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Chapter Three Destiny and Destination Latinos Deciding to Leave for Israel If you had told me a year ago that I would be living and working in Israel, I would have said you were a lunatic, I didn’t even know where Israel was on the map. —Patricio, 36, undocumented Ecuadorian migrant in Tel Aviv Undocumented migrants from Latin America face impediments beyond Israel’s categorical rejection of non-Jewish migrants, notoriously tense military situation, and threat of acts of terror. Israel has no historic connections (economic or cultural) with Latin American countries of the kind that might stimulate large-scale migration, and the geographic distance between them is great. Embarking on such a transatlantic trip not only is intimidating for many undocumented migrants, but is also a big commitment , since return is uncertain. Nevertheless, beginning in the early 1990s, the haphazard immigration of a few Latinos to Israel subsequently generated a significant chain-migration that induced the remarkable spread and intensification of transnational social networks within a span of less than five years. How did Israel become a popular migration destination for thousands of people in Latin America? Latinos who decided to go to Israel mostly came from a low-middle-class background . In their country of origin, they often resided on the outskirts of the capital city, or other big cities and towns, where they usually occupied menial or semiprofessional jobs in the private sector and/or the informal economy. Many of them came from families that, a generation ago, had migrated internally from the rural area of the country to an urban setting. Indicative of this latter characteristic is the fact that many Latinos in Israel came from a major urban center in an agricultural region of their country, for example: in Ecuador, from Cuenca and Loja; in Colombia, from Cali and other towns in the Valle del Cauca; in Bolivia, from Cochabamba. 58 / PART 1 From the migration stories of Latinos it became clear that not all of them could easily be categorized as economic migrants. Some Latinos were driven by a religious fervor regarding the Holy Land, while others apparently decided to emigrate in a rather spontaneous and intuitive way, basing their decision on little knowledge about Israel. While the immigration of most Latinos to Israel was facilitated by transnational social networks, some Latinos conducted their migration in an individual and isolated fashion with no solid ties to such networks. The significant number of ‘‘atypical’’ migrants I encountered in Israel made it empirically inadequate merely to cast them aside as exceptions. I therefore present an analytical framework in which di√erent types of migratory motivations can be accounted for. Rather than identifying di√erent ‘‘push-pull’’ factors, I construct a typology of the motivational structures and the decision-making processes that stimulated Latinos to choose Israel as their destination . I distinguish three prominent processes: economic, religious, and spontaneous. After laying out this typology I introduce the concept of a ‘‘migratory disposition’’ in order to account for people’s immersion in an emigration environment and the ways in which they make sense of their position in it. This approach is meant to advance our understanding of potential migrants’ decision-making processes, and more particularly to elucidate cases in which migrants’ decisions to emigrate appear spontaneous , irrational, and isolated. A better understanding of Latinos’ motivational structures will also lead to a more nuanced understanding of the particular life strategies that they adopted in Israel. The Potency of Migration: The Emergence of Transnational Social Networks around Rudimentary Connections According to world-system theory (Portes and Walton 1981, Castells 1989, Sassen 1988, 1991), the establishment of transnational migration networks largely follows historical (often colonial) ties, as for example between England and India, Portugal and Brazil, and France and Algeria. Given such ties, migration is said to be facilitated by the fact that citizens in former colonies often speak the language of the colonizer state and are aware of, and intrigued by, employment opportunities in these richer countries. Yet, there are no substantial connections between Israel and Latin American countries of the kind that world-system theory points to. More recently, global paths of capitalist penetration (multinationals, outsourcing, etc.) are taken to be essential in the enhancement of cultural ties and the formation of bi-directional channels for the transfer of capital and commodities, which subsequently also give way for the migration of labor. However, as Bartram (1998) indicates , Israel had very few economic ties with most...

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