, but in the idiom of professional expertise andbureaucratic convenience. Probably the only significant site at whichtransnational principles of human rights play a role is in the politics ofclaims-making conducted by local NGOs in their attempt to endogenize thetransnational human rights regime into the local political field. While theyhave been quite successful in raising the issue of labor migrant’ rights onthe public agenda and even in initiating processes of policy change, theirsuccess in introducing transnational concepts and norms of human rightsas primary considerations for state agencies has been far more limited. Thisraises a general question regarding the links that can emerge between a pol-itics of rights-extension formulated in bureaucratic-professional idioms ofproblem solving and a politics of rights-extension formulated in a transna-tional idiom of rights attached to personhood rather than citizenship. Thequestion here is whether, and under what conditions, the extension ofrights based on the pragmatic considerations of state agencies can createopenings for a politics of claims-making grounded on, and formulated in,transnational concepts of rights.
An important recurrent theme explored by the chapters in this volume isthe fact that institutional arrangements and policies in the domain of labormigration in Israel are marked by substantial ambiguities, contradictions,and conflicts. Not only are there constant conflicts among the state, em-ployers, and human rights NGOs, but intensive intra-state conflicts alsoabound among different state agencies. Of course, this is not unique to theIsraeli case. Several studies of the politics of immigration in other countriesreveal similarly complex pictures of inner tensions and conflicts in the oper-ation of migration regimes as reflected in the divergent, and sometimes con-tradictory, agendas and practices of different state agencies (e.g. Calavita1992; 1996; Sassen 1998). Probably even more than in other policy domains,in the field of migration states do not function as monolithic entities. State
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agencies embedded within diverse policy domains and with different clien-teles develop disparate and sometimes incongruent institutional interests,ideologies, and practices. Moreover, as illustrated by the chapters in this vol-ume, some of these preferences and the practices they generate may deviatefrom a migration regime’s institutional and ideological principles, therebymaking it potentially vulnerable to fissures.
This mixture of contradictory trends is clearly manifest in two importantdevelopments that have occurred in the field of labor migration in Israel inthe past few years. One points to the intensification of the exclusionist char-acter of the migration regime, while the other signals a potentially radicalchange of a liberal nature. After years of hesitation during which the adop-tion of a deportation policy was repeatedly announced but never imple-mented on a significant scale, in 2002 the Israeli government initiated astrict campaign of forced deportation of undocumented labor migrants.While in 2001 only 1,900 undocumented migrant workers were deported,followed by around 5,000 in 2002, the numbers increased significantly to21,000 in 2003 and 15,700 in 2004 (Bar-Tzuri 2005). Many other undocu-mented migrant workers decided to leave the country in order to avoidforced deportation, and those that remained live under the constant threatof being arrested and deported. As a result, the number of undocumentedmigrant workers residing in Israel declined drastically, and the rich com-munity life and extended networks of community organizations developedin previous years almost faded away (see Willen, Sabar, this volume).
