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Israel on Wednesday threatened to jail illegal African migrants found in the country by the end of March 2018.
It said it would pay the migrants who, in their thousands, are living illegally in the country, to leave, before the ultimatum expires.
The government is offering the migrants $3,500 and free air tickets to return home or go to countries like Uganda and Rwanda.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the migrants’ presence a threat to Israel’s social fabric and Jewish character, and one government minister has referred to them as “a cancer”.
Speaking at a cabinet meeting on the payment programme, the Prime Minister said a barrier Israel completed in 2013 along its border with Egypt had effectively cut off a stream of “illegal infiltrators” from Africa after some 60,000 crossed the desert frontier.
“We have expelled about 20,000 and now the mission is to get the rest out,” Netanyahu said.
The vast majority of the migrnts came from Eritrea and Sudan with many saying they fled war and persecution as well as economic hardship, but Israel treats them as economic migrants.
An immigration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there are some 38,000 migrants living illegally in Israel, and some 1,420 are being held in two detention centers.
“Beyond the end of March, those who leave voluntarily will receive a significantly smaller payment that will shrink even more with time, and enforcement measures will begin,” Reuters quoted the official as saying, referring to incarceration.
Some have lived for years in Israel and work in low-paying jobs that many Israelis shun. Israel has granted asylum to fewer than one percent of those who have applied and has a years-long backlog of applicants.
Rights groups have accused Israel of being slow to process African migrants’ asylum requests as a matter of policy and denying legitimate claims to the status.
Teklit Michael, a 29-asylum seeker from Eritrea living in Tel Aviv, said in response to the Israeli plan that paying money to other governments to take in Africans was akin to “human trafficking and smuggling”.
“We don’t know what is waiting for us (in Rwanda and Uganda),” he told Reuters by telephone. “They prefer now to stay in prison (in Israel) instead.”
In his remarks, Netanyahu cited the large presence of African migrants in Tel Aviv’s poorer neighborhoods, where he said “veteran residents” – a reference to Israelis – no longer feel safe.
“So today, we are keeping our promise to restore calm, a sense of personal security and law and order to the residents of south Tel Aviv and those in many other neighborhoods,” he said.