Doing better in the promised land

View of Tel Aviv. Israel shows good intellectual achievement, but not the top intellectual achievement of Jews in the U.S. How come?

Why do Ashkenazi Jews do worse in Israel than in the United States? This question is raised by Heiner Rindermann in his new book Cognitive Capitalism. Israel is an advanced country and shows promise in certain areas, like nuclear power and certain high-tech goods. Yet it underperforms when compared with Jewish communities in the West. "There is clear evidence for good intellectual achievement; however, not for top intellectual achievement as from Western Ashkenazi Jews" (Rindermann 2018, p. 149).

Israel is 42% Ashkenazi, a proportion that works out to more than three and a half million. By comparison, American Jews number between 5.5 and 8 million, and their intellectual creativity—in whatever field you choose—has been many times greater. So what gives?

One reason is that the above figure of 42% includes the recent wave of Russian immigrants to Israel, and they are on average only half-Jewish (Wikipedia 2018). It is also possible that offspring of Ashkenazi-Sephardic or Ashkenazi-Mizrahi marriages tend to self-identify as Ashkenazi. 

A second reason is ideological. The Zionist movement sought to create a "new Jew," who would be less intellectual and more interested in other pursuits. Furthermore, Israel is home to over a million Haridim (strictly Orthodox Jews), who confine their intellectual pursuits to Torah study.

A third reason is that Israel is not a high-trust culture, at least not to the same extent as Western countries:

Statistics from Transparency International on corruption corroborate these political observations: while Scandinavian nations are leading in non-corruption, closely followed by (present and past) British and European countries, Israel comes at rank 37, after Botswana, [United Arab] Emirates and Chile. (Rindermann 2018, p. 150).

This is consistent with mainstream thinking. When Jews immigrated to the United States, they found a land of opportunity where they could use their abilities to the fullest. This narrative, however, is usually framed in terms of freedom from discrimination: America offered a haven from antisemitism. Just as importantly, however, it also offered a high-trust culture. Americans could generally be counted on to do what they said they would do and charge only what they said they would charge. When two Soviet journalists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, visited the U.S. in 1935, they were struck by the integrity of the average American:

The American sits in his office with his coat off and works. He works quietly, unobtrusively, without making any fuss. He is never late anywhere. He never hurries anywhere. He has only one telephone. No one waits for him in his reception room, because an appointment is usually made with absolute accuracy, and not a single extra minute is wasted during the interview.

[...] Should an American say in the course of a conversation, even incidentally, "I'll do that," it is not necessary to remind him of anything at all in the future. Everything will be done. The ability to keep his word, to keep it firmly, accurately, to burst, but keep his word—this is the most important thing which our Soviet business people must learn from American business people. (Ilf and Petrov 1937)

Migration and productivity

The same could be said for other immigrant groups. People do better when they move from a low-trust culture to a high-trust one. They can fully realize their potential. We see this with PISA math scores. Asian American students do better than students in Asia, White American students do better than students in Europe, Hispanic American students do better than students in Latin America, and African American students do better than students in sub-Saharan Africa (Sailer 2013).

This benefit of migration is affirmed by mainstream economists, although they usually attribute migrant success to abstractions like "good government" and "good institutions"—as if these entities are not composed of flesh-and-blood people who think and act like other people of the same culture:

There are many reasons why this is so. Among them are that the lower earners usually live in societies with predatory governments that arbitrarily confiscate wealth, are rent asunder by civil war and other armed conflicts, and lack the social, political, and economic institutions that are the foundations for economic growth, as well as numerous other factors. By contrast, residents of developed countries face fewer political and social barriers to economic growth, thus incentivizing the long-term accumulation of the machines, knowledge, and human capital that propel the economy. (Nowrasteh 2016)

As a result, migrants are more productive in First World societies like the United States than they were in their home societies:

[...] the median worker from the developing world can expect a fourfold increase in wages by coming to the United States. Across the board, wage growth can range from a twofold increase for Dominicans to a 15-fold increase for Yemenis. Thus, just by moving to the United States, these workers will experience increases in income that few in the developed world can imagine. These gains do not come at the cost of Americans' losses, but from the increased productivity of the immigrant workers themselves. (Nowrasteh 2016)

Their productivity will increase because they are now interacting with a high-trust culture. They receive their supplies on time, and these supplies don't have to be checked and double-checked. The product of their labor is then distributed or further processed by people who do what they say they will do. More work gets done, and less time gets wasted.

