Seal the borders

My mother and both her parents were refugees who fled Nazi Germany. They lived in Paris until, almost overnight, the Nazis invaded France and advanced toward the capital. My grandfather immediately decided to leave behind everything he had worked for, taking only whatever he could carry, and the three of them boarded a train to Nice. That city, on the coast of the Mediterranean, was part of an extraterritorial zone where thousands of people who had suddenly become refugees congregated.

My grandparents and my mother asked the American consulate to recognize them as refugees and enable them to sail to the U.S. Since my mother was born in Denmark, a neutral country, while her parents hailed from Ukraine, which was under the rule of Joseph Stalin (who was still an ally of Hitler at the time), my mother was granted refugee status after four months, but her parents had to wait several months longer. Three days after my grandparents finally arrived in the U.S., Hitler declared war on the U.S., which in turn ceased, almost entirely, granting refugee status to the people still in Nice.

Turning to the individuals who have illegally crossed the border from Egypt into Israel, only a handful of them can be classified as refugees. There is no dispute that they are economic migrants seeking work in the land of endless opportunities, Israel. The Israeli government now faces the task of discerning between economic migrants and true refugees and barring entry to economic migrants while honoring international law in granting asylum to the refugees.

The current approach is to allow all infiltrators to enter, even if they are caught while crossing the border, and to bring them to a sort of absorption and evaluation camp where their refugee claims are officially investigated. In practice, the system doesn't work due to the sheer number of refugee status requests (everyone submits a request) against the shortage of officials available to investigate the claims. This creates a backlog, which in turn prolongs the infiltrators' stay in the evaluation camp while future infiltrators create constant pressure to vacate room there.

All the infiltrators travel to Israel through Egypt, where their lives are in no immediate danger. Based on this fact, I propose changing the current system as follows: Let us open an office to determine refugee status eligibility in our embassy in Cairo, just as the Americans did in Nice, while hermetically sealing the sections of our border where there is no security fence and preventing infiltrators from crossing under or over the fence where it does exist. I suggest using live fire to prevent any infiltrators from crossing into Israel alive. Until the security fence along our border with Egypt is completed at the end of this year, we should deploy reservists to the border. This way, the evaluation camp will be situated in Egypt, not in Israel, allowing careful examination of each request without the fear of a mass release of African infiltrators onto the streets of Israeli cities.

This change in policy should be made public in every possible way all over Africa (especially in Sudan and Eritrea). Simultaneously, the state should set aside a budget to address the possibility that the infiltrators will relocate to the Jordan border (if the Bedouin mediators take them by boat from Sinai) requiring the construction of an additional security fence there.