As the mass deportation campaign was being implemented, however, theMinister of Interior at the time, Avraham Poraz, opened discussions aboutthe possibility of regularizing some of the children of undocumented mi-grant workers residing in the country. In February 2004, a ministerial panelwas established to consider granting permanent residence status, and citi-zenship after the age of twenty-one, to migrant workers’ children who con-formed to specified eligibility criteria. Their parents and siblings would beeligible first for temporary residence status and later for permanent resi-dence status. To neutralize strong opposition to the proposal, it was em-phasized that the regularization would be a one-time arrangement and thatmigrant workers’ children who were born in the country or entered it afterits implementation would not be eligible.12 Tellingly, the ministerial panelspecified that Palestinian children residing in the country irregularly wouldnot be eligible for the regularization arrangement. The Ministry of Justicelater opposed the arrangement completely, raising the objection that itwould be legally impossible to distinguish between children of migrantworkers and Palestinian children.13
Despite strong opposition within the government,14 in June 2005 thecabinet approved the regularization arrangement while emphasizing in thesame resolution that children who are not eligible would be deported from
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the country with their families. The eligibility criteria stipulated that thechild was born in Israel, that he/she was at least ten years old by the end ofthe year, that his or her parents entered the country legally, that the childstudies or has finished his or her studies at a school in the country, and thathe/she speak Hebrew.15 One year later, the new Minister of Interior pro-posed a new, relatively more liberal set of eligibility criteria that would haveincreased the number of migrant workers’ children entitled to permanentresidence.16 This less restrictive proposal eliminated the previously set con-ditions that the child be born in the country and that his or her parentshave entered Israel legally as well as lowering the minimum period of resi-dence in the country from ten to five years. After some discussion, the cab-inet approved an amended proposal according to which permanent resi-dence status and eventually citizenship would be granted to migrantworkers’ children who arrived before the age of 14, who had been living inthe country for at least six years, and whose parents entered the countrylegally.17
Despite its limited scope in terms of the number of eligible children andits declared one-time character, this arrangement nevertheless can be con-sidered an unexpected watershed in the essence and functioning of the Is-raeli migration regime. It is important to emphasize that in contrast toWestern countries, until the adoption of this arrangement there was nochannel in Israel that allowed labor migrants, whether documented or un-documented, to obtain legal status or temporary or permanent residence.18
Given the significance of the change this regularization arrangement en-tails, it is particularly interesting to consider how the resolution was pre-sented and justified by the government. In contrast to what might havebeen expected, the decision was not formulated in accordance with transna-tional concepts of human rights. As a matter of fact, it was formulated in ex-plicitly national terms, albeit of a novel character within the Israeli context.The recognition of labor migrants’ children as potential members of societywas justified on the grounds that they “have assimilated into Israeli societyand culture” and their deportation “would be akin to ‘cultural exile’ to acountry with which [they have] no cultural ties.”19 The novelty of this for-mulation resides in the fact that it signals a significant departure from thedominant ethnic-Jewish understanding of Israeli nationhood and cultureand admits the possibility that a non-Jewish labor migrant might be “as-similated into Israeli society and culture”—terms which, despite the exis-tence of a large Palestinian minority comprising 20 percent of the citizenry,are generally equated with Jewishness. The question remains whether thisinclusionary measure will remain, as intended, a one-time arrangementbenefiting only a few hundred children and their families or whether it willopen the path for a more fundamental dynamic leading to a substantivebroadening in labor migrants’ access to social and political membership.
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CONCLUSIONS
The explicit and unequivocally exclusionary character of the Israeli migra-tion regime towards non-Jewish labor migrants makes it an especially in-teresting case for analyzing the politics of inclusion and exclusion of prob-lematized and unwanted migrants. The first conclusion to emerge fromthis volume is that even in cases where an exclusionary migration regimeis strongly associated with hegemonic, exclusivist ethnonational concep-tions of membership, it is nonetheless potentially vulnerable to fissures.Factors of diverse origins and character can create openings for the emer-gence of political dynamics leading to the gradual recognition of labor mi-grants as rights-bearing subjects and even as potential members of societyand polity.
A second conclusion refers to the sources of such inclusionaryprocesses. The Israeli case indicates that at least when exclusionary for-mulations of ethnic nationhood and statehood are dominant, inclusion-ary dynamics do not tend to originate in a transnational regime of humanrights that imposes the adoption of inclusionary practices upon the statefrom outside. Rather, the analysis presented here suggests that it is the in-stitutional heterogeneity of the state apparatus itself that functions as amajor source of inclusionary processes. Dynamics leading to the incipientrecognition of labor migrants as rights-bearing subjects can be opened upby state agencies which, because of their particular location within thestate apparatus and their specific clienteles, develop interests that departfrom the exclusionary migration regime. It is precisely by formulatingtheir practices in terms of these forms of professional and bureaucraticproblem-solving logic that such agencies can acquire the power to ad-vance an agenda that contradicts the dominant regime. This seems to beparticularly likely in a socio-political context characterized by a weak nor-mative commitment to the extension of rights to migrants who fail tomeet the ethnonational criteria for social and political membership.Moreover, there are signs that one important unintended consequence ofthese limited and ad hoc inclusionary measures can be the opening of apath for more basic transformations in concepts of membership andrights distribution either in the direction of rights-extension to non-citi-zens or, alternatively, in the direction of broadening the channels of entryinto citizenship for labor migrants. Still, an additional, less optimisticconclusion can also be deduced from observing current developments inWestern countries. As evidenced by what seems to be a restrictive turn inthe migration policies of the United States and Western European coun-tries in recent years, there is nothing deterministic or irreversible aboutthe dynamics that lead to the recognition of migrants as rights-bearingsubjects.
