The petition was filed in the name of four young people who were born or grew up in Israel but upon reaching the age of 18 have been left without legal status and are candidates for deportation.

The petitioners argued that as they have no legal status, they cannot earn a living legally nor lead normal lives. Yishai, who was asked by the petitioners to give them permanent resident status, has in the meantime left the Interior Ministry and thus has been spared the need to answer the petitioners.

The assessment is that he would have sought a way to evade regularizing the matter and would have brought to the court his worldview concerning the danger inherent to the Jewish character of the state of Israel if foreign workers settle here.

Interior Minister Avraham Poraz of Shinui, who upon his entrance to the ministry declared the start of a universal, humane policy with respect to everything that has to do with human and civil rights, will have to give his reply in this matter to the court in the coming weeks.

Poraz has not yet formulated his reply, but he leans toward determining that every year there will be a quota of several hundred foreigners, some of them foreign workers or their children, who will be allowed to become Israeli citizens, a step that he believes could solve this problem.

According to Poraz, he does not intend to take a sweeping step, but will instead examine each case individually as, he says, he does not want "an inundation of foreigners here, but a few hundred each year can be given the possibility of becoming citizens on a humanitarian basis."

However, he says, it must he understood that the problem is far more complicated than the blanket granting of citizenship to all the children: "In most cases, the parents are illegally resident in Israel, so what will I do with the elderly parents? Will I allow them to become citizens because they have managed to live here illegally and have taken other people's jobs?"

Anyone who expected Poraz to make changes in the citizenship law and the law on the entry to Israel, in order to anchor his humanist, liberal worldview, is likely to be disappointed. Poraz does not intend to change the law. He is not interested in granting citizenship to everyone who was born here (as is the practice in the United States) and he will not allow foreign workers who have been living in Israel for extended periods to become citizens, as is the practice in a number of countries.

Judging by his statements, and his deeds thus far, it would seem that he intends to act within the framework of the existing laws, although it is reasonable to presume that he will make use of the broad authority given him by law, including the authority to grant citizenship to an individual as he sees fit.

A series of decisions he has taken in recent weeks concerning the status of foreigners in Israel indicates that he is taking a new approach with more bureaucratic leeway in the granting of permits and in the citizenship procedures for foreigners who are married to Israelis, as well as an administrative responsiveness to human issues that he sees as having encountered insensitivity and unnecessary obstruction on the part of the Interior Ministry.

Fewer permits, less corruption

First, Poraz announced that anyone who is illegally resident in Israel and is hurt in a terror attack will be able to receive a residence-and-work permit from the Interior Ministry. Another new procedure, which came into effect as of last week, is called "the simplification of procedures for spouses of Israeli citizens who are in a graduated process of receiving Israeli citizenship." Up till now this group, after the marriage documents were submitted, entered a graduated process of acquiring citizenship that took four-and-a half-years. During the first half year, the Israeli's spouse received a residence-and-work permit; during the subsequent two years the spouse was given the status of temporary resident which had to be renewed annually. During the last two years, the status of permanent resident also had to be renewed annually.

The new procedure eliminates the need for annual renewal. According to Poraz's instructions, the temporary resident and permanent resident status will be given for two years each.

Another problem connected to the status of foreigners is that of illegal foreigners who have married Israelis in civil weddings abroad. These people cannot return to Israel, despite their being married, because they do not have a permit. In the past they had to wait outside the country, separated from their Israeli spouses, sometimes for months until their reentry was approved under the family reunification procedure, conditional on an application submitted here by the Israeli spouse.

Poraz is now examining with the Foreign Ministry the possibility that spouses who have married Israelis abroad will also be able to submit an application for entry into Israel at Israeli consulates abroad. The spouse's application would be sent here for examination and his or her entry would be approved against a monetary guarantee. The Interior Ministry would commit itself to giving an answer within 30 days of the documents' arrival in Israel. Such a procedure, if it is implemented, would make it possible for the couple to return to Israel together.

Another change is that from now on, applicants for citizenship will have to submit a certification of honesty, which is a condition for receiving citizenship, at the beginning of the procedure. Until now this demand was raised only at the end of the process, after a great deal of time had elapsed, and there were people who had a hard time obtaining certificates and documents from their countries of origin.

