In a column in the Jerusalem Post last week, Seth Frantzman wrote about Israel's new and lenient policy towards immigrants who give birth to children in Israel. The government policy required female foreign workers to leave the country with their babies within three months of giving birth. The workers would have been allowed to retain their work visas only if they returned to their home countries and then returned to Israel without their infants. The Supreme Court, in a decision written by outgoing Justice, Ayala Procaccia, decided recently that a female immigrant who gives birth here may not be deported because doing so would affect her "right to be a parent, to have a family and to support herself. The policy is incongruent with Israeli labor laws that safeguard the rights of the woman both during and after birth.” Frantzman argues that this policy is based on paternalistic or racist views because the government sees the East Asian or African foreign workers as incapable of making mature decisions. Thus when foreign workers come into this country with a visa and decide to remain illegally they are not treated as having made a conscious decision to break the law but as charity cases who need special protection. Frantzman writes that "By deporting foreign workers, their 'rights' to a family are not being harmed; they are merely being asked to be responsible adults, responsible toward the law and their children." The State has the right to set the rules for who can and cannot enter. When the State gives a woman a working visa, it a personal right, not a right that extends to the woman's whole family.
***UPDATE*** The decision from this case was on the Hebrew portion of the Dinei Yisrael exam yesterday, August 7, 2011.
Part of me has trouble with the whole notion of borders in the first place.
