"True, the foreign workers broke the law, but they are not criminals .... The cost of establishing the deportation unit is expensive and excessive, certainly in terms of cost-efficiency. A civilian enforcement unit can be established immediately at one-third the cost ....The deportation tool is vital and important, but it can never serve as a central goal of coping with illegal presence .... The phenomenon can be reduced with the use of tools that are cheaper and smarter ....[These include] a bitter war against employers and manpower companies, which are creating the demand for cheap labor, elimination of the economic incentives for foreign workers, increasing the cost of foreign workers, and reinforcing supervision at the border stations." The letter was signed by Haggai Herzl, who for six years had been the adviser on foreign workers to the minister of public security.

Herzl expressed the feelings of many in the police, including the commissioner, Shlomo Aharonishki, who were not eager to take on the new task the police force was being assigned by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. But Sharon spoke about a national mission and then-finance minister Silvan Shalom made available NIS 20 million and promised more if needed, and the project went ahead.

The Immigration Directorate was officially inaugurated on September 1, 2002. The name was intended to vest the mission with an aura of respectability, though many realized that some of its elements would not bring the police glory.

Under police Major General Yaakov Ganot, who viewed the job as a jumping-off point for the post he really wanted, and in fact recently received - commissioner of the Prisons Authority - the force organized rapidly. About 480 policemen and commanders were recruited, handsome offices were leased in the government compound in Ramle, and the number of detention facility places for the workers being deported was more than tripled, to 1,030.

NIS 6,700 per deportation

It's not easy to answer the question of whether the police have succeeded in reducing the number of foreign workers in Israel in the first year of the unit's activity. Certainly, there has been no significant change. According to the estimate provided by the police to the Knesset two weeks ago, there are 270,000 foreign workers in Israel (both legal and illegal) but no one knows how many there were before September 1, 2002. According to the data provided to the Knesset, the police deported -"moved away" in the euphemism of the official jargon - 16,500 foreign workers. Another 38,500 left "voluntarily," according to the police.

The Immigration Police admit that it's hard to know how many of those who left did so because they were deterred by the unit's activity and how many left in the normal course of things, as tens of thousands do every year, because their contracts expired or they had decided to return home for other reasons.

In 2001, for example, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 55,000 foreign nationals who were not tourists and were classified as temporary workers, students and clergymen and their families left Israel. In the same year, according to the Border Police, 9,916 Chinese nationals, the great majority of them workers, left Israel, down from 15,350 the year before. Add to the possible reasons for leaving this year the fear of the war in Iraq and the recession and concomitant rising unemployment, all of which have had an impact on the foreign workers as on Israelis.

Taking the generous assumption that about 30,000 illegal foreign workers left the country because of operations of the Immigration Police, deportation or deterrence, each of them cost the taxpayer about NIS 6,700, a fairly substantial amount.

If we want to know whether the number of migrant workers was in fact reduced in the past year, we have to find out whether new workers entered Israel during this period. In September 2002, Sharon ordered that no more workers be allowed in, but workers continued to arrive until almost the end of the year, including those whose arrival was already in advanced stages of preparation. Thousands of nursing workers - a category to which Sharon's prohibition did not apply - continued to stream in during the past year, and recently, following a period in which the government took a firm stand in the face of pressure from farmers and contractors, foreign workers in those areas were also allowed in again. All told, in the period in which the police expelled more than 16,000 migrant workers, another 7,500 entered the country and by the end of the year another 7,000 are due to arrive under permits already issued.

Recently, Ehud Olmert (Likud), the minister of industry, trade and employment, authorized the importation of 2,400 foreign workers for agriculture, and according to Olmert's deputy, Michael Ratzon, by the end of the year, the number of work permits in construction, agriculture, industry, hotels and restaurants will increase from 88,000 to 95,000. The Immigration Police point out that these are legal workers, in accordance with the quotas decided on by the government, and they are not targets for deportation. However, every foreign worker can easily become illegal because of the policy that obliges the imported worker to work only for the employer in whose name he was brought to Israel and deprives him - or her - of legal status the moment the worker leaves that employer, no matter what the reason.