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NOTES
1. The principle of unrestricted Jewish immigration was legally enshrined in theLaw of Return of 1950, whose first article declares that, “Every Jew has the right tocome to this country as an oleh” (Law of Return, 1950; English text available on thewebsite of the Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs: www.Israel-mfa.gov.il). The termoleh refers to a Jewish immigrant to the Land of Israel. The law was passed by theKnesset (the Israeli Parliament) unanimously, without even any dissent from thenon-Zionist Israeli Communist party, and the notion of an absolute and “natural”right of every Jew to settle in Israel was taken for granted by all members of parlia-ment.
2. Davar, January 30, 1995. 3. For instance, statement by Knesset Speaker Dan Tichon (Zman Tel Aviv, August
30, 1996). 4. For instance, Minister of Finance Yaacov Neeman declared that, “[T]he for-
eigners take jobs from Israelis” (Ha’aretz, April 22, 1998), and that, “[T]he employ-ment of foreigners is a major cause of the high unemployment” (Yediot Acharonot,August 6, 1998). For similar statements by former Minister of Finance AbrahamShohat, see Ha’aretz, May 22, 1995; and by former Minister of Finance Meir Shitrit,see Ha’aretz, February 26, 1999. The incrimination that migrant workers are re-sponsible for high unemployment rates was posited by other ministers as well in-cluding, for instance, two Ministers of Labor and Social Affairs, Eli Yishai (Ha’aretz,September 24, 1999) and Shlomo Benizri (Ha’aretz, May 14, 2001), as well as byEzer Weizman, the former President of the State (The Jerusalem Post, July 15, 1997;Ma’ariv, February 3, 1998). The connection between the presence of migrant work-ers and high unemployment was also publicly asserted by Professor Jacob Frenkel,former Governor of the Bank of Israel, who enjoyed a great deal of public prestigeas an “apolitical” professional authority. He reacted to claims that his restrictivemonetary policy was responsible for the recession and high unemployment by sug-gesting a causal relationship between the presence of migrant workers and unem-ployment. He declared, “There are 170,000 unemployed and this is a problem, butthere are also 300,000 foreign workers and this is a problem too” (News on TVChannel 1, August 25, 1997; see also declarations by the Director-General of theMinistry of Labor and Social Affairs in Globes, February 10, 1998).
5. Ha’aretz, April 24, 1998. 6. Yom L’Yom, November 28, 1996. Similarly, a report by the Population Author-
ity in the Ministry of Interior warned against the drug trade by “foreign workers”(Ha’aretz, March 20, 1996).
7. Hatzofeh, October 10, 1997. The Population Authority report quoted in theprevious note also warned against the dissemination of infectious diseases by “for-eign workers” (Ha’aretz, March 20, 1996).
8. Ma’ariv, May 22, 1995. Similarly, the Minister of Interior, Eliahu Suissaclaimed that, “The foreigners opened for themselves kindergartens, schools,churches, and this is broadening . . . We must avoid the development of extraterri-torial areas, as in South Tel Aviv, within Israel” (Ma’ariv, September 29, 1998). Sim-ilarly, the Commissioner of Visas in the Ministry of Interior warned that, “Thou-
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sands of foreign workers received Israeli citizenship over the last years through ficti-tious marriages. [ . . . ] If we are not strict with the new procedures, all of the foreignworkers will marry and stay in the country, and we will have a catastrophe here”(Yediot Acharonot, November 27, 1996). Finally, the Advisor of the Minister of Inter-nal Security on Foreign Workers declared, “The foreign workers threaten us as a Jew-ish, democratic state” (Ha’aretz, May 15, 2001).
