Foreign care givers are making extortionate payments to agencies in their home countries in order to be connected with a job in Israel. Fees are so exorbitant that it can take as much as two years to recoup the money, an issue exacerbated by the life span of foreign workers’ visas which expire after four years and three months.
“We don’t have enough time in Israel to earn money. We pay a lot, $17,000, to a Sri Lankan agent to come here,” Mangela, a care giver from Sri Lanka told The Media Line on condition that his family name be withheld. “You see, it will take two years to earn this money back: this is a problem because we have a limited period that we can work for,” he explained.
Having worked in both Japan and Singapore previously, Mangela, a stocky Singhalese man in his forties, is a veteran of the overseas labor force for which countries like Sri Lanka and the Philippines are large exporters. Mangela says that even working as a police officer – a dangerous job during the years of the Tamil Tigers — he could not earn enough in his home country. “We don’t want to take something from [Israel], we want to earn money here and then go home – another three years would be enough. We want more time. I don’t want to be a citizen. If Israel offered me a permanent residence I would say no.”
“The thing I miss most from home is my children,” says a Filipino woman who spoke to The Media Line but was afraid to give her surname. She is a care giver who cleans offices in her spare time to add to the money she can send home. With children aged 26, 18 and 15, remaining in the Philippines, she is conscious of the life events she is missing. The money she sends home has helped to pay for her children’s education. Her eldest child, a daughter, studied to be a nurse but now works in a call center speaking to customers in the United States, earning about $350 a month. When the woman came to Israel in 2001, she made two payments, one of nearly $3,000, to a Filipino broker and a second of a similar amount to an Israeli nursing agency. She explained to The Media Line that many of her friends are forced to make monthly payments of about $400 a month to agencies, a figure which represents about half of their wages and cuts into the amount that they can send home to their families. The care worker says that some Filipinos share three bedroom apartments with twenty other people in order to be able to afford the agency fees and still send money home.
High brokerage fees is an issue with which Kav LaOved, the Workers’ Hotline, is very familiar. Roni Livneh, spokesperson for the non-profit organization which campaigns for workers’ rights, said that a survey conducted in 2013 found that on average, care workers in Israel paid $8,500 in brokerage fees and that the costs are increasing. The highest Kav LaOved has seen was $11,000. Unreasonable brokerage fees were an issue for foreign workers in agriculture and construction previously, but these industries have been tightened up after the signing of bilateral agreements between the Israeli administration and foreign governments, where now a worker is unlikely to pay an administration fee of more than $1,000. This process has not reached the care industry, Livneh explained, where foreign nationals continue to be saddled with heavy debt.
Mediation fees for employment are illegal in Israel but the phenomenon of care workers paying middlemen to connect them with nursing agencies in Israel “is so widespread that everybody knows about it,” Livneh says. The debt with which care givers begin their employment makes them dependent on their employer in Israel and leads to harsh working conditions and sometimes abuse. Livneh explained that this problem is made worse because a care worker is only allowed to switch employers twice during the terms of their visa.
An emerging issue for care givers is that workers are limited legally from work in certain geographical regions. Kav LaOved says that brokerage agencies are charging higher fees for work in the country’s choice locations, such as the center.
Nursing agencies themselves are not the recipients of these fees, Mangela explained, but they make no effort to mitigate against the illegal practice. “I didn’t pay anything to the nursing agencies in Israel. While you are here for four years and three months they are most welcoming, but after that they don’t care, they don’t even help to extend the visa.” Of the nursing agencies approached by The Media Line — Goldman Care, Dina Care and A.S. ONE — none were willing to comment.
There are a number of foreign nationals living and working in Israel on a variety of different visas. According to the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an NGO which focuses on the rights of asylum seekers but also works with migrants, the majority of foreign workers come from countries in Asia which suffer from high levels of poverty, mainly the Filipinos, China, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. These workers take up employment in agriculture, construction and the health care industries, areas that Israelis generally don’t wish to work in. There are also a number of foreign nationals from Europe and America living in Israel who work in journalism, the NGO sector and in tourism.
Care workers from Asia are not the only foreigners struggling with visa problems. The Media Line spoke to a German woman who has been living in Israel for the last five years working in the hotel industry, who asked not to be named for fear it would harm her employer. The woman moved to Israel to be with her boyfriend and learned to call Israel home, finding a job she loved and a close network of friends here. She was able to get a visa due to her relationship with a Jewish Israeli on what is known as a “Partner’s Visa.” After her relationship ended, she didn’t want to be forced to leave the country and so asked a male friend to act as her boyfriend while she applied to the Ministry of Interior for renewal of her visa.
But now that the date for her visa renewal is again approaching, the German woman doesn’t feel this is a process she can repeat and so she will leave Israel. When asked why she felt the need to lie, she said that she loved living in Israel and just wanted to get on with her life. “We like it here, we help the economy, it’s not like we’re just here to take money from the state. We actually work, we pay our taxes, and we don’t get a lot back. We don’t understand why they make it so hard just because we are not Jewish.”
But for the foreign nationals working in the NGO sector, many of whom are based in the West Bank, visas are even more problematic. “There are so many cases of NGO workers being denied access. Almost everybody is routinely questioned and goes through severe, excessive, security measures at the airport.” Jenny, an NGO worker from Ireland with a background in human rights law, explained to The Media Line that she felt the government used visas as a way to exert pressure on people who were interfering in Israel’s affairs. “You are made to feel as if you are some sort of criminal. Your status can be revoked at any time, you never feel safe coming into the country.” But not everybody feels this way.
“I’ve never felt that the government was using visas as a way to prevent journalists coming in to the country,” reported a Western journalist who spoke to The Media Line and asked not to be named. The process is slow and can be complicated but this is due more to bureaucracy than to deliberate interference, he explained. “No one knows what the rules are and they are changing all the time… (but) I’ve never felt like anybody held (a visa) up because they didn’t like something I wrote.” The journalist explained that not all foreign workers were viewed by Israelis in the same light.
“On a spectrum, you’ve got the basketball players, they’re probably the favorite foreign workers; then the Filipino home health care workers, they’re not seen as a threat; then you’ve got the journalists, who are generally not liked but are tolerated; and then you have the aid workers and the UN workers who are pretty much despised… and I think the diplomats are kind of towards the lower end, towards the journalists and the aid workers.”
Israel’s Ministry of the Interior declined to comment on the issues presented in this article.
For his part, Mangela just wants more time to work and to earn additional money. “Give an extension to us to work seven or eight years,” he pleads. But, he says, the agencies are not interested in helping the foreign workers to petition the government for an extension of the visas because they make their money by bringing in new workers every four years. As Mangela puts it, “to them, its money, money, money.”