Foreign Workers in Israel: Global Perspectives

NINE Deportation

One night, Chou and his friends—all Chinese illegal workers— were sleeping when they heard loud knocks on their door. “We immediately knew that it was the police. We all woke immediately and jumped from the window. I couldn’t allow myself to be deported as I’m only now close to covering the loans I took to get here.” One by one, each jumped out the window of their secondfloor apartment.Two of Chou’s friends were captured by the police. Two others escaped, though their legs were badly injured. Now they are in hiding. Chou broke a vertebra in his back, an injury so serious—he couldn’t move—that he was taken to the hospital. —Interview, March 2, 2003 Since 2002, with the establishment of the Deportation Administration (or immigration police, as it is popularly known), deportation has become aggressive and brutal. Illegal foreign workers have been picked up at bus stations early in the morning, dragged from their apartments after doors were broken down in the middle of the night, or met by police as they arrived at work. Advice on how to avoid the police is easily available. On one of the Web sites dedicated to beating the system, the following is written: Don’t open your flat door; carry little weight so you can run from the police; regularly send your entire savings home; if you work in Tel Aviv, take taxis to work; collect your salary daily; prepare a bag with personal belongings; if caught, avoid paying airfare by claiming that you don’t have the money and let the government pay for it; sell all valuables at any price, because if caught by the police and detained, you will lose everything. Haunted by these fears, some have turned to the immigration authorities to ask for clemency, thereby earning a few weeks to settle their affairs and 153 NINE Deportation leave at their own free will, avoiding the anguish of spending time in jail (which could stretch into months) before deportation. Although deportation has been a cornerstone of government policy since the mid-1990s, implementation was initially sluggish. With the rising numbers of illegal foreign workers—an estimated 150,000 in 2000 (CBS 2002)—and their residential concentration in Tel Aviv (see Schnell 2002; Kemp and Raijman 2004), the implications of their presence have become a key issue on the government’s political agenda. Deportation reflects attitudes toward two major issues that circumstance has chosen to intertwine. The first is economic in nature. Labor migrants, it is argued, were substitutes for low-skilled Israeli workers, a fact that encouraged the latter to drop out of the labor market. This process has been portrayed as contributing to local unemployment, with the subsequent overburdening of the welfare system. The second issue captured by deportation is that of citizenship and national identity. Deportation has come to be viewed as an efficient mechanism to avoid confrontation with a large religiously and culturally alien population residing within the country and therefore threatening Israel’s Jewish identity.1 What may be considered unique in the Likud government’s presentation of this argument was that it managed to portray the weighty civil issues as inherently associated with the economic issue, a specious combination that transformed all foreign workers, but particularly illegal workers, into targets for political action.2 Deportation: Process and Practices The policy of deportation had made itself felt through the manhunt attitude adopted by the immigration police. Specific practices have been adopted according to the nature of the illegal migrants’ social space, daily habits, and employment patterns. In bureaucratic terms, deportation involves establishing a system based on a “top-down” and “bottom-up” approach that, according to the testimony of one immigration police officer, is: based on raids at any place, at home, work, bus stations, streets, wherever our intelligence indicate, and backed by a whole system which is based on these components: prevention of the entry of illegal workers, dissemination of information to employers on the dire consequences of employing illegal workers and to workers and their community leaders on the more dire consequences of being caught and deported. The last component involves the actual process of deportation. Each component entails costly and intricate operations. (interview, February 2005) Thus the deportation methods of illegal labor migrants are a highly complex cultural process that is developing and changing along the modificaForeign Workers in Israel 154 tions...