This is the main argument for labor mobility. Workers from a Third World country can do better if moved to a First World country. This is not because they have become better workers. It's because they are now immersed in a culture that functions better.

So why not let people migrate from the Third World to the First World? Their productivity will rise, employers will get cheaper labor, and the global economy as a whole will benefit. It's a win-win, isn't it?

Well, no. If you fill a high-trust culture with people from low-trust societies, you'll eventually get .... another low-trust culture. You'll kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Parting thoughts

When I raise these points with other people, I soon run into disagreement, even when among people with open minds.

Disagreement often comes from a belief that immigrants will "assimilate." The habits of a low-trust culture will be shed and replaced with those of a high-trust one. To some extent, this does happen when immigrants are relatively few in number. As they become more numerous, however, the pressure to assimilate slackens and may even go into reverse. The pressure to assimilate is also weakened by new technologies, particularly the Internet, which are making it easier for migrants to live in their native culture anywhere on the planet.

There is also disagreement over what creates a high-trust culture. At one time this question used to interest social scientists, but now that interest has refocused on "whiteness studies." It seems that societies like Iceland function admirably because of their "white privilege."

Sarcasm aside, trust does matter. It has been key to the rise of Western societies to global dominance. But how is it created? I've argued that Western societies have extended the high-trust environment of the family to a much larger social context, specifically through a more individualistic mindset that is governed by universal moral rules, rather than by a dual morality that favors close kin over everyone else.

This high-trust mindset has four main components:

Independent social orientation - independence of the self from others, including stronger motivation toward self-expression, self-esteem, and self-efficacy and emphasis on personal happiness rather than social happiness. 

Universal rule adherence - capacity to obey universal and absolute moral rules, i.e., moral universalism and moral absolutism, as opposed to situational morality based on kinship. These rules are enforced by monitoring not only others but also oneself. Rule-breakers may be branded as morally worthless and expelled from the entire moral community, as opposed to being ostracized by close kin.

Guilt proneness - capacity to self-monitor thoughts and behavior for rule adherence in order to self-judge and, if necessary, to self-punish.

Affective empathy - capacity to experience the emotional states of other people in order to prevent harm and to provide help if needed. This help is conditional on the other person being judged morally worthy, i.e., a rule follower. In most human populations, affective empathy is largely confined to relations between a mother and her offspring. In northwest Europeans, it has become generalized to all community members (Frost 2017).

In addition, there is a fifth and historically more recent component: pacification of social relations. This is an outcome of the first component. Once violent individuals had become branded as immoral, they were removed from society with fanatical zealousness (Frost and Harpending 2015). Finally, there is increased cognitive ability, which I mention last partly because it receives too much attention in this sort of discussion and partly because it too may be relatively recent. Rindermann (2018, pp. 86-87) has argued that mean IQ rose in Western Europe during late medieval and post-medieval times as a result of the greater reproductive success of the nascent middle class.

All of the above components have medium to high heritability. If we wish to impose this mindset, we will be constrained by the underlying genotype. Guilt and empathy cannot be elicited from people who are not guilt-prone and empathic. Nor can such people be made to feel calm if they have exceeded their anger threshold. There remain only "carrot and stick" methods to make them act in ways they normally would not. As for cognitive ability, the room for improvement is slim. Any gains made during adolescence will largely "wash out" during adulthood.

That may not be the message you want to hear. And perhaps it is too pessimistic. Again, it depends on the numbers. It would also help if Christians were still interested in enforcing proper behavior. Nowadays, most aren't.

Finally, I should point out that there may be more than one way to build a high-trust culture. East Asian societies, for instance, rely more on rule adherence and less on affective empathy and guilt proneness (Frost 2015).

References

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe, Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

Frost, P. (2015). Two Paths. The Unz Review, January 24

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/two-paths/

Frost, P. and H. Harpending. (2015). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification, Evolutionary Psychology 13: 230-243.

http://evp.sagepub.com/content/13/1/147470491501300114.abstract

Ilf, I. and E. Petrov. (1937). Little Golden America

https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=little+golden+america&btnG= 

Nowrasteh, A. (2016). The Case for More Immigration. Democracy. A Journal of Ideas. Fall. No. 42

https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/42/the-case-for-more-immigration/

Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive Capitalism. Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press.

