Many Eilat hoteliers found themselves short staffed on Wednesday while tens of thousands of illegals from Eritrea and Sudan protested outside of Knesset. The hotels in the southern port city regularly use the illegals as a source of inexpensive unskilled labor.

Now hoteliers are calling on the government to permit them to bring day laborers from Aqaba, Jordan, explaining they would arrive before their shift and return home to Jordan at day’s end.

A representative of the city’s hotels has already filed a request with relevant officials, seeking to permit thousands of Jordanian to cross into Eilat for work daily. The Isrotel chain operating hotels in Eilat employs 700 asylum-seekers, the daily Maariv reports. The protest on Wednesday brought hotel operators in the city to the realization that without the illegals they are in big trouble.

There are 5,000 asylum-seekers living in Eilat, with 2,000 of them working in city hotels. An additional 1,500 are employed in city restaurants, as gardeners and in factories. In short, the illegals have become Eilat’s inexpensive illegal labor force.

Officials in the Ministry of Tourism and the Jordan Desk in the Foreign Ministry support the request to import Jordanians to replace the illegals from Africa. Shabtai Shai, who heads the Eilat Hoteliers Association, explains that the ISA (Israel Security Agency – Shin Bet) has given its approval for such a plan as well.

Maariv adds that some of the illegals wish to report to work at the hotels but they fear doing so because strike organizers are patrolling the area – on the lookout for strike-breakers. Hoteliers are now giving striking illegals an ultimatum, that anyone not returning to work will be fired.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)