A Nigerian soccer team, which arrived in Israel on Saturday to play a match against the country's youth squad, has disappeared. Officials from Israel's Football Association assume that the seventeen-year old Nigerians vanished in order to become illegal foreign workers somewhere in Israel.

Israel's youth team had been looking for opponents as it prepared for an upcoming winter soccer tournament. The Nigerian squad was invited to play a friendly match, and Sunday morning nine players and two staff members landed in Israel, with others due to arrive on Monday. The visitors went straight to the Wingate Institute near Netanya, where they were greeted by Pini Keinan, head of the Association's youth department.

"They went to sleep, and got up for breakfast on Sunday," Keinan said. "Breakfast lasted until 9:30 a.m., and then they went to walk around. In the afternoon we noticed that they weren't in their rooms," he said.

Later in the day, police began searching for the missing team members. Calls were made to Nigeria, but officials there knew nothing of the team's whereabouts. The arrival of the rest of the players was canceled, as was the planned soccer match.

Officials in the Interior Ministry fear that the Nigerian players arrived in Israel with the intention of finding work in the country. "In the past, so-called 'athletes' have come to the country and vanished somewhere within our borders," a Ministry statement said.

Foreign workers make up 11.9% of Israel's work force
According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, foreign workers are attracted to Israel due to the country's rapid economic development in recent years. In addition, the rising need for labor, due in part to the security situation, which prohibits Palestinian laborers from working in Israel, has made the country a target for foreign workers. Workers from overseas are willing to work for wages that, though lower than the Israeli norm, allow them to save and send money to their families in their home countries.

The number of legal and illegal foreign workers in Israel totaled some 240,000 in the year 2000, an increase of 19.4 percent, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reported at the end of October. Foreign workers make up 11.9% of the civilian work force in Israel, according to Finance Ministry reports. This ranks Israel as having the second highest rate of foreign workers in the western world after Switzerland.

"This large population not only creates economic, demographic and social problems, but they do not pour money back into the Israeli economy, as Palestinian workers did before the Intifada," said Treasury director general Ohad Marani.

Romanian citizens accounted for 29% of the documented foreign worker population in Israel, followed by Thailand at 22% and the Philippines with 15%. A larger portion of the foreign workers is not documented, and consists of visitors who arrived as tourists but then overstayed their original entrance visas. According to the CBS, citizens from the former Soviet Union accounted for 32% of all undocumented workers in Israel.

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