Sailer, S. (2013). PISA racial results for Americans on Math. December 3, Steve Sailer. iSteve.

https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/pisa-racial-results-for-americans-on.html

Wikipedia (2018). 1990s Post-Soviet aliyah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah  

The end of Jewish achievement?

Neurons show more axonal growth when exposed to higher levels of sphingolipids (last figure) (Cochran et al. 2006)

Jewish achievement is a difficult topic. Recently, it has been addressed by Jordan Peterson, as in this interview with the Forward:

"You can assume that they [Jews] are intelligent and have a culture of learning, or you can think that there's some kind of cabal," Peterson told the Forward. "So if I'm gonna hit the hornets nest, I might as well hit it on the side that takes the wind out of the sails of far-righters and their idiot anti-Semitism." (Feldman 2018)

That quote appeared under the headline "Is Jordan Peterson Enabling Jew Hatred?" There was also a photo montage (since removed) juxtaposing his image with that of Hitler. It's hard to believe that this topic was freely discussed in the mainstream a mere decade ago. At that time Commentary ran an article by Charles Murray on "Jewish Genius":

From 1870 to 1950, Jewish representation in literature was four times the number one would expect. In music, five times. In the visual arts, five times. In biology, eight times. In chemistry, six times. In physics, nine times. In mathematics, twelve times. In philosophy, fourteen times.

[...] What accounts for this remarkable record? A full answer must call on many characteristics of Jewish culture, but intelligence has to be at the center of the answer. Jews have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests since the first Jewish samples were tested. (The widely repeated story that Jewish immigrants to this country in the early 20th century tested low on IQ is a canard.) Exactly how high has been difficult to pin down, because Jewish sub-samples in the available surveys are seldom perfectly representative. But it is currently accepted that the mean is somewhere in the range of 107 to 115, with 110 being a plausible compromise. (Murray 2007)

Murray then discussed a paper by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending, likewise published in a mainstream journal. The authors argued that Ashkenazi Jews had historically worked in occupations that select for cognitive ability, i.e., sales, finance, and trade. Non-Jews usually worked in intellectually less demanding occupations, most often farming. Sephardic Jews were similarly selected, but not to the same extent. They tended to work in a wider range of occupations, with more emphasis on crafts than on finance. Furthermore, beginning in the 17th century, Ashkenazi craftsmen were more entrepreneurial than their Sephardic counterparts; they produced for a larger market, geographically and demographically, where the rewards for success were greater and where successful craftsmen had only one way of increasing their workforce to meet demand: marrying younger and having more children (Frost 2007).

This theory is supported by a striking piece of evidence: the high incidence among Ashkenazim of certain genetic disorders: Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, and mucolipidosis type IV (MLIV). All four of these disorders affect the same metabolic pathway: the capacity to store sphingolipid compounds that promote the growth and branching of axons in the brain. Although these disorders are deleterious in the homozygote state, they're a net benefit in the much more frequent heterozygote state. They provide the brain with higher levels of sphingolipids without the adverse health effects (Cochran et al. 2006).

This is not to say that only these four disorders explain the higher mean IQ of Ashkenazim.  They're simply witnesses to a selection pressure that has probably acted on the many thousands of genes that in one way another influence cognitive ability.

A strange collapse

If Jewish achievement is genetically based, it should be relatively stable, shouldn't it? Yet it has been far from stable over the past forty years. Ron Unz (2012) has ably documented what he calls "the strange collapse of Jewish achievement":

- In the U.S. Math Olympiad, over 40% of the top students were Jewish during the 1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s, the percentage averaged about one-third. During the thirteen years since 2000, two names out of 78 or 2.5% appear to be Jewish. 

- On the Putnam Exam (a mathematics competition for American college students) over 40% of the winners were Jewish before 1950. Between that year and the 1990s, the percentage was 22-31%. Since 2000, it has been under 10%, without a single likely Jewish name between 2005 and 2012.

- Of the national finalists for the Science Talent Search, 22-23% were Jewish from the 1950s to the 1980s. The percentage was 17% in the 1990s, 15% in the 2000s, and 7% from 2010 to 2012. Of the thirty top students over the last period, only one seems to have been Jewish. 

- Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997. During the 2000s the percentage was 5%.

- From 2000 to 2012, only 8% of the top students in the Biology Olympiad were Jewish, with none from 2010 to 2012. 

