JERUSALEM: Israel’s Cabinet, hoping to stanch the illegal flow of Africans through the country’s porous southern border with Egypt, is scheduled to vote Sunday on a proposal to build a massive detention center to hold the migrants.
Some of the Africans seek political asylum, but officials say most come looking for work and have become absorbed into the country’s sizable illegal work force. The center is meant to make infiltration a less attractive prospect, and will be voted on just days after Israel began building a barrier along the border.
Israel has become a popular refuge for migrants because of its relatively open society and high wages. Thousands have paid Egyptian smugglers to sneak them across a lightly patrolled desert border.
And their numbers are mounting.
According to figures the government prepared ahead of the Cabinet vote, about 13,000 illegal migrants from Africa are expected to enter relatively affluent Israel this year, joining about 20,000 others who came between 2006 and 2009.
At this rate, next year, "there will be more infiltrators than immigrants," said Eyal Gabbai, a top aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Although they will be fed, housed and receive medical care at the center, the illegals won’t be able to work. "This will weaken their economic incentive to come to Israel," Gabbai told Israel Radio. Similar centers, he said, exist in Western Europe.
Construction of the facility, which would be run by the prisons service, is to begin within six months of Cabinet’s approval.
The mounting numbers of non-Jewish residents worry some Israelis who think that might detract from the country’s Jewish character.
But others sympathize with the migrants and don’t want their country, which grew out of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, to turn away people from conflict zones.
Two advocacy groups — The Hotline for Migrant Workers and The Association for Civil Rights in Israel — called the center "a refugee camp, nothing more than a ghetto."
In a letter to Netanyahu, they called the proposal "a particularly shocking layer in the Israeli government’s continued disregard for its ethical and legal commitments to refugees and asylum seekers and to (their) children."
Human rights workers say most of the migrants come from Eritrea, Sudan and other impoverished African countries. They say the Africans appear to be racing to cross the border before Israel builds a fence there.
On Monday, Israel began working on the barrier, which is also designed to keep out Islamic militants. The fence will be erected at especially porous points along the 130-mile (220-kilometer) border that Egypt and Israel share, through the sand, rocks and hills of the Sinai desert.
In addition to the African migrants, there are about 120,000 foreign workers with expired visas now in Israel, working illegally, the government and activists say. Employers are willing to hire them illegally despite potential penalties because they work at considerably lower wages than Israelis and are willing to perform menial jobs that Israelis shun.
