Migrant labour, debt and the branding of a ‘multicultural’ Israel

Abstract

The author examines the way in which the example of Filipina caregiver Rosa Fostanes, winner of X-Factor Israel, was used to reframe Israel as multicultural and economically empowering for migrants. Such representations of Israeli magnanimity obscure the ‘incommensurable’ debts owed to Palestinians for dispossession of their land, while obscuring past and ongoing labour and resource extraction that shape global labour markets and drive migration. Such representations of non-white (im)migrant inclusion are common within liberal settler economies, and have long been deployed to shore up global influence in states embroiled in colonial violence. Through the lens of debt, the author highlights the comparative racialisations of migrants.