Written in Mandarin, the text appears at the center of a mural that covers an entire wall of the Midrasha art gallery in Tel Aviv. To its right, an airplane drawn in white chalk takes off above a chain gang of crying workers who carry small bags marked CHINA as they march past an immigration official.

"At first, I didn't understand exactly what they wanted at the gallery," Chen-Loung told me as we settle down to an outdoor table at one of the kiosks scattered along Rehov Naveh Sha'anan, between the city's new and old central bus stations.

"I learned Hebrew from the street and I don't speak it properly," he explains, pouring me a plastic cupful of Coca-Cola from a family-size bottle he had ordered. "I don't know words like 'painting' in Hebrew. Where would I learn such a word? I was ashamed, because I didn't know how to paint. Then Doron explained his idea to me. What I did came to me spontaneously. No big, important words. The painting came out of my heart."

Artist Doron Rabina, curator of the Midrasha gallery, conceived of the mural as an act of political protest, an open invitation to foreign workers to voice their feelings about Israel's current deportation policies.

"Foreign Slaves" - the title he gave the exhibition - plays on the similarity of the Hebrew words for "workers" and "slaves." Rabina contacted the Hotline for Migrant Workers, whose director introduced him to several potential participants. Some of them made a great effort to come and meet him. Twenty-four hours before the scheduled opening of the exhibition, however, Chen-Loung was the only one who was not too afraid or too busy to participate.

"All we had was a sketch and one sentence written in chalk in the center of the wall," Rabina tells me.

At seven o'clock that Thursday evening, a young man from Ecuador by the name of Lucas showed up unexpectedly with a Colombian friend, Julio, who brought along another friend. Chen-Loung came back with a Chinese acquaintance. Within a matter of hours, an improvised mural sprawled across the black wall.

Some of the old shoe stores that Rehov Naveh Sha'anan was once known for are still there, but the majority have given way to cheap cafes and small Russian and Chinese grocery stores. For the most part, the street is now filled with shops advertising cellphones and discounted phone rates for African, Asian, and Latin American destinations. At Central Cinema, a neon pink poster offers "Two sex movies for the price of one."

"Neveh Sha'anan is our social club," Chen-Loung explains to me as I watch two different Chinese television shows on a pair of monitors inside the kiosk. "Almost none of the Chinese here speak Hebrew or English. Most of us cannot even read the Latin alphabet. The only thing everyone learns is how to get to the central bus station.

"I added the word 'sorry' in yellow paint next to what I wrote," Chen-Loung tells me, "because I'm sorry I came here. So are most of the Chinese people I know."

"He paid 120,000 yuan to come here and now he's sitting in jail," reads another fragment of the text Chen-Loung wrote for the mural.

A fee of between $10,000 and $15,000 is the standard payment that Chinese contractors demand in advance from Chinese workers for bringing them to Israel, Chen-Loung explained. Many of them, he said, do not know they are being brought here illegally.

Throughout his years in Israel, Chen-Loung has worked nights at various construction sites. Working 10-hour shifts six days a week, he earns an average monthly salary of $280.

Once they are here, he explains, workers like him are unable to leave because going home means facing a debt they will never be able to repay from the wages they earn in Israel.

"I am angry because the Chinese contractors lie in order to keep bringing more people here who don't know what life in Israel is really like," he says.

"Other immigrants want to stay here and have children, but not the Chinese. It's too difficult for us. We don't speak your language. We can't eat your food. The police hunt us down because we are the easiest to spot," says Chen-Loung.

"Even if Chinese workers want to run away from their employers, they have no idea what to do or where to go. They don't know any of their rights. It hurts me to see them. I don't see a future here for Chinese people. Only stupid Chinese would think of having children here," Chen-Loung concludes.

"What would you do if you were put in charge of the country's foreign worker policy?" I ask.

"First of all, I would wring the necks of the contractors and the people in this country that let them operate. If you want foreign workers out, don't keep deporting them while you continue giving visas to new ones. If you want them here, don't let them live under these conditions."

"You wrote on the mural that you were looking for a dream," I say. "What is your dream?"

"The dream is work - for a day, for half a day. Just a little money to survive on and maybe something to send home."

