Israel says halted African migration across Egypt border
Sun Nov 4, 2012 12:38pm GMT
(Adds comments by Israeli and U.N. officials)
By Dan Williams
JERUSALEM Nov 4 (Reuters) - Israel has stopped the unapproved influx of
African migrants across its once porous border with Egypt after months of
intensive counter-measures, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on
Sunday.
More than 60,000 Africans, most of them men, have walked into the Jewish
state in recent years seeking work or refuge. They have stirred fear for
public order and demographics, coming under occasional racially-motivated
street violence.
The government has responded by erecting a heavily patrolled fence on the
frontier with the Egyptian Sinai desert, pursuing legal penalties against
Israelis who hire migrants without work permits and launching so far
small-scale deportation drives.
Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that 54 migrants crossed the border in
October and were all taken into custody - a steep decline from the some
2,000 migrants who came through monthly by mid-2012, many of them settling
in Israeli cities.
"Given this figure, we can say explicitly that we have halted the
infiltration. And now we have to focus on removing or returning those
infiltrators who are already in the territory of Israel to their countries
of origin," the conservative premier said.
Israel brands the vast majority of the migrants, more than 80 percent of
whom are adult males, as illegal job-seekers. Humanitarian agencies say they
should be considered for asylum. Some Israelis have been troubled that their
country, founded by war refugees and immigrants, is packing foreigners en
masse.
But only a few thousand migrants from South Sudan and Ivory Coast have been
targeted for expulsion. The bulk of the migrants are from Sudan or Eritrea,
and Israel's ability to repatriate them is limited. The former is a hostile
Muslim state, the latter deemed a ravaged danger zone by refugee advocates.
Israel was holding around 2,500 migrants caught at the Egyptian border or
rounded up by city police in two desert stockades, an Israeli official told
Reuters, adding that the relatively low number reflected the fact that
"there has not yet been any major deportation campaign".
William Tall, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees representative in
Israel, saw in the Netanyahu government's inaction against the Sudanese and
Eritreans a de facto immunity.
"I think we all understand that if the government was capable of deporting
them, it would have moved to do so long ago," Tall said.
He agreed that migration across the Israel-Egypt border had dropped off
"dramatically", suggesting that among disincentives had been Cairo's recent
military mobilisation against jihadi groups in the Sinai. (Writing by Dan
Williams, Editing by Jeffrey Heller)
C Thomson Reuters 2012 All rights reserved
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Received on Sun Nov 04 2012 - 14:14:17 EST
