СЕРИЯ ДЕМОГРАФИЯ. СОЦИОЛОГИЯ. ЭКОНОМИКА

362

grants from Russia during the 1990s as an example Some were mine engineers or train engineers Israel has no mines and the train services were limited and just be-ing revived and developed The medical training of both physicians and nurses was quite different from the training in Israel So training courses were developed to teach engineers new technical skills and for health personnel courses were pro-vided aimed at teaching the medical terminology and the medications used in Is-rael which is North-America oriented

c) Migrant Labour and Asylum Seekers Let us make clear that the formal policy is against any non-Jewish immigra-

tion at the same time estimates vary on the number of legal and illegal migrant workers in Israel but something in the region of a quarter of a million may be a fair guess Given the security controls on the borders entering the country ille-gally is almost impossible (but see below on asylum seekers) There are however a variety of ways to enter legally with a temporary work permits or with a tourist visa and then overstay ones permit

Israels history which resulted in cohabiting of a relatively small and segre-gated indigenous population with immigrants from more and from less developed countries led to the development of an ethnically structured dual labour market As one moves down the ladder from Jews of European origin through North African and West Asia origin to indigenous Israeli Arabs from locally born and raised to im-migrant populations there is an increased risk of working in low paid temporary oc-cupations The inflow of Palestinian workers from the occupied territories after the 1967 pushed Israeli citizen workers ldquouprdquo the employment ladder and created a series of very low paid insecure occupations which were untouchable for most Israelis es-pecially in agriculture construction and home nursing (and which effectively offered little advantage over National Insurance payments) The flow of Palestinian workers was disrupted in the late 1980s by the political violence of the first Intifada and the subsequent closing of the borders with the Occupied Territories and again in the early 2000s Opening the revolving door to temporary labour migrants enabled the maintenance of low wage segregated labour force particularly in these labour inten-sive sectors which have come to be identified with Thais in agriculture Filipinas in nursing services and Chinese and East Europeans in construction

The inflow of labour migrants particularly as long-term residents contra-dicts the underlying logic of Israel as an immigrant absorbing state for Jews one in which labour migrants are an unfortunate necessity On the other hand the pres-ence of long-term residents particularly when many of them are concentrated inone locality in South Tel Aviv creates its own needs which if ignored are liable to impinge upon the permanent residents of the city or neighbourhood This cre-ates a number of anomalies Permit-holding migrants who are by definition short-term and single are legitimate residents of the country but are not entitled to state services Instead the employers are required to provide housing and basic medical insurance (deducted from wages) but there is no effective supervision of their implementation Illegal migrants on the other hand often benefit from ser-vices supplied by the municipality such as education for their children and pre-ventative medicine (which often spills over into curative services as well)