9. Yediot Acharonot, December 1, 1998. Avigdor Kahalani, the Minister of Inter-nal Security, stated, “They take over an entire area in Tel-Aviv . . . This is a plague”(Ha’aretz, September 18, 1996). The Adviser of the Minister of Labor and Social Af-fairs on Foreign Workers declared, “This public that settles among us stops our de-velopment. This is an infection” (Ha’aretz, August 19, 1996), and Knesset MemberDavid Tal claimed, “They are a cancer in the heart of the nation” (Ha’aretz, August19, 1996).
10. Ha’aretz, September 6, 1996. 11. Ma’ariv, August 6, 1998. 12. Ha’aretz, February 29, 2004. 13. Ha’aretz, October 17, 2004. 14. See Ha’aretz, March 24, 2005. 15. Government Resolution No. 3807, June 26, 2005. 16. According to the Population Administration at the Ministry of Interior, some
460 families representing 1,400 persons had submitted applications for legal statuson behalf of their children by the March 2006 deadline (Ha’aretz, May 10, 2006).
17. Government Resolution No. 156, June 18, 2006. 18. The only legal provision that permitted migrant workers to obtain residence
status was through marriage to an Israeli citizen. The Ministry of Interior, however,has tended to obstruct this option by raising bureaucratic obstacles.
19. Government Resolution No. 3807, June 26, 2005.
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1
Contributors Biographies
Acknowledgments
The production of this book has been made possible by a generous grantfrom the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University.
Rami Adout is former project coordinator for the Project on Migrant Work-ers, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers at Physicians for Human Rights—Israel(PHR-Israel), former director of the organization’s Open Clinic, and ascholar of Israeli labor history. He is author of Aggressively Passive: The Stateof Health of Migrant Workers in Israel (Tel Aviv: PHR-Israel, 2002) and Israel—A Safe Haven? Problems in the Treatment Offered by the State of Israel toRefugees and Asylum Seekers (with Anat Ben-Dor; Tel Aviv: PHR-Israel, 2003).
Michael Alexander, Ph.D. is author of Cities And Labour Immigration: Com-paring Policy Responses in Amsterdam, Paris, Rome And Tel Aviv (Ashgate,2007). He has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Haifa Uni-versity, and he currently works for the International Committee of the RedCross (ICRC) on Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories (EastJerusalem).
Nadav Davidovitch, M.D., Ph.D., MPH is a public health physician and his-torian of medicine and public health. He is a senior lecturer in the Depart-ment of Health Systems Management, Division of Public Health, Ben Gu-rion University and an adjunct lecturer at the Center for the History andEthics of Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public
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Health. He is currently studying the varied consequences of immigrationwithin the health domain. He is also working on various notions of con-tested science in environmental health and vaccination policy. His recentpublications include, “Medical Borders: Historical, Political and CulturalAnalyses” (Science in Context, with Rakefet Zalashik), and “Health Care as aNational Right? The Development of Health Care Services for MigrantWorkers in Israel” (Social Theory and Health, with Dani Filc). His co-editedbook with Michal Alberstein and Austin Sarat, Trauma and Memory: Reading,Healing and Making Law, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.
Heide Castañeda, Ph.D., MPH is an assistant professor in the Departmentof Anthropology at the University of South Florida. Her research areas in-clude labor migration and the political economy of health in Europe andthe United States.
Dani Filc, M.D., Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics andGovernment at Ben Gurion University. He is also a practicing physician andChair of PHR-Israel. His fields of interest include the right to health, healthpolicies, and the influence of neo-liberalism on health care systems. Amonghis publications are recent articles in Acta Sociologica, Critical Public Health,Critical Social Policy, Social Theory and Health, and Theory and Criticism.
Adriana Kemp, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociologyand Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. Her main areas of research are la-bor migration, migration policy and citizenship, sociology of the state,boundaries, and nationalism. Her work on these topics has been publishedin Ethnic and Racial Studies, Political Geography, Identities, and Gender and So-ciety among others. She is the co-editor of Israelis in Conflict: Hegemonies,Identities and Challenges (Sussex Academic Press, 2004) and Citizenship Gaps(Van Leer and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press). Her book Migrants and Work-ers: The Political Economy of Labor Migration in Israel (co-authored with Re-beca Raijman) is forthcoming from Van Leer and Hakibbutz HameuchadPress in 2007.
