One family in our merry band of tourists in Israel last month has a child who is devoted to Ethiopian food. The mom found a restaurant with great reviews in Google. We thus hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address in central Tel Aviv. “Are you sure that you want to go there?” he asked. Why not? Google says it is 15 minutes away. “Well, that’s near the old bus station. Quite a few of Israel’s 160,000 illegal immigrants live in that neighborhood. There are also a lot of prostitutes, which doesn’t bother me because they’re doing honest work. But there are also a lot of drug dealers and that does bother me.”
The neighborhood was almost completely dark, except for some brightly lit street-level apartments containing barely dressed women. The restaurant, at Ha-Negev St 10, featured warm friendly service and food that the New Yorkers said was better than their neighborhood Ethiopian place. It was also kosher! (On the other hand, if the boy’s father hadn’t had the GetTaxi app on his phone we might never have gotten out of there.)
I asked around and learned that there are indeed a substantial number of asylum-seekers/illegal immigrants in Israel. “They’re mostly from Sudan and South Sudan. They just walk across the border from Egypt,” said one Israeli, “It is a real problem because it is illegal for them to work here. But of course they do get jobs and are paid in cash. Then when there is a problem with their employer they sue under all of the Israeli laws protecting workers.”
One of our hotel maids was Agok, who said that she was South Sudan. She was very pleasant but it was unclear if she wanted to learn Hebrew or become somehow “Israeli.”
Related: A friend here in the U.S. hired an undocumented immigrant to work as a nanny and receive roughly $900 per week in cash compensation. After about four years the child outgrew the need for a nanny. The nanny then found an attorney to sue the employer on a contingent fee basis. The facts alleged were that the agreement was for $1300 per week in cash and that, every week for four years, the nanny had been shorted $400. The nanny was thus owed about $83,000 in unpaid back wages. That it was illegal for the nanny to be working at all apparently did not impair her claim under state law.
[Note: I mentioned the taxi ride and restaurant experience to one of the front desk clerks at our hotel. She said “I lived in that neighborhood for three years. It is kind of dark at night but it isn’t really unsafe and I enjoy being in a multicultural environment.”]
“I enjoy being in a multicultural environment.”
is this true? are there people who really enjoy “vibrant diversity,” or are they just engaging in virtue signaling?
That last statement, “walking across the border” does not convey half the horror of it. These are the survivors of that “walk,” because, if my liberal news sources are to be believed, to get there they first had to evade being captured by marauding Sinaï Bedouins, who now habitually “dabble in” kidnapping of Africans for ransom. Both women and men refugees are raped, sometimes gang raped, and if the captive’s cellphone-accessible family can not pay the ransom (usually to, surprise, surprise, someone in Egypt proper), they risk mutilation and death, incl. such of being buried alive.
The Egyptian army patrolling these ancient trade routes is aware of it, but not doing much about it for reasons only known to itself – I presume because they already have their hands full with budding Al Qaeda’esque and Hezbollah’ian insurrections mushrooming there. And then, when the escapees have reached the border, it is not exactly one left unguarded, and thus easy to cross.
The “safest” route appears to be along the Nile up north (avoiding capture and deportation by Egyptian police), then crossing the Suez Canal south of Cairo, following it a bit inland to the Medi, and only crossing to Israel fairly close to Rafah – one report that I read speculated that that’s because that stretch of land is heavily monitored by the IDF, that knows how to distinguish between freely cellphone-chatting refugees and silent guerrilla approaches.
Leaving aside the illegality of their ingress and status there, isn’t it a bit ironic, that a not insubstantial number of Sudanese immigrants (and other black-skinned Africans, most of them Muslim) seek shelter in the only somewhat accessible country in the region where they can feel safe from persecution even living at the bottom of the society? The country that’s supposedly so oppressive to Arabs, that it routinely “deserves” condemnation in international fora. Yet history keeps making strange bedfellows.
ObFilmRef: “Noodle” (2007), two bickering sisters, conveniently stewardesses with the El-Al, surreptitiously repatriate a 6-year old Chinese boy to Beijing. His mother-illegal migrant in Israel was rounded up in a police sweep and summarily—what an efficiency!—deported without the heartless Israeli clerks caring an iota for the now-motherless child left behind. Or so the screenwriters wanted us to believe. Includes presumably realistic depictions of the squalid Asian illegal migrant quarters, where the righteous stewardess seeks intel on where to deliver the human cargo. This is somehow also a penance for her not being a Mother. 2 hankies.
