It is not true there are no jobs. There are 300,000 work places. They just need to be vacated for Israelis.

- Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, August 2003

What is a job? We ask this because this month the State of Israel passed a disgraceful milestone: The deportation, over the past 18 months, of 100,000 illegal foreign workers. This "achievement," which involved gigantic police energies and has cost approximately NIS 670 million, was part of what the Finance Ministry seems to believe is a plausible job-creation scheme. After tolerating illegal immigration for years, the state decided these people were "stealing" jobs that properly belonged to Israelis.

So now that 100,000 Philippine, Romanian, and Thai job thieves are back in Manila, Bucharest, and Bangkok, have 100,000 Israelis become gainfully employed in their place? Well, no. In the fourth quarter of 2002, when the deportation campaign began, there were 259,400 unemployed people in Israel, or 10.1 percent of the workforce. In the first quarter of 2004, there were 288,000 unemployed, or 10.9%. That's a net job loss of 18,600. What happened to the anticipated 100,000 gain?

Here's what happened: The jobs disappeared. Foreign workers don't just vacate their jobs when we, in our wisdom, kick them out of the country. They take those jobs with them.

To grasp the point here, try to understand what a job is not. Pace Netanyahu, a job is not "a work place." It is not something that can simply be vacated and filled at a moment's notice, like a hotel room. It is not an empty cubicle waiting to be filled by a talented and motivated unemployed person. It is not a Platonic form that exists independently of the activity itself. Unlike, say, the Gaza Strip, it is not something one "occupies."

Rather, a job is something that comes into being when one person is willing to supply his labor at a certain price, and another person is willing to purchase that labor at the same or a higher price. A family of four, with a gross income of NIS 30,000 per month, may find it within their means to employ a foreign housekeeper at NIS 25 an hour. If the going rate for an Israeli housekeeper is NIS 35, this family may opt to clean its own floors. Does that count as a job, too?

So much should be obvious. But, we are told, there is a social cost to the presence of all these foreign workers. Our friends in Shas complain that foreign workers are de- Judaizing the nation. Our friends in Yahad complain that foreign workers are taking work from our Palestinian friends. Our friends in Labor and Likud fret about the fraying social fabric, as if Israeli employers would gladly carry the higher costs of Jewish labor were it not for the degrading temptations of these inexpensive and frightfully efficient Chinese.

These arguments are even flimsier than the economic ones.

Foreign workers are not some kind of infestation of the Israeli body politic. They came because they were in demand, because Jewish workers had become prohibitively expensive to employ, because Jews no longer wanted to perform the tasks foreign workers were willing to perform, and because it was politically difficult to give such work to Palestinians. Most of us know foreign workers as immensely hard-working, honest, and fundamentally law- abiding people, whose single crime is to flout immigration laws to seek a better future.

In return, they have often been treated abominably by Israeli employers, while the Israeli government turned a blind eye. Now we are arresting them every chance we get, sometimes breaking up families, returning them to the destitute places from whence they came, and congratulating ourselves for the great service we are doing Israel's economy and society.

It seems to us that a country with so many real enemies ought not to conjure up new ones. The government should be working toward a policy of amnesty and regularization, as George Bush has proposed doing in the US. It would allow us to reap the benefits of their labor; it would allow them to live among us in dignity and safety. Most importantly, it would put an end to a policy that is disgraceful and stupid, allowing the government to concentrate on the real source of unemployment and social tension. Namely, of course, government itself.