Ending a state of limbo

When it comes to immigration policy, Israel has its cake and eats it, too. Over the past 20 years, the country has admitted thousands of non-Jewish migrants to do work that Israelis themselves refuse to do, but by allowing naturalization almost exclusively to Jews alone, and by tying social benefits to legal-residency status, the state has created an entire class of people living here in limbo, deprived of basic rights.

This is not a transient population: Some have been in the country for years; many have established homes and families, and have become integrated into Israeli society and reality.

The recent, lively public discussion relating to the children of foreign workers served well the needs of these youngsters and their families, but it also swept under the rug an even more wide-reaching and urgent issue: It blinded us to the plight of thousands of migrants who dwell in Israel in outrageously onerous conditions, awaiting a decision about their future. These people live without a social safety net, and are only one major illness away from losing their jobs, their rented apartments, their family’s cohesion, their children’s future, their self-respect.

Israel’s social system makes the conferral of basic social rights contingent upon at least legal-residency status. These aliens thus lack access to heath and social services, and are effectively cut off from all local social-service frameworks. This drives many into an existence of indigence and want, and, to a large degree, dependence upon charity and other services provided by volunteers and private social-assistance organizations.

This is not the case in many other countries, where the link between legal status and social benefits is severed, without prejudicing any eventual decision regarding conferral of citizenship. In time, a migrant family may be granted citizenship, or it may be expelled, but while its members wait for a ruling, they enjoy many or all of the social rights due a citizen, and also are recognized by the tax authorities, though they lack political rights.

In Spain, for example, migrants, even undocumented ones, are entitled to social services in the district in which they reside. In England, a gamut of social rights – including education, health and social welfare services – are available to the entire population of migrants and refugees. In Portugal, aliens are eligible for national health insurance and other social benefits, without any connection to their citizenship or alien status. Even in the United States, where health insurance is largely privatized, there are now glimmers of a change in the attitude toward migrants: Public welfare and health packages for them are beginning to make headway, without any link to foreigners’ legal status, or to reforms planned by the president.

An open and public debate has been raging in Israel over the nature of the state’s identity. While the debate continues, migrants are relegated to something of a limbo existence. The Law of Return benefits Jews exclusively, while others lack any comparable path to naturalization. But they do not need to be kept in limbo. They could be given “social residency.” By conferring this status, the state’s agencies would recognize a person as a resident with regard to the national insurance and state health laws, while withholding Interior Ministry recognition.

Ending the linkage between citizenship status and social rights would stimulate a genuine, fair-minded public discussion about the character of Israeli society and its immigration policy. This discussion would not be held at migrants’ expense, and would not aggravate their troubles.

Nor would such a step require fundamental changes in the country’s legal structures. In Israel, the ministers of health, welfare and social services, have the authority to recognize aliens as possessors of social residency status. Under existing laws, these ministers can establish registration procedures at health maintenance organizations, and also set up social welfare services for migrants, on an adjustable scale and based on certain conditions. Basically, the ministers already possess the power to allow migrants to live with us under the protection of basic social rights. Such a courageous policy initiative – should it be undertaken by the relevant government ministries – would make a clear but revolutionary social statement, and also remove the authority to confer status to immigrants from the exclusive control of the Interior Ministry.

The path to reform in Israel’s immigration policy is a long one, and public discussion about it remains in its infancy. Many questions demand answers. Should the Law of Return be preserved, while immigration procedures are added, parallel to it? What parameters should be considered in the formation of immigration policy? The conferral of social residency status to aliens in Israel would not preempt such questions; nor would it mean that members of this population group would forfeit hopes of eventually receiving political rights. But the conferral of social residency would alleviate migrants’ distress, and would constitute an important step by Israel en route to the formation of a comprehensive immigration policy that takes into account transformations in global politics, economics and workforce circumstances. By continuing to tacitly accept the current situation, in which thousands of persons are denied access to fundamental social services, Israel is depriving them of what the democratic world − and we ourselves − now regard as fundamental human rights.

Ran Cohen directs the migrants and refugees department of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.