Tel Aviv's city bus number four runs down Allenby Street through the heart of secular Israel's glittering urban showcase. Just visible in one direction is the crowded Mediterranean coast, dotted with international hotels and frolicking sunbathers. A few blocks in the other direction are the cafés and boutiques of Dizengoff Street. As the bus pulls southward and heads farther inland, the scene out the window becomes seedier and, in a country not known for its clean streets, even dirtier. Trendy shops are replaced by open-fronted stores displaying luggage and trinkets, carts piled with vegetables and candied nuts, and placards advertising peep shows. This is South Tel Aviv, an area populated by members of Israel's large and growing community of foreign workers.
At the end of a workday, Romanian men still dusty from the job gather on benches to drink bottled beer. African men sit in threes and fours on folding chairs outside international calling centers that advertise rates to Kenya, Ecuador, Moldova, and Ukraine. A few older Filipino women rest on crates, displaying bunches of vegetables before them on blankets. The only Israeli in view is a man in a knitted kippah selling adult videos and assorted electronic goods.
According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, there are approximately 125,000 non-Palestinian foreign workers in the country today--roughly 50,000 of them undocumented. Israeli businesses recruit workers from all over the world: Thais for field work, Romanians for construction jobs, Filipino women as nannies and home health care providers. Illegal workers arrive from Nigeria, Ghana, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and the former Soviet Union.
The presence of foreign workers is a relatively new phenomenon in Israel, a society that prides itself on being a haven for Jewish immigrants--and Israel is not alone. From Japan to Germany to Singapore, migration for employment is a growing trend. The category of "migrant worker"--as distinguished from "immigrant" on the one hand and "refugee" on the other--is somewhat hazy, so no one knows exactly how many of these workers there are worldwide. The International Labour Organization (ILO) pegs the total at around 42 million: Indian computer programmers in Silicon Valley, Pakistani laborers in Saudi Arabian oil fields, and Filipino maids cleaning fashionable apartments in Tel Aviv, among many others.
The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) warns that the number of migrant workers will only increase over the next 20 years, as whole groups of people in the developing world are displaced by civil conflict and environmental degradation. Migrant labor probably will increase, but migrants may not be pushed from poor nations so much as pulled by rich ones. The populations of most countries in the industrialized world (the United States being one notable exception) are projected both to shrink and to age dramatically in the next generation. Importing foreign workers, a process dubbed "replacement migration" in a recent United Nations report, may be the only way for developed countries to sustain economic prosperity without drastically scaling back entitlements.
But industrialized countries will need to balance their appetite for foreign labor against their reluctance to open their doors to outsiders. Even at current levels of migration, foreign workers are the favorite scapegoat for economic strain--more than a million were deported from Malaysia and South Korea after the 1998 Asian financial crisis--and their increasing visibility will only enhance their vulnerability.
Blood Citizenship
Nowhere, perhaps, has the political impact of migrant labor been more acute than in Germany, which is currently home to 7.3 million foreigners. Many of these foreign residents are the children or grandchildren of Turkish, Italian, and Yugoslavian Gastarbeiters ("guest workers") recruited by the government in the 1950s and 1960s. Because the recruitment program's inception in 1955 coincided with postwar economic expansion, the government was slow to enforce rotation requirements and other measures designed to restrict permanent settlement. According to Douglas Klusmeyer, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment's program on international migration, policy makers were focused on the short-term economic benefits of a stable workforce, which, unlike a rotating system, does not require the constant training of new recruits.
By 1973, when the oil crisis and ensuing recession led to a freeze on new recruits, the number of guest workers had grown to 2.7 million. Over the next few years, the government offered financial rewards to workers who agreed to return home, but few accepted. The bargain was too little, too late; despite the moratorium on new guest workers, there were more foreigners living in Germany in 1983 than in 1973.
Germany has historically defined citizenship solely according to bloodlines or heritage instead of birthplace; the citizenship law of 1913 (which was reinstated after World War II, but has since been revised) provides automatic German citizenship only to children with a German father. U.S. citizenship law, by contrast, is a mixed system based on parentage and birthplace. Both the child born to an illegal Mexican migrant in El Paso and the child born to a U.S. citizen in Mexico City are automatically citizens of the United States.
Like Germany, Israel operates under a strict system of jus sanguinis, or citizenship by blood. Israeli immigration policy, codified in the 1950 Law of Return, is explicitly targeted at the "return" of the world Jewish community to its ancestral land. As Ze'ev Rosenhek, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, puts it: "Israel is not an immigration country; it is an aliyah country. Non-Jewish immigrants are not considered prospective members of society." Aliyah, which literally means "ascending," denotes purely Jewish immigration to Israel.
