ABSTRACT
Situated in the Middle East, Israel is geographically a small country with a population of 8.2 million citizens. Of these, just over 20 percent are Arab citizens, and the remainder are Jews. Ultraorthodox Jews comprise approximately a tenth of the overall population. An immigration state established to provide a safe haven for Jews after the Holocaust, a large proportion of the Israeli population has always been Jewish immigrants. Indeed legislation guarantees Jewish immigrants the immediate and virtually unconditional right to citizenship and to diverse social rights. While immigration has continued unabated since the establishment of the state, the last major influx of Jewish immigrants occurred in the early 1990s, when over a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union arrived in the country (Gal and Oser, 2011). In addition, recent years have seen a marked growth in the number of non-Jewish labour migrants and of asylum seekers in Israel (Shamir and Mundlak, 2013). There are estimated to be 250,000 labour migrants and asylum seekers currently in the country.