- Between 1992 and 2012, only 11% of the winners of the Computing Olympiad had Jewish names, as did 8% of the Siemens AP Award winners. 

- From 2010 to 2012, none of the Chemistry Olympiad winners had a probable Jewish name.

A similar decline seems to be under way in Israel. Rindermann (2018, p. 148) cites student assessment studies that indicate a decrease in that country's IQ from 101 in the 1960s to 95 today. Yet the intervening years saw a large influx of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union—about 979,000 between 1989 and 2006 (Wikipedia 2018b). The Ashkenazi proportion of Israel's population is consequently higher today than it was in the 1960s.

So what is driving this decline in academic performance? Ron Unz opts for a social/cultural cause: "today's overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing challenges of the immigrant experience."

Hmm ...It's a bit of a stretch to say that most Jewish American kids were still the children or grandchildren of immigrants as late as the 1970s. In this, Ron is echoing the frequent claim that the immigrant experience has a transformative effect, turning slackers into strivers or at least encouraging the slackers to stay home. 

Let's take off the rose-tinted glasses and look reality in the face: most immigrants are not high achievers. Either today or back in the challenging 1970s. As for the minority who are, they typically come from groups that were already that way in their countries of origin. So the immigrant experience, in itself, has little explanatory value. The explanation is that certain cultures have selected for mental and behavioral traits that make high achievement possible.

Unz is on firmer ground when he says that over the last two decades up to half of the Jewish winners of the Math Olympiad were recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union. But why, then, did the mean IQ of Israel decline when that country took in a similar influx of Soviet Jews? That influx was much larger proportionately—almost a million in a country of eight and a half million. Today, Russian Jews number 1.2 million in Israel, if one includes non-Jewish household members (Wikipedia 2018a; Wikipedia 2018b). 

Perhaps Soviet Jews who went to the United States were somehow different from those who went to Israel.  In the U.S., about half of them arrived under the Lautenberg amendment (1990) which authorizes the entry of religious minorities "with a credible, but not necessarily individual, fear of persecution." In Israel, they arrived under the Law of Return, which lets in anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent or a Jewish spouse. 

Israel is thus more open to immigrants from the former Soviet Union ... as long as they have some sort of Jewish affiliation. The affiliation is often weak:

In 1988, a year before the immigration wave began, 58% of married Jewish men and 47% of married Jewish women in the Soviet Union had a non-Jewish spouse. Some 26%, or 240,000, of the immigrants had no Jewish mother, and were thus not considered Jewish under Halakha, or Jewish religious law, which stipulates one must have a Jewish mother to be considered Jewish. (Wikipedia 2018b)

Out-marriage has increased considerably in those countries that provide Israel with immigrants, not only the former Soviet Union but also the United States, Canada, and France. If Jews are becoming less and less Jewish by ancestry, it should be no surprise that anything specific to them genetically is likewise becoming less and less, whether they live in Israel or in the United States. This genetic change should be most noticeable on the right tail of the bell curve ... among the most gifted.

Conclusion

So the decline in Jewish achievement may be both an argument for and an argument against a genetic cause. Ron Unz sees an argument against: "the innate potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly." Well, only if the group has a closed membership. According to a 2013 American survey, the intermarriage rate is now 58% among all Jews and 71% among non-Orthodox Jews. Yet 81% of all Jews still raise their children as Jewish (Goodstein 2013). It seems that "Jewishness" is increasingly self-defined and self-ascribed.

Besides out-marriage, something else may be going on. There are signs that fertility is sharply declining among the most intelligent women (Kanazawa 2014). Jewish Americans would be harder hit in this respect, but the problem may be a much larger one, as indicated by the recent slowing down and reversal of the Flynn Effect and by the steady increase in reaction time from about the year 1980 onward (Flynn 2007, pp. 143; Frost 2014; Madison 2014; Teasdale and Owen 2005).

In conclusion, the decline in Jewish achievement may have a genetic cause, a social/cultural one, or both. It nonetheless looks real. Much has been written about the bleak outlook for Jewish Americans due to their high out-marriage rate and their low fertility rate. But what if, on top of this numerical decline, there has also been a cognitive and intellectual one?

What will happen when Jewish millennials and post-millennials pick up the torch, move up in the world, and begin to make their mark? We may see another collapse: that of the remarkable Jewish presence in American life and culture.

