With the Law of Return back in the headlines, the familiar voices are piping up again, alleging that removing the "Grandchild Clause" (which allows anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent to gain automatic citizenship) will lead to an "irreversible rift with Diaspora Jewry."
However, a closer look at the facts reveals that removing the Grandchild Clause will not actually affect immigration from the United States at all.
Data revealed by Dr. Nathaniel Fisher, an expert on immigration, show that in the last decade only 67 American citizens utilized the Grandchild Clause to immigrate to Israel, less than one percent of all American immigrants during this period.
According to data from the Central Bureau of Statistics, since the establishment of the state until today, around 120 thousand people immigrated to Israel from the United States. In recent years there has been a slight increase in the number of immigrants arriving each year, which varies between 2,500 and 4,000 people annually.
Furthermore, of the tiny proportion of non-Jews arriving in Israel from the United States, the vast majority (around 90 percent) are close family members of Jews (spouses or children). This is vastly different from the situation with immigrants from the former Soviet bloc, where it is common for the non-Jewish relatives of non-Jewish grandchildren of Jews to take advantage of the Law of Return.
Meanwhile, around 120 converts to Judaism immigrate to Israel per year, 1,500 over the past decade. Whether or not these people are halachically Jewish is impossible to know, as the data do not record the type of conversion process undergone, and recent Supreme Court rulings have forced Israel to accept people converted by Reform or Conservative ministers as Jews, if they converted abroad.