In recent years, Israel's political establishment has declared a war without compromise or moderation against an enemy. The only problem is that the war they have launched is not against a real enemy at all, but against important and valuable friends of Israel. The imaginary enemy that has aroused the spleen of the politicos and the chattering classes is the guest worker.

Israel employs a large number of temporary workers from around the world, most of them unskilled or low-skilled, most of them from impoverished countries. There is debate as to the total numbers with work permits, and there are also many illegally working in Israel without work permits at all. For the foreign workers, employment in Israel is a golden opportunity to earn $500, $700 or $900 dollars per month, rather than the $100 or less they often get back home. Most of them send their earnings home to support their families, for many of whom the wages from Israel mean the difference between starvation and sustenance. They come from Africa, Thailand, China, the Philippines and Eastern Europe.

For Israel, these workers contribute enormously to the economy. Some work in construction or agricultural jobs Israelis do not want. Others work in services, such as providing in-home care for the elderly and incapacitated. Most are hard-working and law abiding. Among the reasons they like working in Israel is that they are exempt from the countless Histadrut-imposed agreements and other "social welfare" arrangements. They get their entire compensation in cash, which they can send home, and are not coerced (as are Israeli workers) into large, forced, long-term savings, coercive pension saving, coerced state health insurance programs and other "social benefits" that end up lowering their take-home pay.

From an economic point of view, importing cheap labor, whose cost is less than that available in the local market, is no different from importing cheap computers, cars, oil or DVDs. In other words, from a strictly economic point of view, there is no reason whatsoever to restrict imports of guest labor. There are, however, some social and non-economic reasons for doing so.

Israel does not want a huge growing population of entrenched, permanent, non-Israeli residents. Israel has tried to prevent temporary workers from morphing into permanents by restricting renewals of work permits, restricting entrance by worker families and preferring bachelors, and otherwise trying to keep the guest workers around as guests only. It has worked with partial success. There are, in fact, quite a few guest workers who stay in the country after their work permits run out. There are some guest workers who have stayed long enough to learn Hebrew and they earn wages at quite a premium, making them even more reluctant to leave.

Israel, like most of Europe, fears a large foreign population turning into a permanent feature of its domestic demography. Like in Europe, economically, the more guest workers - the better. But non-economically, again like in Europe, problems arise when the numbers get too large.

There are two other considerations for Israel. Most important is the fact that foreign guest workers by and large replace and displace Palestinian day workers. This is good, because there is no way to allow tens of thousands of Palestinian day workers to enter Israel without also opening the same gates to suicide bombers and other terrorists. But it is also what irritates the Left. The Left prefers to have tens of thousands of Palestinians wandering around Israel, and the Left will oppose anything that reduces the number of terrorist atrocities (except complete capitulation by Israel to the terrorists).

The presence of guest workers especially benefits those sectors in Israel that were highly dependent on Palestinian unskilled day workers and so suffered whenever the Palestinians were barred by the army from entering Israel (usually a few days after every major atrocity): construction and agriculture. Foreign guest workers, unlike Palestinians, do not murder Jews, do not engage in terror and rarely are involved in crime.

Another issue is Israeli unemployment. Israel has had a fairly high unemployment rate these past few years, similar to that in some of the worse parts of the European Union, and for many of the same reasons. Among the main reasons for high Israeli unemployment is a large "underground" cash economy, where many "unemployed" are actually employed on a cash-under-the-table basis.

In addition, Israel's minimum wage law is a major cause of unemployment, and it will raise unemployment further if the Histadrut crime family has its way and succeeds in its current campaign to raise the minimum wage by a third. The minimum wage prices low-skilled workers out of the market altogether, leaving them to rot in the streets or seek income via other not-always-legal avenues. Israeli unemployment benefits also reduce and deter job-seeking by Israelis. The Histadrut itself has extorted many employers into paying wages above market-clearing levels, also producing unemployment (a similar phenomenon is common in Europe and explains why EU unemployment rates are twice those in the US).

And, of course, the Israeli economy has been in recession for a couple of years, thanks in large part to the Oslo debacle and its consequential bloodshed.

The lobby to expel the temps working here from overseas has decided that foreign workers "take jobs away" from the unemployed Israelis, and the evidence they have presented to prove this is the fact that they think it is so. In truth, there is no evidence at all that temporary foreign guest workers cause Israeli unemployment to go up and there is some evidence that they cause it to go down.