Guy Mundlak, SJD teaches and studies labor law and industrial relations inthe Faculty of Law and Department of Labor Studies at Tel-Aviv University.His research spans the study of migrant workers, social and economic rightsas human rights, social law, collective labor relations, and labor market pol-icy. His book, Fading Corporatism: The Transformation of Labor Law and Indus-trial Relations in Israel, will be published by Cornell University Press in 2007.
Rebeca Raijman, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociologyand Anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her research focuses on
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international migration (in Israel and the United States) with special em-phasis on migrants’ modes of incorporation into host societies and the so-cial mechanisms underlying the emergence of prejudice and discriminationagainst subordinate ethnic minorities in modern societies. Her most recentpublished research includes, Migrants and Workers: The Political Economy ofLabor Migration in Israel (co-authored with Adriana Kemp) (Van Leer andHakibbutz Hameuchad Press, forthcoming 2007) and an article on changein attitudes toward foreign populations across European societies (AmericanSociological Review).
Zeev Rosenhek, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology,Political Science and Communication at the Open University of Israel. Hisfields of research include state-society relations, labor migration, the poli-tics of citizenship, and the political economy of the welfare state. His workhas been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies,International Sociology, SocialProblems, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, Acta Sociologica and the Review ofInternational Political Economy.
Anat Rosenthal, MA is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociologyand Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has con-ducted fieldwork in Israel and in Malawi on issues pertaining to the socialand cultural effects of HIV/AIDS, health policy, and migration. Her workhas been published in International Migration and the newsletter of the AIDSand Anthropology Research Group.
Galia Sabar, Ph.D. is chair of African studies at Tel Aviv University. Her pri-mary research interests include African Christianity, civil society in Africa,and African diasporas in Israel. Her publications include, “Between CrossingBoundaries and Respecting Norms: Sub-Saharan African Women Labor Mi-grants in Israel, 1990–2005,” in A. Wilder-Smith, E. Schwartz and M. Shaw(eds.) Travel Medicine (England: Elsevier Publishers), and “Une migration in-achevée? Réflexions sur la communauté africaine de travailleurs migrants enIsraël, à la veille de sa disparition,” Cahiers de Anneaux Memoire, N°9.
Izhak Schnell, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Geography andHuman Environment at Tel Aviv University. His main interests are in socialand cultural geography. Much of his work deals with the structure of socialspace and sense of place in a globalizing reality, including works on so-ciospatial segregation, ethnic entrepreneurship and sociospatial networks,and the impact of ideology on the landscape. Among his publications arearticles in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Human Organization, theAnnals of the Association of American Geographers, Urban Geography, and Ur-ban Studies.
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Sarah S. Willen, Ph.D., MPH is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Na-tional Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) Training Program within the De-partment of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her primary re-search interests include undocumented migration and migrant “illegality,”migration and health, the anthropology of human rights and humanitari-anism, West African and Filipino transnational migration, and the anthro-pology of Israel/Palestine. She is editor of the present volume and guest ed-itor of a special issue of International Migration titled, “Exploring ‘Illegal’ and‘Irregular’ Migrants’ Lived Experiences of Law and State Power” (forthcom-ing 2007). Her work has appeared in International Migration, the Revue Eu-ropéene des Migrations Internationales, and the Journal of Middle East Women’sStudies. Her forthcoming publications include, “Seeing the ‘Holy Land’ withNew Eyes: Undocumented Labor Migration, Reproductive Health, and theFluctuating Borders of the Israeli National Body” in M. LeVine and S. Su-fian, Reapproaching the Border: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel/Palestine(forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield), and “‘Illegality,’ Mass Deporta-tion, and the Threat of Violent Arrest: Structural Violence and Social Suffer-ing in the Lives of Undocumented Migrant Workers in Israel” in A. Sarat, M.Alberstein, and N. Davidovitch, eds., Trauma and Memory: Reading, Healing,and Making Law (forthcoming from Stanford University Press).
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