Israel should have made this clear from day one. The migrants pay a large sum of money to be smuggled in. If they were warned that they would be returned, they would not want to invest the money to try. Ted Belman
Interior minister dismisses notion that some Africans are asylum seekers or refugees: “These are economic migrants.”
Interior Minister Eli Yishai vowed Thursday to exert every effort to see that “the last of the infiltrators return to their countries,” referring to the some 50,000 African economic migrants, asylum seekers and refugees currently in Israel.
Speaking with Army Radio, Yishai dismissed the notion that Sudanese, Eritreans and other Africans in Israel have any standing to seek political asylum. “These are not refugees, these are economic migrants who want to come to Israel for work,” he said.
Their presence “is an existential threat” to the State of Israel, he asserted, vowing to “defend the Jewish majority.” The interior minister added, “Each and every one of them will return to their countries.”
The statements come as the government is advancing the construction of a detention center in the South to house asylum seekers and infiltrators and construction of a border fence along the Egyptian border is being accelerated.
Next Sunday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s NIS 630 million plan to complete construction on the fence and build the detention center will be submitted for cabinet approval, the PMO said in a statement released Wednesday.
The cost is in addition to the NIS 1.5 billion that has already been invested. In order not to break the budgetary framework, all ministries will be asked to allocate two percent of their budgets, the PMO stated.
An additional NIS 280 million will be allocated to complete the fence on the Egyptian border, which the government anticipates will be completed within a year’s time. A 70-kilometer section of the fence has already been completed. The fence is expected to be 240 kilometers in length when completed, stretching from the Kerem Shalom crossing in the west to the Taba crossing in the east.
NIS 250 million will be allocated for a new detention center in the South. An additional NIS 100 million will be allocated to operate and maintain the center, which is expected to hold 8,000 people.
Netanyahu said of the infiltrator problem, “Israel is a small country. We cannot allow ourselves to be flooded by illegal work infiltrators. This threatens our society, our economy and our security. Therefore, we must expedite our dealing with the problem.”
One of the reasons for the fall of Rome was they allowed non-Romans from all over the empire to come into Rome to do the work and fight the fights. At the end the Romans were a minority in Rome. That must sound familiar Bland to someone in the States.
With Arabs at the end of the work day or week they return home. Most speak Hebrew, and their earnings for the most part are recycled in the Israeli economy. Most are not a security threat as such. That said, I am against any foreigners remaining in Israel and a believer in Jewish labor only except when there is no choice. Israel today has over a half million legal and illegal foreign workers.
To BlandOatmeal: From the first glance you seem to have a valid point, exactly like the approach some Americans have towards illigal residents in USA. However, under closer review such approach has no standing whatsoever for the following reasons. First, they can not possibly work 24×7. There will be a time when they produce babies too… To if they are left in the country, their number will only grow. Who is going to pay for medical services for pregnant moms if they happened to be also “illegal economic migrants”. And this could be one of the better scenarious, because options when these migrants (likely non-Jewish) would marry Jewish Israelies has different negative outcomes. Ane even if they live in Israel to earn honest living, send money back to their villages, not multiply, do not cause any medical expenses for Israeli society and to not commit any crimes, sooner or later their expectations of salaries, “wants and needs” will grow as well and they will not want to continue the same job they started from in the country after crossing the border. For those reasons, applicable to Israel, I think this premise is completely counterproductive and Minister’s approach is correct.
If you make Israel a purely Jewish state, who’s going to do the work? The Jews? You must be kidding. If these people WANT to work, why on earth would Israel want to get rid of them? At least they’re not Arabs.