A similar right of return affirmed in Germany's federal constitution allows ethnic Germans whose families settled in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century to return with full citizenship. The number of ethnic German Aussiedlers ("resettlers") arriving from Eastern Europe each year is not insignificant; while it has fallen from its peak of 397,000 in 1990, it remains at roughly 100,000 a year.
Before 1990, second- and third-generation foreigners, most of whom had attended German schools and could speak the language fluently, were denied the opportunity to naturalize as German citizens. Children whose parents, or even grandparents, were of foreign origin inherited their family's "foreignness." By the early 1990s, 100,000 such native foreigners were being born every year and, if the government had not acted, could have lived in Germany for many more generations as technical outsiders. The first citizenship reforms, authorized by thenChancellor Helmut Kohl, were modest; they extended the option of naturalization to foreign workers who had been living in Germany for at least 15 years.
In 1999 Chancellor Gerhard Schröder proposed a far more sweeping revision of the citizenship regime: reducing the residency minimum from 15 years to eight and permitting newly naturalized Germans to hold dual citizenship. Pressed by the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)--which, in an unprecedented operation, collected nearly five million signatures on a "yes to integration, no to dual nationality" petition--Schröder's Red-Green government was forced to jettison some of the more progressive elements of the proposal. The final legislation abandoned the prospect of dual citizenship: Foreigners who wish to become German citizens must relinquish their original citizenship, but children of foreign-born parents may hold dual citizenship until the age of 23, at which time they must choose between the two.
For all its restrictions, Germany is downright welcoming compared to Japan, a country known for being particularly insular and intolerant of foreigners. The native-foreigner problem there--most of Japan's 630,000 noncitizen permanent residents are descended from Korean workers who have lived in the country since World War II or before--has not been addressed. A measure that would give permanent residents the right to vote in Japanese elections is pending in the Diet, the nation's parliament. But despite small reforms, Japanese politicians and their constituents are wary of what they see as an increasing foreign presence. Tokyo's Governor Shintaro Ishihara caused a minor international scandal when he publicly accused "sangokujin and other foreigners" of committing "atrocious crimes." (Sangokujin is a derogatory term that literally means "people from third countries" and usually refers to Koreans or Taiwanese.)
International Solutions
Migration is by definition a global issue, but the movement of people is, for the most part, regulated at the national level. There are a few exceptions. The European Union allows citizens of its member states to move and settle freely throughout the union (though it does not yet have a coherent policy on welcoming immigrants from outside the union). But when Mexico's new president, Vicente Fox, recently suggested an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement to include the free movement of people, not just goods, his northern neighbors in the United States and Canada laughed uncomfortably and then politely ignored him.
With regional organizations turning a blind eye to the problem, the task of protecting migrant workers has been left to the (relatively weak) instruments of the United Nations and the International Labour Organization. The ILO's Migration for Employment Convention, drafted in 1949, is sorely outmoded. In a recent e-mail, Gloria Moreno Fontes Chammartin, an ILO official in Geneva, wrote that while "the principles enshrined in these instruments are still valid today," many of the specific provisions need to be updated. "The ILO instruments were drafted with state-organized migration in mind," she said, and they have little to say about "clandestine migration and undocumented employment," which have become much larger problems.
While the ILO is in the process of rethinking its convention, the United Nations is moving--very, very slowly--toward the enactment of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which was adopted by the General Assembly in 1990. The text of the convention is little more than a reiteration of two covenants included in what is known in diplomatic parlance as the International Bill of Human Rights: the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Migrant workers, along with women, racial and ethnic minorities, and children, need their own convention, the thinking goes, because in practice they are often not afforded the rights promised them by more universal human rights language.
As part of international law, the convention would establish minimum standards for the protection of migrant workers, regardless of their legal status, including freedom from slavery or forced labor and from arbitrary arrest and detention. States could be held accountable for their mistreatment of undocumented workers at border crossings and police stations; under the current system, such mistreatment is considered an internal matter. (Unless a large number of their countrymen work abroad, as with Koreans in Japan and Indians in the Gulf states, sending countries are slow to protest abuses.) The convention would go even further in extending rights to documented migrants--most notably, the right to "equality of treatment" with nationals in access to education, housing, and a variety of workplace protections.
