Israel’s parliament has approved harsh new penalties on illegal immigrants and the Israelis who help them, building on other contentious measures designed to stanch the flood of Africans seeking sanctuary in the Jewish state

The bill allows imprisonment of illegal immigrants for an unlimited time without trial. People caught helping them could face prison terms of up to 15 years. Africans began trickling into Israel through its porous southern border with Egypt’s Sinai desert after Egyptian security forces violently quashed a demonstration by a group of Sudanese refugees in 2005. The number of immigrants surged as word spread of safety and job opportunities in the relatively prosperous Jewish state. The government estimates that 50,000 Africans — the overwhelming majority from Sudan and Eritrea — have illegally entered Israel since. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has called the swelling number of illegal migrants a national scourge, voted for the bill. His spokesman, Mark Regev, called the legislation part of a multi-tiered strategy to deal with the challenge of illegal immigration to Israel. Israel already has repatriated hundreds of Africans and Netanyahu has said he would explore the possibility of repatriating others when he visits Africa in 2012. Of course, if we tried to do this sort of thing in the United States, the Jews would denounce us as racists.