Regarding “a child who is devoted to Ethiopian food”
This was a NYC pre-teen who’s already been indoctrinated by its foodie-parents to such a degree that it has developed an expertise of, preference, nose, or yearning for, specifically, Ethiopian cuisine? What is the parents’ objective, having their heir established as some Adolescent Ethnic Food Critic on the NBC?
@ Eagle-eyed dsgntd_plyr: lots of people, esp. in such urban real estate constricted space as Israel, have no option but to adapt to the creep of “multi-culti” that gradually takes place in their vicinity. Whether their then liking the vibrancy that ensues is true, or merely PC-posturing for visiting tourists, is anybody’s guess, but if you’ve got no option but to stay put, you soon adapt to new circumstances (analogous to “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade”).
ObLitRef: “Bad Neighbors” by Edward P. Jones, a pensive sort of #blackpeoplediversityproblems story.
“A friend here in the U.S. hired an undocumented immigrant to work as a nanny and receive roughly $900 per week in cash compensation. After about four years the child outgrew the need for a nanny. The nanny then found an attorney to sue the employer on a contingent fee basis. The facts alleged were that the agreement was for $1300 per week in cash and that, every week for four years, the nanny had been shorted $400. The nanny was thus owed about $83,000 in unpaid back wages. That it was illegal for the nanny to be working at all apparently did not impair her claim under state law.”
The nanny’s rights to pay should not be affected by legal status. She should, of course, be deported on filing such a cause of action, but her claim should still be considered. Otherwise we’d be awarding people for employing illegals, letting slave labor exist in our country.
In fact, the parents hiring illegals should be prosecuted and fined, whether they paid fairly or not.
But what really gets me here is that they’re paying $65,000 (or $45,000) to a nanny. That’s more than I can make as a senior software engineer.
If you can afford to pay market rates under the table, that friend could have probably found a legal citizen to accept very similar wages over the table and farmed out the paperwork for 2-5k per year. Way cheaper, even with the extra taxes than 20k+ per year for four years.
I apologize for my un-American ways and ignorance in advance, but what exactly do you mean, you—a self-avowed #5 Conservative (=in European parlance that implies fiscal responsibility and grudgingly BUT paying wage set-asides and taxes, but maybe your morals are on some higher, “practical,” plane?)
Is what you are proposing some faux arrangement intended to lessen your tax burden at the expense of that of… whom? And who is going to take care of your kids for the least amount of money?
Because, IF THAT is your utmost objective, having it done by the lowest bidder, then why not just pay some homeless bozo a fiver a day (that’s 5×300 days/year = $1500 TAXFREE bucks to the bum, s/he should be grateful) to watch the kid playing in the neighborhood sandbox; if not outright deploy the methods of the Ik tribe: abandonment of 3-and-up-year-olds to find support and shelter in their cohort, and to fend for themselves. If the Ik could do this, why not Manhattanites? (teach them young: “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere…”)
Or maybe I misunderestimated the whole thing, that guardianship and upkeep of your kid shouldn’t cost as much as $20k/year – which is why I am seeking clarification.
ianf: The Practical Conservative’s comment about $20,000/year relates to the purported $400/week shortfall that led to the lawsuit mentioned in the original posting. Try multiplying $400 by 52 (the number of weeks in a year). As I read it, the Practical Conservative’s comment does not relate in any way to the total cost of obtaining child care.
Yeah, I was saying that it would have been cheaper to have paid the 900 a week legally to a citizen or legal resident who could work than to have paid 900 a week illegally and gotten hit with back pay and penalties.
13 years ago we hired a relative to watch our first-born. My wife found NannyPay and used that to make sure that the taxes were done properly. Somewhat to my surprise, they’re still around. Not sure what we paid but it wasn’t the $150/year they’re asking.
is this true? are there people who really enjoy “vibrant diversity,” or are they just engaging in virtue signaling?
To me, there’s good diversity (ethnic restaurants and markets) and bad diversity (getting mugged, people playing loud music in the street all night). I happen to love spicy food so I enjoy most ethnic restaurants (the hotter the country the spicier the food is the general rule) but my wife doesn’t as much so she doesn’t put much value on the ethnic food aspect either.
I don’t consider it indoctrination to expose your kids to ethnic cuisine. You could just as well say that it is child abuse to expose your child only to bland English food and cripple their palate for life.
When I was a kid, it would have been a hard sell to get a little American kid to eat raw fish (ewwww) but now I see that young teens, left to their own devices, will often choose to eat sushi. Food tastes change over time – maybe someday injera and wat will be as American as hamburgers and sushi.