The issue is a technical economic one. Are foreign workers substitutes or complements for Israeli workers? "Substitutes" means they can displace Israeli workers in jobs. "Complements" are like cable TV lines and internet service - they reinforce one another and are used together. There is some evidence that the foreigners are in fact complements with Israeli workers, and that Israeli workers are more productive and will earn more when there are plenty of foreign workers around. (It is not much different from the increase in employment and wages when there are plenty of machines and capital around, another bogeyman fear, spread by the Luddist Left, but long ago debunked by reality.)

The main lobby group for expelling guest workers via forcing employers to overpay them has been Kav Laoved, a bleeding-heart pro-Palestinian group of "caring" far-leftists. They have lobbied against "exploitation" by Israeli employers of foreign workers. The Israeli media have also been filled with horror stories about the supposed "exploitation", as has the bash-Israel foreign media.

It never occurred to any of these media opinion-dispensers that there is a problem with their "viewpoint" if the most pressing national problem in the labor force is the refusal by foreign workers to give up being exploited whenever their work permits run out. Or, that - literally - hundreds of thousands of people around the world are knocking down the security guards at Israeli embassies trying to get permits to come to Israel to get exploited. A handful of guest workers convert to Judaism to remain in the country as Israeli Jews. A handful of others marry locals.

Yes, there are occasionally cases where guest workers get cheated out of wages or employers violate contract obligations, but Israel has a system of national labor courts that are accessible to foreigners. If the bleeding hearts restricted their interference to ponying up cash for lawyers to do pro bono representation of any foreign worker so mistreated, I would be all in favor of it. (A better protection of the guest workers is the fact that misbehaving employers get a rep and then have trouble finding new guests to work for them.) But, instead, the Caring Crowd want the Israeli domestic minimum wage applied to foreign workers, so that it will have the same unemployment magnification effect upon them that it already has upon Israeli workers. They want pension programs and other social savings plans applied to the foreign workers, and never mind that the foreign workers do not want these at all and simply prefer cash on the barrel.

In short, the worst thing that can happen to a group of people on the planet is to become the focus of caring by the Left. It usually condemns these people to poverty, dependence and violence. In Israel, the Caring Left is trying to price the wage-seeking, hard-working guest workers right back into their rice paddies back home.

Meanwhile, I believe I was the only commentator around who argued over the past few years that there was no connection between the "guest workers" coming into Israel and Israeli unemployment.

The Left does not like the well-behaved, hard-working guest workers, because they make Israel less dependent upon Palestinian day workers and so allow Israel to keep out the Palestinians and their accompanying suicide bombers. The Left also likes to whine that the guest workers are "exploited" because they earn less than the average Israeli. The Left wants them paid the same as Israelis, which is the same thing as condemning the guest workers not to be hired at all in Israel, and so being confined to poverty in their home countries, all in order to make the Leftists in Israel feel righteous.

The Caring Crowd persuaded the dullards in the Likud coalition to declare jihad on the foreign workers. Ariel Sharon created a well-funded special police force to track them down and deport them. Then, the same Left and the same Kav Laoved, which lobbied to price the guest workers out of the market in the first place, were then suddenly all emotional and caring about the illegals among the foreigners getting deported. The government's guest-worker-catchers were budgeted NIS 250 million for the establishment of a special "task force", and it was assigned 470 soldiers. Anyway, the latest economic news is that, while huge numbers of guest workers illegally in the country have been deported in recent months and the numbers coming in cut down drastically, Israeli unemployment has been going up.

Among the developments, and I quote the leftist newspaper Haaretz, "Two years have gone by and, according to the Immigration Police's web site, some 116,000 illegal workers have been 'removed' from Israel. More than 40,000 were deported in keeping with court orders, while the remainder left for various other reasons - fear of being arrested; dismissals from workplaces due to an employer's fear of being caught and fined; the recession, which also took its toll on jobs for migrant workers; and fear of missiles from Iraq.... According to figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), since September 2002, the number of unemployed has risen to 288,000, or 10.7 percent of the workforce. The treasury forecasts a similar rate for 2005, despite the fact that the Immigration Police has set itself a target of deporting another 50,000 illegal workers."

The same clowns who have been lobbying for applying minimum wage and union agreements to the employment of foreign workers have also been demanding the same for Palestinian day workers. Since such an idea would effectively price all the Palestinians out of the market and end their employment in Israel altogether, that might be something worth supporting.

What do we conclude from this? That Comrade Steve was right. The foreign workers are complements with Israeli workers and not substitutes, and that employment of foreign workers makes Israeli workers better off and makes Israel a wealthier, more highly-developed country. In other words, just like the foreign workers do in Switzerland.