Screen them out: Mariash
Photo: Elad Gershgoren
Filtering immigrants
Haifa police chief says country must conduct background checks prior to immigration to filter out alcoholics
HAIFA - Haifa Police Chief Nir Mariash said Monday Israel should change existing immigration laws to prevent alcoholics and known criminals from making aliya.
In an exclusive interview with Ynet, Mariash said immigrants from the former Soviet Union play a much larger role in the Haifa crime scene than the percentage of the overall population.
According to Mariash, the fact that Haifa is a port city, and the first stop for many new immigrants arriving at the seaport, is a main factor for the city’s high crime rate.
Addressing the increasing incidences of murders - nine since the beginning of 2005, as opposed to eight for all of 2004 - Mariash said the numbers were misleading because “four of them were committed by one man.”
However, he also said there was a nationwide rise in violence, not just in Haifa.
“The problem in our city is a dramatic rise in a weak population from the former Soviet Union,” he said. “I think Haifa has absorbed the largest number of immigrants of any city in Israel.”
Mariash also said, “Many immigrants are sick, homeless, and alcoholic. They don’t move on. They stay in the place their ships docked.”
Screening process
“Maybe we need to change the law, to have a screening process," he said. "We shouldn’t allow everyone who applies to come here without checking their backgrounds first.”
He said it is difficult to use computers to dissect and track serial criminals according to psychological profiles and past crimes when speaking about immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
“The police have no basic information on these people, who are in many cases homeless or alcoholics," he said.