In his carefully pressed black suit and starched white shirt, Chen-Loung could pass for a high-powered attorney or broker, pausing every so often to answer the silver cellphone in his hand.

"People here think the Chinese are stinking garbage. Who doesn't want to be clean and well dressed? But when you are always looking for work you cannot afford to dress up. Who would give me a job the way I look right now?"

"Look," he says, carefully opening the flap of his suit jacket. "I iron the outside, but inside everything is torn and unraveling. When you see the inside, you cannot believe I'm still wearing this. Other people would have thrown this suit out a long time ago." He laughs a short, unhappy laugh. "But nobody knows what's going on on the inside. Do you get it? If I didn't show you, you would never know."

"I am a gay man illegally working in Israel. Where I come from, homosexuality is not accepted. To be deported means losing my freedom, and to me it feels just like losing my life," Lucas wrote in English on his portion of the mural.

Lucas, who is also in his early thirties, has been living here for several years and now speaks fluent Hebrew. In Ecuador, he was an engineering student. In Israel, he earns a living cleaning apartments.

Six years ago, a year after his arrival in Israel, Lucas was caught by the police.

"For me it was death. I was in jail for 15 days, and that was very frightening. I saw the police beating up people that had been there for months. I was alone with a group of Chinese I couldn't exchange one word with. I couldn't eat the food. I had no idea how long I would be there."

A month after being deported, he came back on a tourist visa.

"I feel this is where I belong," he explains. Two years ago, however, he began suffering from tremors, an irregular heartbeat, and panic attacks.

"I felt I was going crazy with the fear of being caught again," he tells me. "I really thought it was the end. But at the same time I feel so at home here. I lived with an Israeli boyfriend for several years. All my friends here are Israelis. Sometimes I forget that I am illegal here. I've decided to live, not to think too much about the police. When I hear on the news about foreign workers being arrested and deported, I say to myself: 'Oh, but that's the central bus station area, not the area where I live.' Still, I feel like I'm already living in jail."

Julio, whom Lucas met on a Tel Aviv bus, was a second-year law student in Colombia when he came to Israel three years ago.

"Israelis think foreign workers are all people with no education or culture," Julio says, speaking in Spanish, when the three of us go to have coffee together at a trendy caf the two chose near the gallery.

"Sometimes I get angry and ask Israelis how would they like it if they were treated this way in New York or Miami. In Colombia, I had no money to keep on studying. So now I'm getting a degree in scrubbing floors."

They both laugh.

"We call it maintenanceology."

Paradoxically, both Lucas and Julio describe life in Israel as offering a previously unexperienced degree of personal freedom and security despite their oppressive situation.

"You are constantly afraid of the police, and some guy you work for might think he can exploit you sexually or withhold a year's worth of pay because you are an illegal worker, but you're not afraid someone is going to grab your jewelry off your body like they do in Colombia," Julio explains.

Julio was caught by the Israeli police last Sunday evening.

"I can't believe it," Lucas says when he calls to tell me the news. "Just this morning, we were laughing together on the phone."

I called Julio on his cell phone.

"Where are you?" I asked.

"Inside the white minivan that gathers people off the streets," he answers. He sounds unexpectedly calm. "Right now we are still in the south of Tel Aviv, near Rehov Ha'aliya," he told me, trying to speak over the noise of the moving vehicle and the police radio in the background. "They're looking for more people to pick up.

"I got off a bus on Allenby Street with an Israeli friend when two cops came up from behind us and asked for papers. When I didn't have any, they took me with them.

"I'm OK," he adds. "They didn't hurt me, because I cooperated. But there was this bunch of morenos, these black guys who started running when they saw the police coming after them. The cops caught one of them, hit him and threw him on the ground. He started bleeding. They took him away in an ambulance."

Julio was lucky enough to have money put aside for exactly this kind of emergency, a phone to call from, and Israeli friends who were able to understand where he was being held, buy him a ticket on a flight that left the following afternoon for Bogota , and get it to him together with all his personal belongings.

The only thing he left behind is a painted pair of blue manacles crossed out with a flamboyant red X, and a sentence reading "No deportacion."