References

Cochran, G., J. Hardy, and H. Harpending. (2006). Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence, Journal of Biosocial Science 38: 659-693.

https://antville.org/static/sites/kratzbuerste/files/AshkenaziIQ.pdf   

Feldman, A. (2018). Is Jordan Peterson enabling Jew hatred? Forward. May 11

https://forward.com/news/national/400597/is-jordan-peterson-enabling-jew-hatred/

Flynn, J.R. (2007). What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect. Cambridge University Press.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=qvBipuypYUkC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Frost, P. (2007). Natural selection in proto-industrial Europe. Evo and Proud, November 16.

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2007/11/natural-selection-in-proto-industrial.html

Frost, P. (2014). What happened in the 1980s to reaction time? Evo and Proud, May 3.

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/05/what-happened-in-1980s-to-reaction-time.html

Goodstein, L. (2013). Poll shows major shift in identity of U.S. Jews. The New York Times, October 1.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/us/poll-shows-major-shift-in-identity-of-us-jews.html  

Kanazawa, S. (2014). Intelligence and childlessness. Social Science Research 48: 157-170.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Satoshi_Kanazawa/publication/263666009_Intelligence_and_childlessness/links/59dc1174458515e9ab45299c/Intelligence-and-childlessness.pdf

Madison, G. (2014). Increasing simple reaction times demonstrate decreasing genetic intelligence in Scotland and Sweden, London Conference on Intelligence, Psychological comments, April 25,  #LCI14 Conference proceedings

http://www.unz.com/jthompson/lci14-questions-on-intelligence/

Murray, C. (2007). Jewish Genius. Commentary, April 1

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/jewish-genius/  

Rindermann, H. (2018). Cognitive Capitalism. Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press.

Teasdale, T.W., and D.R. Owen. (2005). A long-term rise and recent decline in intelligence test performance: The Flynn Effect in reverse. Personality and Individual Differences 39(4): 837-843.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2005.01.029

Unz, R. (2012). The myth of American meritocracy. The American Conservative, November 28

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/  

Wikipedia (2018a). Russian Jews in Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Jews_in_Israel

Wikipedia (2018b). 1990s Post-Soviet Aliyah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah

Walking to the Promised Land

In anthropology, the term ‘expansion’ is used to describe the spread of a population into new lands, often much larger in size. The Bantu Expansion was thus the spread of Bantu agricultural peoples from eastern Nigeria into central, eastern, and southern Africa between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago. Roughly the same period saw Austronesians expand out of southern China and into most of southeast Asia and Oceania. Finally, the last five hundred years have seen the expansion of European peoples into the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, southern Africa, and Siberia.

Today, a new expansion is under way. In a zone stretching across Africa from Sierra Leone to Somalia, population growth is outstripping the carrying capacity of the land. People are responding to this situation in the same way that people have always responded: by migrating en masse to new territories and a new life.

But how? Isn’t the rest of the world already occupied by other peoples? Yes, but so were the lands colonized by the Bantu, the Austronesians, and the Europeans. What once belonged to one people can be taken by another. It’s really that simple.

This new population expansion at first spread largely into the homelands of the former colonial powers, specifically Great Britain and France. In recent years, especially since the mid-1990s, it has begun to spill into southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, as well as cities farther afield.

Israel, in particular, is becoming a prime destination. There are two reasons. First, it is the only First World nation that abuts directly on Africa. You can literally walk there from demographic hotspots in the Sahel or the Horn of Africa. Second, Israel has weak ideological defenses. In a post-national world, it is no longer acceptable to justify Israel’s existence as a land where Jews can live as Jews among Jews. The preferred justification is to present Israel as a haven for ‘victims.’ Unfortunately, this victimology can have unintended consequences.

Background

Since the mid-1990s, 3 to 5 million people have poured into Egypt from sub-Saharan Africa. Although this population movement is widely attributed to the civil war in Darfur and to the continuing low-grade conflict in southern Sudan, there are also many migrants coming from Eritrea and elsewhere in Africa.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, some of these migrants began to infiltrate across the Israeli border with the help of Bedouin smugglers. They were not sent back, as one of them recounted:

“We were taken to the court and the judge said that it will be impossible to send us back to Sudan, which is an enemy country. But she also said that if the state will support us two million refugees will come to Israel and it will be a disaster. Then we were sent to Maasihu Prison, where I stayed for 14 months.” (Yacobi, 2009, p. 3).

