Foreign Workers -- New Trend in Migration
http://www.jcpa.org/dje/articles2/foreignwork.htm
Daniel J. Elazar
Israel -- or at least the Israeli media -- seem to have awakened to the presence of the large number of foreign workers now among us and the likely consequences of their presence. It is not yet clear that the government and the private market that employs them have or even want to. Israel entered into the venture of importing foreign workers some forty years after Europe did so and long after Europe discovered the problems that such an importation brings with it. Like Europe, Israel has imported foreign workers in a systematic fashion, but in addition it has at least several tens of thousands of foreign workers who are in this country illegally. In that respect, Israel's problems are also similar to those of the United States which for decades has been faced with illegal immigration of Latin Americans and Asians seeking a better life for themselves by assuming the most menial positions in the American work force.
Both the European countries and the United States have learned to their discomfiture that many foreign workers, once they arrive, have no desire to return home, that the same reasons that propelled them to seek temporary work outside of their homelands makes them want to stay and build new lives in those more attractive and affluent societies. In shorter order, they bring their families or try to. In some cases they marry locals or, where the opportunity presents itself, with others from their own ethnic backgrounds. They have children who do not even know the countries that their parents came from and know only the host country into which they were born. The hosts who enjoy the fruits of the foreign workers' labor are not so keen on accepting them as permanent residents, much less citizens, and this in circumstances in which national identity is less exclusivist than normally is the case in Israel.
What Israel must come to recognize, is that in a state designed to give special attention to the Jewish people, a small minority in the world with very different customs who need a place where their ways are accepted and dominant ones, unthinking involvement in the new migration will end the possibility of maintaining Jewish civilization in any form.