Last year a decision in principle was made to the effect that instead of bringing in workers from abroad for contractors, farmers and the others who have employment permits and are short of legal workers, they would be supplied with workers from the pool of those who were already in Israel and had lost their legal status. In practice, though, this laundering method is limited. To date, only 2,000 permits at most have been issued to workers who were arrested and were to be deported. A major reason for this is a lack of desire by employers to use these workers, pressure from the manpower companies, which prefer to bring in new workers from abroad, and the reluctance of some officials to "reward" those who broke the law. In any event, the police and the Interior Ministry do not allow the "reassignment" of foreign workers until after they are arrested.

Scaring the employers

"No doubt, the police have succeeded in deporting and deterring," says Hanna Zohar, director of Kav La'Oved (Hotline for Workers). "The question is, at what price. The deportations are done brutally, sometimes illegally and almost always inhumanely." A harsh report that Kav La'Oved issued in May together with the Hotline for Migrant Workers, another nongovernmental association, which assists detained workers, documented dozens of cases of workers being beaten by police, of police forcing their way into foreign workers' apartments in the middle of the night, and of detained workers being deprived of their legal rights - such as not being informed of their right to appeal the deportation order. According to the report, even though the law stipulates 72 hours from the time of arrest before the deportation, to allow the detainee to appeal, deportations are carried out during the three-day period.

The Hotline for Migrant Workers received testimonies from workers "who were forced, under threat, to sign a document in Hebrew stating that they waive their right to appeal and wish to be deported as quickly as possible," the report says. The raids by the police and the extensive media campaign now under way against foreign workers and their employers have had a not insignificant deterrent effect. Dr. Rebeca Raijman, a sociologist from the University of Haifa, who has researched the situation of the foreign workers in Israel, says, "What has been achieved in the past year is the imposition of a reign of terror, under which the lives of the migrant workers have become a living hell." Instead of using buses, where they are vulnerable to police raids, the workers now take taxis. They have adopted habits of living underground - using only side streets, going out only at night, entertaining themselves in their apartments rather than in public places.

The spokesman of the Immigration Directorate, Superintendent Rafi Yaffe, said in response that the new commander of the unit, police Major General Berti Ohayon, who took up the post in July, emphasized to his officers the importance he attaches to preserving the dignity, rights and property of the foreign workers. According to the spokesman, Ohayon ordered the unit not to use force at the time of arrest other than in exceptional cases in which the worker resists the police violently.

The deterrent effect works vis-?-vis the employers as well. In addition to the warnings voiced in media spots about the risks entailed in illegally employing foreign workers, the fine for this offense has been doubled in the past year, from NIS 5,000 to NIS 10,000. Labor Ministry inspectors have issued citations against 3,019 employers and 400 indictments have been filed against employers, with another 500 in the pipeline. The legal department of the Industry, Trade and Employment Ministry has been beefed up with 12 additional lawyers.

The well-publicized raids that have been carried out in the past few weeks in homes where foreign workers are employed have induced hundreds of employers to start looking for Israeli cleaning women.

At the same time, the expulsion campaign has not achieved one of its main goals: reducing unemployment. In the year since the establishment of the Immigration Police, the unemployment figures have continued to rise. "Unfortunately, we are not yet seeing results in this sphere; the recession remains deep," admits deputy minister Ratzon.

Nevertheless, Ratzon says, there was no choice but to create the Immigration Police. "For years there was no supervision of the coming and going of foreign workers, and no one knew how many there were. Tens of thousands of foreigners entered, as well as tens of thousands of Palestinians and Jordanians, and they didn't leave." "Some of them established families here," says Ratzon. "The situation went out of control and the state had to come up with an orderly response to the phenomenon, which had become a veritable epidemic."

The police have also begun to deal with an area that had been previously neglected: the crime accompanying the importation of foreign workers by manpower companies, forgers, middlemen and others. To date, 771 investigative files have been opened on suspicions of fraud and forgery relating to the employment of foreign workers, and 48 indictments have been filed.

The prime minister, at least, views the Immigration Police as a success, if only because of the reports he has received to the effect that so far more than 50,000 foreign workers have left - the goal he set for the unit upon its establishment.

This figure ignores the distinction between expulsion and leaving "voluntarily." In practice, it's unlikely that the Immigration Police should be given credit for more than half that number. In the light of this perceived success, the government has decided to double the deportation goal and set it at 100,000. Ratzon believes this may be too ambitions, but he is certain that 80,000 is definitely a realistic goal.