The news soon spread to places as far away as Eritrea, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast. From early 2007 to the end of March 2008, over 20,000 Africans crossed into the Negev from Egypt (Yacobi, 2009, p. 13). They were split equally between Sudanese and Eritreans with smaller numbers from Central and West Africa (Yacobi, 2009, p. 7).

These African migrants have stirred up divergent reactions in their host country. On the one hand, it is difficult to turn them away when official discourse so often presents Israel as a haven for refugees:

There is wide agreement that one of the turning points in bringing the refugee issue to the Israeli public was when the campaign against the deportation of refugees focused on the Holocaust, pointing out that it was the Jewish people who had needed shelter and protection during and after the Second World War. The Jewish historical experience and Jewish collective memory became a convincing tool in the public sphere as noted, for example, by Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev who said: “we cannot stand by as refugees from genocide in Darfur are knocking on our doors” (Yacobi, 2009, p. 10)

Many Africans understand the power of Holocaust discourse in this debate:

Just before last Passover a group of African refugees volunteered to help Holocaust survivors with cleaning, painting and, more generally, with renovating their flats. This event was covered by the Israeli media, emphasizing the common fate of both Jewish and African refugees. (Yacobi, 2009, p. 10)

The influx of African migrants has thus been facilitated by comparisons with Jewish refugees of another era. This comparison is not accepted by all Israelis, like this commenter:

to be precise the only difference between janjaweed and darfurians is that the janjaweed have won the war .. otherwise the whole story would have been replayed in reverse with the darfurians attacking, raping and ethnic cleansing the arabs… this cannot be said about jewish refugees in europe who did not resist (the conflict in darfur was started by the darfurian separatists, not by the arabs) while the danger for them was a real one … it’s impossible to call the darfurian conflict a genocide and compare it to holocaust as it’s just an ethnic conflict in which both parties widely resort to ethnic cleansing. (Lotan, 2007)

This view seems to be shared by the Israeli government, which is increasingly using the term ‘infiltrator’ instead of ‘refugee,’ as in this speech by the prime minister in January 2010:

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Thursday warned that ongoing illegal African immigration posed a threat to Israel, and announced that he will ask the government to endorse a plan to erect a barrier along Israel's border with Egypt to prevent infiltration from Africa.

The barrier is meant to prevent an expected "flood" of African immigrants seeking jobs in Israel, Netanyahu said.

According to Netanyahu's plan, border guards and electronic systems will safeguard the proposed barrier, which will be partly above ground. In addition to the barrier, the government will work to increase law enforcement against employers who hire illegal foreign workers.

Addressing the Manufacturers Association General Assembly, Netanyahu warned that African immigrants infiltrating Israel from Egypt were changing the "demographic landscape" in Israel.

"I don't know if you have been to Eilat and have seen what's going on there. In Tel Aviv there are places you wouldn't recognize, this is something that must be stopped," Netanyahu said. (JPost, 2010)

Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders hope to staunch African immigration by building a ‘smart fence’ between Israel and Egypt, by interning refugees for lengthy periods, and by fining employers of illegal immigrants. As strong as these measures may seem, it is doubtful whether they will have much effect. A ‘smart fence’ can be outmaneuvered by first having a few refugees cross it to tie down the border patrol and then sending over a much larger group farther down the border. Nor will lengthy internment be a real deterrent. Many of the refugees see it as a price worth paying for admission to a First World country (Yacobi, 2009, p. 5). Finally, employer sanctions have a poor record of enforcement in other Western nations.

Israelis in general are also pinning their hopes on an end to the Darfur civil war. But even with peace there will still be an outflow of people from Darfur, as there is from other Sahel regions that have no civil conflict. The truth is that a subsistence economy on arid soil cannot support Darfur’s growing population: up from 1 million in 1950 to over 6 million today. Something has to give, and it is richer countries, like Israel, that will be called on to do the giving.

References

JPost (2010). PM: Infiltrators dangerous for Israel, The Jerusalem Post, January 21, 2010, http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=166296

Lotan, G. (2007). Israel: Sudanese Refugees – Like Darfur, as Auschwitz
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2007/08/01/israel-sudanese-refugees-like-darfur-as-auschwitz/

Yacobi, H. (2009). African Refugees’ Influx in Israel from a Socio-Political Perspective, CARIM Research Reports 2009/04, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.
http://cadmus.iue.it/dspace/handle/1814/10790