Israel’s migrant policy criticised – but SA is no better

NICOLA MILTZ

The entire world is grappling with the increasing global refugee crisis and there are few countries who have come out shining in this situation. The crisis is sky-high, with United Nations refugee agency the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimating the number of displaced people to be more than 65 million, including 22.5 million refugees.

Most countries have attempted to stem the tide of refugees entering their borders illegally by erecting higher walls and high-tech surveillance fences, and implementing stricter border controls as well as more oppressive migration policies.

Israel is offering to pay its illegal foreigners to leave. In January, Israel said it would pay about 38 000 African migrants living illegally in the country to leave, threatening them with jail if they refused the deportation offer of $3 500 (R42 000) and a free air ticket. They have until the end of March to comply.

Rwanda and Uganda reportedly are the likeliest destinations for deportees, although both governments have yet to confirm this.

This move by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resulted in widespread criticism from Israeli human rights groups, rabbis, Holocaust survivors, pilots and doctors. International groups have also voiced strong objections against the forced deportations, despite Netanyahu’s assurances that the deportees will be going to places of safety.

This week, Israel’s interior minister, Aryeh Deri, told a heated Knesset committee that the country would draw a distinction between Africans who came to Israel seeking work and refugees who came from war zones seeking sanctuary. Netanyahu has repeatedly said the majority of illegal migrants are economic migrants, not refugees, and has vehemently defended Israel’s right to expel the Africans by saying: “Guarding the borders against illegal infiltration is both a right and a fundamental obligation of a sovereign state.”

Steven Gruzd, a political analyst at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said: “Migration is such a complex issue. I don’t think any country is really in a position to criticise what another one does. Many countries treat foreigners and migrants very poorly indeed, but are quick to point the finger at others. There’s no monopoly on hypocrisy on this one.”

Loren Landau, a researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society, said there were no shining examples and that “countries are ill at ease” on the subject. Some countries, such as Uganda and Kenya, have opened their doors despite their own struggles.

Landau said Netanyahu’s plan reflected a racist vision of Israel’s future – a vision that clearly not all Israelis share, given the protests against his proposals within the country. However, he said, “South Africa’s moral legitimacy to speak on issues of discrimination – and its moral authority more generally – is greatly weakened by the implicit endorsement of xenophobic violence and discrimination within the country and its own anti-immigrant pronouncements.”

Landau said the South African government had done “little to address threats of targeted, xenophobic violence”. Foreigners – especially undocumented ones – have been persistently demonised and accused of being major contributors to the country’s high crime rates as well as of sapping services and jobs.

“Foreigners have increasingly become the subject of political scapegoating,” added Landau. “Having an outsider to blame for poor services or insecurity can come in handy. That the world – from Israel to the US to Europe – has started to turn their back on immigrants only helps to legitimise such exclusion.”  

According to Sharon Ekambaram, who heads up the Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme at Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), the country’s asylum system is in “crisis”.

Construction has begun on border “processing centres”, where migrants could find themselves detained for years at a time. Meanwhile, refugee reception centres around the country – asylum seekers only resort to going there to gain legal status – are being closed, forcing people to travel vast distances in a struggle to get documented.

“Instead of reforms to bring our immigration law into the democratic era, the current government has resorted to xenophobic populism,” she wrote in a recent opinion piece in News Deeply, Refugees Deeply, an independent digital media quarterly covering the global refugee crisis.

Undocumented foreigners face hostility within South Africa rather than humanitarian assistance, she said.

According to critics, the white paper on international migration recently adopted by Cabinet accelerates a “hard-line agenda” in response to migration.

“While there are progressive elements to the white paper, they come at the expense of asylum seekers and refugees, who face lengthy periods of immigration detention,” said Ekambaram.

It is not uncommon for the government to inflate asylum and refugee figures to justify the public’s perceptions of illegal foreigners.

As with immigration statistics anywhere, said Landau, the numbers are imprecise. “There is a myth in people’s minds that the numbers are greater,” he said.

The latest census showed that “only 4.4% of South Africa’s 52 million people were born outside of South Africa”. This includes refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, undocumented migrants and naturalised citizens.

This number refutes claims in the international media that there were more than a million asylum seekers in the country.

LHR says the current shifts in policy with regard to refugees and migrants go against the ethos of South Africa’s progressive Constitution.

Conditions at Lindela Repatriation Centre outside Johannesburg, the country’s largest detention facility for undocumented migrants, demonstrate “long-standing infringements of the basic rights of non-nationals”, said Ekambaram.

Lindela, which is operated privately by security company Bosasa, is “not a place you want to land up in”, said Landau.

“It is a place of abuse,” he said, coming as it does with damning evidence of human rights abuses that include detainees having been incarcerated for more than the 120-day limit, the physical abuse of detainees by guards, the lack of medical care, and corruption.

According to Ekambaram, this is the backdrop against which LHR and other organisations are challenging recent policy shifts.

LHR, which runs a refugee and migrant rights programme, hears almost daily how people have had their rights and dignity squashed throughout their engagement with the department of home affairs and, more specifically, with the refugee reception offices.

Ekambaram said there was an urgent need for a plan to deal with corruption that takes place at the refugee reception offices, which acts as a barrier to asylum seekers, preventing them from getting legal documentation. Other serious issues requiring urgent attention included the lack of capacity to deal efficiently with claims for asylum and the lack of resources to allow department officials to conduct their work independently and fairly.

She said a humanitarian crisis was likely to result if the government did not provide adequate shelter and basic services at the remote border areas or “processing centres”, where newly arrived asylum seekers were sent while their status applications were being processed.

Independent monitoring of these detention centres would be crucial, she added.