It is hard to consider the migrant workers' convention (MWC) a "major human rights instrument," as it was hailed at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights: More than 10 years after its drafting, it has yet to go into effect. A UN convention can enter into force only after 20 countries have ratified it. The MWC, which has 16 ratifications and 10 signatures (a signature is the first step toward ratification), is in diplomatic limbo. Patrick Taran, who coordinates the global campaign for ratification of the MWC, is hopeful that the convention will come into force within the next few months. The easiest short-term solution, he says, would be to lean on the 10 signatory countries to ratify the convention as quickly as possible.
But the campaign, a consortium of 15 nongovernmental organizations (including Migrants Rights International, of which Taran is director), does not have the resources to carry out such a coordinated effort. The process has been held back by understaffing, caused in turn by underfinancing. As Taran wrote in the European Journal of Migration and Law last summer, "There is not one person anywhere in the world, in any international organization, in any government, or any civil society group engaged with full-time responsibilities related to promoting this convention. There is simply no one yet taking up on a full-time basis the huge tasks of information distribution, coordination, advocacy, etc., that promoting adoption of a major international treaty requires."
If the convention were to come into effect in a few months, or even a few years, a huge problem would still remain: All of the countries that have signed on are developing nations that, on balance, send their citizens to work abroad. Egypt, Mexico, and the Philippines have all ratified the treaty; Turkey, Guatemala, and Bangladesh are at the signature phase. To date, none of the industrialized countries--countries that are largely responsible for the mistreatment of migrants--has so much as expressed interest in the treaty.
This divide between developed and developing countries was obvious last year at a meeting on the topic of Rights of Migrant Workers, Minorities, Displaced Persons, and Other Vulnerable Groups" that was held by the United Nations commissioner for human rights. Representatives from developing countries like Senegal, El Salvador, Morocco, and Venezuela spoke about the need for international standards to address the plight of migrant workers. The United States and European countries talked instead about minorities and "other vulnerable groups" like gays and lesbians and people with mental disabilities, ignoring the topic of migrant workers completely. Belgium brought up the not wholly related topic of child pornography. The only direct response came from Singapore, whose representative, Margaret Liang, asserted that migrants ought not to have guarantees of equal treatment because "the labor market should be allowed to find its own equilibrium."
Activists are not surprised that industrialized countries, many of whom are dependent on migrant labor in their agricultural or service sectors, are not interested in backing an international treaty for migrants' rights. Patrick Taran likes to say that "Chile under Pinochet and Iran under the shah did not rush to sign the treaty on torture." Shirley Hune, who sat in on the convention's drafting process for the Quaker United Nations Office, remembers the U.S. representative insisting that the treaty had little to do with the American immigration experience. But the convention states that any migrant-- documented or undocumented--who is engaged in "remunerated activity," or any member of such a migrant's family, is entitled to certain fundamental human rights. This would include the seasonal farm workers, more than one million of them, who cross the U.S.-Mexican border to pick tobacco and lettuce and apples, as well as the undocumented migrants who work in restaurants and factories in U.S. cities.
Wanted but Not Welcome
Whether or not the industrialized countries choose to ratify the MWC, they will be forced to reconsider their policies on migrant labor over the next few years as they find their social insurance running up against the strain of an aging population. According to a UN report on replacement migration released last year, the demographic situation is so dire that in order to offset the aging population, the necessary level of new immigration will need to be "extremely large, and in all cases entail vastly more immigration than occurred in the past." Consider the case of Japan, whose population is projected to decline by 17 percent by 2050, from 127 million to 105 million, at the same time that the percentage of the population over 65 is expected to nearly double from 17 percent to 32 percent. In order to maintain the current balance between workers and retirees, Japan would have to open its doors to an unprecedented 10 million migrants a year over the next 50 years. Just to keep the size of the labor force at the 1995 level would require 600,000 new migrants a year. And similarly radical levels of immigration would be necessary to safeguard retirement benefits throughout Europe.
Changing deep-rooted attitudes toward immigration, though, is easier said than done. Throughout the industrialized world, public reaction to the presence of foreign workers has been anything but welcoming. Switzerland, which has the largest percentage of foreigners of any European country--in part because of its restrictive citizenship policies--held a referendum in September on a proposal to cap the number of foreigners at 18 percent of the population. The proposal lost 64 percent to 36 percent. If it had been adopted, it would have been summarily deported.