Another new procedure concerns spouses of Israelis who are widowed during the graduated citizenship process. Until now they were required to leave the country, on the grounds that their reason for their citizenship application (marriage to an Israeli) was no longer valid. Under the new procedure, the citizenship process will not be stopped.

Poraz has also decided to grant the status of temporary resident to pregnant foreign women who have married Israeli men, even if they are only in the first stage of the citizenship procedure, in order to allow them to receive medical care.

These procedures, which are important news for spouses of Israelis, do not afford an answer to a large group of migrant workers who are living legally and illegally in Israel (according to figures of Moked - the Hotline for Migrant Workers, there are 110,000 migrant workers in Israel who have permits and 150,000 without permits).

For them, Poraz has no special news. He does not intend to bring about a revolution in the existing policy. He supports a reduction in the number of illegal foreign workers, through enforcement and deportations, and a limit on the number of new permits. As he sees it, new permits should henceforth be issued only to workers in the areas of agriculture and nursing care, where there is a real need for foreign workers.

The only good news for them is that Poraz intends to extend the period of work permits to a maximum of five years, instead of the current policy, and at the end of the period the worker is required to leave the country.

Poraz argues that the short period of validity of the permit currently given is one of the factors explaining why the number of illegal workers has swollen so much. He says that this has just led to a high turnover of workers and means that the foreign workers whose permits have expired have stayed on to work illegally while at the same time new permits have been issued to other workers.

This circumstance, he says, has benefited mainly the contractors who have imported workers and have "cut coupons" worth thousands of dollars. He is referring to the illegal procedure of charging the foreign workers huge sums in exchange for the permits.

Poraz says that he learned that new permits have been issued to workers for whom there was no demand, and that "these things were done in a corrupt way."

The claim was, adds Poraz, "that if you give them a permit for a short period they don't settle here, and this turns out not to be correct. In fact, it has just enriched the contractors."

Visas for bribes

Another phenomenon that has landed on Poraz's desk is the giving of tourist visas at Israeli consulates abroad, in return for bribes. "These people are supposedly tourists who in fact come to work and settle here, and in exchange for thousands of dollars, they get a tourist visa," he says. "Several complaints about this have come to my attention and they have been passed along to the police because it is necessary to find out who has taken this money."

However, despite the many steps Poraz has already taken in order to simplify procedures, he is expected to find that the issue is compounded by scores of restrictive orders and instructions that have taken root over the years. It will be hard to uproot them.

An example of this is the application by Yelena Linsko, an Israeli citizen, who lives with an illegal foreign worker who is a Turkish citizen and their two children, who were born in Israel. Linsko has applied to the Interior Ministry with a request to register her partner as the father of her children, but has been refused. In the Population Registry they are listed as "father unknown," despite his willingness and desire to raise them legally. The Interior Minister demands that they show a marriage license, but the couple do not have the means to marry abroad, and even if they had, they are afraid that after the wedding, they would have to be separated as the spouse who lives illegally in Israel will not be allowed to return. According to Sigal Rosen from the Hotline for Migrant Workers, all approaches made to the Ministry have been denied.

Another painful problem that Rosen notes is the policy of "tying" workers, against which Kav La'Oved is also waging a struggle. By law, the work permits are given to the employer, not to the worker, which creates a situation in which the worker is totally dependent on the employer.

Attorney Oded Feller of ACRI is encouraged by the human approach that appears to be emanating from Poraz's steps, but in his opinion, this is not enough, and an immigration law should be legislated to deal with the issue. "What will happen 10 years from now, when there will be foreign workers who have lived here for 20 or 30 years?" asks Feller.

Dr. Yossi Dahan, who studies the working conditions of foreign workers in Israel, thinks that the state will do everything possible in order to prevent the granting of any civil status to foreign workers, who have settled here and for whom, for years, the center of their lives has been in Israel. He sees this as hypocrisy.

"On the one hand, we want globalization, we want investors to come, we want movement of people and capital and we want to talk about the world being a single unit," says Dahan. "Yet, on the other hand, we are still clinging to nationalist and anachronistic ideology and practice that contrary to the global view. A person can't be a subject all his life. That's absurd. A person is born here and lives here and doesn't have any status."Dahan says Israel has to grant citizenship to everyone who is born here and also to those whose the center of existence has long been Israel: "There can be strict criteria," he says, "but these cannot be ethnic criteria that deny basic human rights."