Government to Review Decision to Expel Children of Migrant Workers

Further discussion on the pending deportation of children of migrant workers is expected to take places in the coming days within the Israeli government. An aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the government will have to hold another discussion on fate of the children following demands made by Labor ministers and President Shimon Peres, according to Israel’s Ynet News.

"With coalition partners like the Labor Party, which is demanding such a discussion, it will have to take place eventually," a source close to the prime minister told Ynet last week.

The debate surrounding the pending deportation of 400 children of foreign workers is intensifying as the set September date draws nearer. A very divided inter-ministerial committee commissioned by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu voted at the beginning of August to deport the children (thirteen ministers approved the vote, ten voted against the recommendations, and four abstained), a move which is supposed to take place within weeks. The remaining 800 out of the 1,200 children in question will be allowed to stay in Israel.

"Regarding the 400 children who were born in Israel, speak Hebrew, and feel Israeli, deporting them is out of the question. My opinion is unequivocal: These children must be allowed to remain in Israel," said Israel’s President Shimon Peres, a vocal supporter of the children, at a conference in the central city of Ramat Gan.

In addition to President Peres, Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s wife, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have also come out in support of the children and have called on Interior Minister Eli Yishai and Prime Minister Netanyahu to re-examine the case.

"The decision to grant 800 children of migrant workers legal status is just and worthy, but the decision to arrest and deport 400 children from Israel is arbitrary," Barak said.

"The sight of police officers raiding migrant workers' homes and forcing the children out, the sight of guards holding families in detention camps and the sight of interior ministry inspectors escorting Hebrew-speaking children on to planes, will cause us all irreversible damage, both from within and abroad," he added.

"The cabinet made a decision after a profound discussion and after the extensive work of the inter-ministerial committee," said Yishai. "Therefore, it is unfitting to render the government's work pointless.”

"It is strange that he who knowingly ignored the issue of migrant workers now chooses to act as if he heard about it today for the first time," Yishai said in response to comments by Barak.

"I turn to you as the mother of two sons and as a psychologist," Sara Netanyahu wrote in a letter to the Interior Minister. "I ask from the bottom of my heart that you use your authority to allow a vast majority of the remaining 400 children to remain in Israel. This issue is very close to my heart."

At least five migrant worker families of are already in danger of deportation because the Interior Ministry is demanding that they present their children's original birth certificates - which are already in the ministry's possession, according to the Israeli news daily Haaretz.

Families with children who meet the government’s criteria were asked to submit a request, attached to specific documentation, to the Interior Ministry, within a 40-day period.

When migrant worker parents do not properly register a child in Israeli hospitals after birth, as is sometimes the case, the parents do not receive the original birth certificates. “At the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, a practice has developed over the last decade of sending the child's original birth certificate to the Interior Ministry should the new mother fail to appear at the hospital to register her newborns following the birth,” reported Haaretz.

"This is absurd," a Hotline for Migrant Workers spokesperson told Haaretz. "On one hand, the ministry is demanding original birth certificates from parents, and on the other, it isn't providing instructions to hospitals on how to handle cases in which the original documents were sent to the Interior Ministry. It's a real shame that five families meet all the criteria for receiving status, but are unable to provide this basic document because of bureaucratic difficulties."