The climate in Switzerland is not much more extreme than in the European Union. While member states have successfully harmonized their policies toward movement within the union, they are finding it much more difficult to agree on a common set of immigration laws. Douglas Klusmeyer of the Carnegie Endowment notes that efforts to establish a set of European Union--wide guidelines on the acceptance of what are known as third-country nationals--most recently at a conference in Tampere, Finland--have been "focused on the prevention of asylum seekers and illegal immigration, and the crime associated with those groups. It is striking that there was so little said in Tampere about the positive contributions of immigrants to European societies since World War II and next to nothing about the demographic problems."
In Israel some conservative politicians have seized on the problem of foreign workers as one that threatens everything from jobs to the solvency of the welfare system to the Jewish character of the state. In December of last year, Zevulun Orlev, a member of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, for the mainstream National Religious Party, called for the deportation of all undocumented foreign workers. His words could have been taken from the debate five years earlier in California over Proposition 187, the controversial ballot initiative to deny state social services to illegal immigrants. Orlev told The Jerusalem Post that "the children of foreign workers demand resources which should be given to Israeli children. I am not in favor of punishing a child because of the sins of his parents, but I cannot understand why we do not ... expel them from the country."
The irony, of course, is that many of the very workers accused of overrunning the country were recruited by local businesses. Until the early 1990s, Israeli businesses were dependent on Palestinian day laborers to work in their fields and build block after block of concrete apartment buildings. That changed in 1993 when a series of bus bombings encouraged the Israeli government to close the border with the territories and impose curfews, sometimes for weeks at a time. Because Palestinians were no longer a reliable source of labor, Israeli businesses quietly lobbied the labor and agriculture ministries for permission to recruit workers from abroad. The policy and its possible implications were never debated in the Knesset.
Aristide Zolberg, director of the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship and a professor of politics at the New School University, calls this discrepancy between business interest and nationalist sentiment the "wanted but not welcome paradox." As he explains in Citizenship and Exclusion, "The very qualities that make a group suitable for recruitment as ålabor' demonstrate its lack of qualifications for åmembership.'" But foreign workers are not merely labor; they are also human beings who put down roots and start families in their host country. Efforts to prevent temporary workers from settling more permanently--limiting slots to single men and women, rotating recruitment, and restricting options in employment (often to a single employer)--have failed, almost without exception.
Even if a country were able to monitor its legal foreign workforce closely, there still would be the matter of illegal entrants. In Israel undocumented workers, who are not bound by set visa time limits, are even more likely than their legal counterparts to stay in the country for long stretches of time. "Wages are low in their home country. They cannot make a living," notes sociology professor Ze'ev Rosenhek, who--along with Erik Cohen, also of the Hebrew University--is conducting the first academic study of Israeli migrant-worker communities. "Some have already stayed for 10 years; they have families and kids here. They've established a ånormal life.' Kids play in the streets. Families walk to church on Sunday."
While illegal migrants do live with the fear of being deported--the Israeli government deported 5,200 illegal workers in 1999, up from 950 in 1995--they often have more freedom than legally recruited migrants in their choice of work. Illegal migrants can work for any company willing to hire labor under the table, while legal workers are often restricted on official work permits to a single employer. This structure worries Dana Alexander, an attorney with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, who calls legal foreign workers "one of the most vulnerable groups in Israeli society." Because workers are bound to a single employer, they "have no bargaining power," Alexander says. "They cannot stand up to their employers for abuses like illegal deductions, withholding pay, or receiving less than minimum wage," for fear of deportation. (This process is not unlike the H1-B visa program in the United States, which is used to recruit skilled foreign labor. An H1-B visa authorizes computer programmers and techies to work for a particular employer; workers can be deported if they quit or get fired. [See Alexander Nguyen, "High-Tech Migrant Labor," TAP, December 20, 1999.])
A better solution, argues Dana Alexander, would be to issue a work permit for a certain area of employment--say, agriculture or construction--for a given period of time. With work authorization separated from employment at a specific company, foreign workers could join the open labor market, and employers would be forced to treat their workers fairly or risk losing them entirely. Decoupling work permits from specific jobs would also eliminate the most egregious abuses of human rights, such as the confiscation of a worker's passport or the withholding of pay until the end of a worker's stay--both common strategies that companies use to retain control over "their" corps of foreign workers.
This is exactly the kind of reform that would be encouraged by the UN convention on migrant workers. It remains to be seen, though, if countries like Israel, Germany, and the United States will comply with the convention's guidelines, or if they will, in the words of Singapore's Margaret Liang, allow the labor market to "find its own equilibrium," exploitation and all.
