The government has inked a deal with a third state willing to accept thousands of deported migrants from Israel, Interior Minister Gideon Sa\’ar announced on Wednesday.
The as-yet-unnamed African country agreed to accept thousands of migrants after working on the deal with senior Israeli officials over the last several months. Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein has given the green light for the deal in which African migrants will have to agree to leave the country of their own volition.
Sa\’ar announced the deal during an Internal Affairs and Environmental Committee meeting. He said Israel had contacted several third states to ensure the deportations of the tens of thousands of migrants residing in Israel illegally today. He predicted that, with the implementation of the plan, migrants would start leaving Israel at a pace higher than the current average, which he said rested at about 2,000 to 3,000 people per year.
The interior minister said the government would ramp up pressure on migrants to leave the country voluntarily after the High Holy Days by taking punitive measures against migrants who refuse to leave, including cancelling renewable residency permits and enforcing penalties against migrants who continue to be employed.
Sa\’ar said migrant workers in Israel were sending around 700 million to 800 million shekels ($191 million-$219 million) to their home countries per year, according to data collected from money changers operating in south Tel Aviv.
The Internal Affairs Committee approved an additional measure that would make it harder for migrant workers in Israel to transfer money out of the country, to discourage their continued employment. The regulation would go into effect September 13, and would place limits on the amount of money individual migrants could send to their home countries.
The regulation would forbid migrants from leaving the country with cash exceeding the monthly minimum wage (NIS 4,300, equivalent to $1,182) multiplied by the number of months the migrant resided in Israel. Migrants would have to receive permission from the Interior Ministry\’s Immigration and Borders Authority to leave the country with funds exceeding that sum.
Sa\’ar called the influx of migrants from Africa a "widespread phenomenon," and said their growing numbers in cities nationwide were leading to "complex social problems."
"Illegal infiltrators from the African continent are a widespread phenomenon that the State of Israel has been dealing with for the past several years. The measures taken by the previous government — building the fence and the Infiltrator Prevention Law — almost completely stemmed the flow of infiltrators into Israel. Still, the high concentrations of illegal infiltrators are causing complex social problems in Israel, and especially in certain municipalities," he said.