African immigration to Israel is the international movement to Israel from Africa of people that are not natives or do not possess Israeli citizenship in order to settle or reside there. This phenomenon began in the second half of the 2000s, when a large number of people from Africa entered Israel, mainly through the then-lightly fenced border between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula. According to the data of the Israeli Interior Ministry, 26,635 people arrived illegally in this way by July 2010, and over 55,000 by January 2012. In an attempt to curb the influx, Israel constructed the Egypt–Israel barrier. Since its completion in December 2013, the barrier has almost completely stopped the immigration of Africans into Israel across the Sinai border.
As of January 2018, according to the Population and Immigration Authority (PIBA) there were 37,288 African migrants in Israel, not including children born to migrants in Israel. Most African migrants are regarded to be legitimate asylum seekers by human rights organizations, but the Israeli government says most of them are job seeking work-migrants.
Many of the migrants seek asylum status under the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Citizens of Eritrea and Sudan cannot be forcibly deported from Israel. Under international law, Eritrea citizens (who, since 2009, form the majority of the undocumented workers in Israel) cannot be deported due to the opinion of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that Eritrea has a difficult internal situation and a forced recruitment and therefore the Eritrean immigrants are defined as a "temporary humanitarian protection group". Israeli authorities have stated that they could not deport Sudanese directly back to Sudan because Israel has no diplomatic ties to Sudan. Accordingly, the Israeli authorities grant temporary residence through "conditional release permits" which must be renewed every one to four months, depending on the discretion of the individual immigration official. Various authorities in Israel estimate that 80–90% of the undocumented workers live primarily in two centers: more than 60% in Tel Aviv and more than 20% Eilat, with a few in Ashdod, Jerusalem and Arad.
Legal status
According to the government, the majority of the migrants are seeking economic opportunity. This is not the case among Israel's allies such as the United States, where the vast majority of Eritrean and Sudanese applicants are accepted as refugees. Once in Israel, African migrants have sought refugee status for fleeing forced, open-ended conscription in Eritrea or ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of Sudan, but the government of Israel maintains that these areas merely have a poor human rights record, which does not automatically entitle one to asylum. To qualify, applicants must establish that they face the risk of personal harm or persecution if they return to their country. The Interior Ministry has failed to review the vast majority of asylum requests.
Most migrants request refugee status after arriving in Israel, in accordance with the United Nations's Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Israel does not review the status of the individual immigrants originating from Eritrea or Sudan, who constitute about 83% of the total people coming to Israel across the Egyptian border, and instead automatically grants them a "temporary protection group" status. This status allows these people to have temporary residence right within Israel, which must be renew every 3 months; usually this also means that they would be eligible for a work permit in Israel. In the past Israel also granted an automatic "temporary protection group" status to all citizens of the Ivory Coast and South Sudan, although since then the validity of this status has expired. Regarding the other asylum requests filed by citizens of other countries and examined individually, the Interior Ministry stated that only a fraction of them were actually eligible for refugee status.