But it was not the breaches of international and Israeli law that brought the Israeli government to diverge from its course of recruiting labor migrants. Only the economic crises in 2002, under the slogan "War on foreign Labor" led the government to the initiation of a migration police (Police Immigration Administration Department) and to begin the end of the "Open Sky" policy in reducing the quota for work permits. The guideline pursued by the Ministry of the Interior ""Israeli first"" therefore is a definitive reaction to this recession. Since then the migration police forces the deportation of labor migrants who came into conflict with their employers (or just had been fired for other reasons) and thereby into illegality – we are familiar with this procedure from other countries as well. Wagner reported that due to the poor working conditions and the bond on a particular employer, by now 50 per cent of the people who came legally with a work permit have been driven into illegality. The program of reducing foreign labor has been correspondingly successful: About 25,000 of the once legal migrants were deported, and some 60,000 other workers left without being deported during 2003, that is within a year since starting the end of "Open sky". For the year 2005 the commission on labor migration in the ministry under Yuval Rachlewski’s lead recommended the deportation of additional 100,000 workers.
Besides the reinforced deportation, a further reduction of the quotas and of the duration of stay are planned, as his colleague Eli Paz, deputy director in the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Employment explained to us. His officials established a hotline that allows migrants to file their complaints concerning violations of the labor law anonymously, and they act against breaches of the law on minimum wages as well as against the practice of charging fees on the side of the personnel agencies, of which so far 40 have lost their licenses to import workers.
But the number of inspectors and thereby the potential of control are limited. (This has also been severely criticized by a recent state comptroller report.) Actually, improving or equalizing the working conditions of foreign labor is not the primary political concern in both Ministries, though meanwhile the possibility of changing the job were – similar to the nursing sector – provided for in the construction industry. The politicians act under the immense pressure of reducing the unemployment rates in the country, while at the same time there is an interest in cheap labor. In fact, the government has not abandoned awarding new permits, but pursues a revolving door policy: ""On the one hand"" – the WAC concludes in its report – ""it forces "illegalized" migrants out of the country, on the other hand it gets new "legal" workers in.""
The reports made clear that what in each case counts as the foremost national interest with regards to labor market policy turns out to be very divergent.
Paz’s colleagues working under Rachlewski at the Finance Ministry certainly think about once again providing Palestinian labor the opportunity to work within Israel – ""they are our actual migrants"". A decision the Knesseth made at the end of 2002, that is during the ongoing Intifada, heads in the same direction: in the course of the Closed Sky policy and in order to produce relief regarding the "threatening" social conditions in the Palestinian Territories, the parliament decided to award 15,000 work permits to Palestinians. But, as the working paper of the WAC shows, due to the continued closures this number has never been realized.
Whereas Paz himself and his team have the employment outlook of the Israelis in mind. Accordingly, he supported the development of autonomous economic activities and employment opportunities for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as well as a ""reduction of the recruitment quota to zero per cent"" for labor migrants. Although this doesn’t mean that economic considerations were irrelevant. In his argument on the necessity of reducing unemployment rates in Israel and of a recruitment ban, Paz referred to the high consequential costs of illegalizing migrants: costs for the operation of the migration police, for mass-deportations and controlling the companies as well as losses of income in social insurance and taxes due to the illegalization.
When Paz believes that the restrictive handling of the quotas proved successful in massively reducing unemployment among Israeli construction workers, this concerns a group that thus far played the role, that migrants and Palestinians play, too: traditionally, it has been mainly Arab Israelis who worked in this sector. Competing with labor migrants their chances are small: even construction companies owned by Arab Israelis had, as Paz remarked regretfully, hired migrants rather than construction workers from Arab settlements, even though there were enough qualified labor on hand in the settlements. But Arab Israelis are still cheaper than their Jewish colleagues.
