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A week ago, a two-year-old boy got lost. He ran away from his nursery school, which was located in the cellar of a crumbling building and run by a girl without any training. She “taught” fifteen toddlers trapped in a room without toys or any other equipment. . . . Someone found the boy on the street, and took him to the police station. [The police] didn’t know who the toddler was; they didn’t even know how to change his diaper. The social services staff didn ’t know who he was either. In the evening, the boy’s father arrived at the police station with a picture of the child. We [the police] gave him the child but later arrested and deported the father because he was an illegal worker from Turkey. The mother, also Turkish, and the child, who was born in Israel, were allowed to remain. —Mia, a policewoman Illegal labor migration has loomed large on the Israeli public agenda since the early 1990s, when the realization that in tandem with the contracted workers, illegal migrants and their families were settling on the outskirts of Israeli cities, especially Tel Aviv. In Israel, the public debate over illegal migrants often is seen as linked to the employment of labor migrants at large and is associated with two major spheres, economic and social-political. Within the economic sphere, labor migrants are perceived as having taken jobs that otherwise would have gone to Israelis, depressing salaries for unskilled Israelis, which in turn forced the state to increase unemployment and income security payments, and as having reduced workers’ general productivity, as the employment of cheap foreign labor serves as a negative incentive to invest in labor substitution production technologies. 131 EIGHT Illegal Labor Migrants Life and Work on the Run In the social and political sphere debate is centered mainly on citizenship issues and their consequences. For example, labor migrants have access to social amenities and basic protection that for Israeli citizens is limited. Civil disputes are mainly related to social services and everyday life and stem from the incorporation effort of illegal migrants to establish their own ethnic communities (Raijman and Kemp 2003; Schnell 2000; Schnell and Alexander 2002). There also are considerable entitlement issues, associated with citizenship and the ethnicity of non-Jewish immigrants in a Jewish state. In this chapter I explore the development of the illegal labor market of foreign workers. Beginning with how the system of employment induces the creation of such a market, and its basic characteristics, I then explore the institutionalization of this market, in terms of constituting communities of illegal foreign workers. After reviewing the relations between illegal foreign workers and the Israeli society and its institutions, I conclude by claiming that the various illegal communities were institutionalized in Israel as a response to both the principle of a growing capitalist market in need of cheap labor and as a bureaucratic mechanism that organizes the importation of foreign workers to Israel. Working Life The illegal labor migrant market has developed in the gaps between the formal , legal labor migrant market and the employment system. Illegal workers are thus, in the widest sense, a product of Israel’s institutional environment. Their status, rights, and existence are precarious, mainly because of institutional shortcomings and the government’s reluctance to address, in a comprehensive way, the realities of their life and work in Israel. The long, bitter experience of dealing with Israeli Arabs and the Palestinians—two minority groups that are not Jewish and therefore outside the “boundaries” of the Jewish constituency—has led to the common solution known as “exclusionary practices.” Illegal foreign workers are treated as “unlawful aliens,” which must not be allowed to take root; they must be controlled and deported. The policies toward undocumented labor migrants portray an inherent tension between deportation and accommodation. The former will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, and the latter reflects a recognition of the usefulness of a cheap and vulnerable labor force that is inherently temporary and apparently has no legal or moral claim to citizenship entitlement (Engbersen and Van der Leun 2001). Illegal workers are either undocumented migrants who entered Israel legally and either cease working for their legal employers, thereby becoming illegal aliens, or remained after their work permits expired. Some often enter as tourists and overstay their period covered by their visas or, occasionally, they seek asylum or enter the country clandestinely. In the early 2000s, it was estiForeign Workers...

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