Managing Global Migration: A Strategy for Immigration Policy in Israel

By: Shlomo Avineri, Liav Orgad, Amnon Rubinstein

 Immigration, with its growing scale and significant inherent challenges, is one of the main topics on the agendas of Western democracies. Most countries have formulated systematic policies and made perceptible attempts to adjust their legislation to the changing reality.

Israel, which has found it difficult thus far to internalize the fact that it has ceased to be exclusively an aliya country and has become one that also attracts large-scale immigration, has yet to take the requisite actions. Its legislature has not given thought to the enormous changes that have unfolded in Israel and abroad since the early 1950s, when the Law of Return, the Citizenship Law, and the Entry into Israel Law - which regulate entry to, residence in, and the acquisition of citizenship in Israel - were passed.

Today, Israel has neither a systematic immigration policy nor a policy toward immigrants. Absent a normative and structural infrastructure and absent adequate legislation, Israel is unprepared to cope with the political, social, security, and economic challenges that its immigrants bring in train.

Israel’s daunting immigration reality is the blatant outcome of its lack of a coherent policy. In this Position Paper, the authors, for the first time in Israel, propose a strategy for thought and action ahead of the formulation of an immigration policy that promotes Israel’s interests as a Jewish and democratic state.




To order the publication click here.

To read the full paper click here.

To read follow up articles to this publication please click here.