I have to hand it to the immigration police, Interior Minister Eli Yishai and the
government – they’re clever. I honestly never believed they would deport
hundreds of children of foreign workers who are here illegally – not because
they didn’t want to, but because there would be too much of an international
Jewish outcry, like there was last summer when the government okayed the plan.
Certainly not after a documentary about foreign children in South Tel Aviv,
Strangers No More, just won an Oscar.
I was wrong. The deportation of an
estimated 400 to 600 children has begun. It’s happening now. And there is no
international Jewish outcry, except from a few Israeli activists. Why? Because,
like I said, the immigration police, Yishai and the government are clever.
They’re not rounding up crying kids and their crying mothers and fathers en
masse and marching them onto planes in full view of the media, which is the way
I, in my stupidity, imagined it.
No, they’re doing it gradually,
patiently, one or two at a time, quietly, out of sight of the cameras. If
hundreds of kids and their parents were deported at once, or in large groups, it
would be on CNN, Al Jazeera, Sky and everyplace else, not to mention all over
the local media. But if one infant is put on a plane with his mother, then
another a few days later, then another a few days afterward, and more are
continually arrested and put in the pipeline? Big deal. It’s not much for news.
Slowly, slowly, as we say in this country.
Clev-errrr.
AS OF
yesterday morning, three infants and their mothers – two from the Philippines
and one from Nigeria – have been deported back to their home countries. Foreign
workers have been coming here in large numbers for nearly 25 years, and this is
the first time Israel has ever deported any of their children.
The three
deported, as well as all or likely all of the other infants slated to go, were
born here, said Sigal Rozen of the Hot Line for Migrant Workers.
The
campaign started two weeks ago. The last mother and child flown out were a
Filipina and her 18-month-old daughter on Monday, said an Immigration Authority
official.
“If you’re going to write down the details of each one, it’s
going to take you a long time,” the official told me. “The Hebrew papers have
already stopped writing about them. We’re going to remove these people; we’ve
been saying so all along.”
Asked how many children and parents were
awaiting deportation in the new holding cells set up at Ben-Gurion Airport, the
official said, “I don’t know, and I don’t know that we’re going to give out that
information.”
During the interview, though, the official said “dozens”
had been in the cells.
By law, they can be held up to 72 hours and are
entitled to see an attorney. However, Rozen says nobody in the cells has been
allowed a telephone call. “We only found out who’d been arrested when the people
they know told us they were gone,” she said.
In the last two weeks, the
only time an attorney has been to the cells came after a Turkish worker told the
Hot Line his Filipina girlfriend and their 17-month-old son were missing. The
Hot Line got the family a lawyer, who went to the airport, where the immigration
police had to let her speak to her client. (The mother, Malo Cuatuazon, and her
son, Kaan, were temporarily released by court order – the only deportees let out
so far – because the father is seeking protection as a refugee. Chances are,
however, they will be deported in a matter of weeks.)
The immigration official
insisted that all those arrested are offered the opportunity to see a lawyer.
Asked about the claim that they’re not allowed to even make a telephone call,
she said she didn’t know if this was true or not, but noted that she gave her
own cellphone to one mother “to call her family in the Philippines.”
VERY
FEW people here and seemingly no one abroad are aware of what’s happening. Right
before the operation began, Yishai announced that he was postponing the
deportation of school-age kids and their parents for a few months so as not to
disrupt their education. Everyone cheered. The adorable, smiling face of
Esther Aikpehae of South Africa, a “star” of the Oscar-winning documentary who’s
become the poster child of the cause, was all over the media, and the public’s
attention moved on.
What got overlooked, though, was Yishai’s pledge to
start the deportation of children under three – the pre-schoolers – and their
parents right away. It turns out he’s as good as his word. And when he says he
means to start kicking out the school-age kids and their parents, too, in a few
months, I’d believe him. When classes end and summer starts, expect 12-year-old
Esther and hundreds of other kids of foreign workers who’ve
overstayed their welcome to be flown back where they came from.
Not all
at once, though. Slowly, slowly.
Nobody’s saying that all children of
foreign workers should forever be allowed to stay here permanently with their
parents, or that there should be a law granting automatic “birthright
citizenship” to all children born here, as there is in the US and dozens of
other countries. Israel is a very small place, but because of its economy, it’s
a huge magnet for poor people from the Third World. So we have to set
limits.
But we don’t have to be rigid and stone-hearted. We don’t
have to kick off a new immigration policy by deporting 400 to 600 kids and their
parents. We can give them amnesty, we can “grandfather” them in on
“humanitarian grounds,” as the ADL’s Abraham Foxman urged. If there’s suddenly a
baby boom among foreign workers, we can see about applying the deportation law
to children born
after the law went into effect last July.
How many
people are we talking about letting out of the net? Kids and parents, all told,
about 1,000 to 1,500. (Many of the fathers aren’t around.) There are 300,000
foreign workers living in this country, about half of them here illegally; what
difference one way or the other is 1,000 to 1,500 people, including kids, mainly
Israeli-born kids?
Are they an existential threat to the Jewish state? Is this
deportation anybody’s idea of Zionism?
When the cabinet made its decision to
round up the children and parents and fly them out, Elie Wiesel said it was
“hard to believe that such a thing is happening in Israel.”
It’s
happening. If there was ever a time for an international Jewish outcry against
an Israeli government policy, that time is now.