The government and the man who heads it would rather look for persons from certain professions overseas than to pick up the coin that’s right under the local street lamp. Thus, for instance, asylum seekers are sent to rot in the open detention facility at Holot even as Thais are imported for farmwork in the Arava Desert. Similarly, Palestinian construction workers are stuck behind checkpoints while Chinese workers slap on the concrete and cement.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently announced that Israel would soon be flooded with foreign engineers, because the “industry needs them.” Israeli high-tech does in fact need engineers, but the shortage is also connected to the fact that the state doesn’t count Arab engineers, who did not serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

Every year, more than 500 Israeli Arabs study the subjects that earn their Jewish counterparts jobs in high-tech. Despite graduating with honors from Israeli colleges and universities, around 50 percent of them recently reported that they were unable to find work in their profession for at least six months after graduating.

This is a troubling statistic. One might think that a sector with a shortage of qualified employees would snap up all available engineers, especially those with good grades from a reputable institution, in Israel that’s not how it works.

Despite the efforts of civil society organizations such as Tsofen, Kav Mashve, Maantech and ITWorks, which match Arab job seekers with companies that have openings, more than a few Israeli Arab engineers become math teachers instead of entering the high-tech field, contributing to its development and also earning much higher salaries.

There are many reasons for this situation. Arab engineers generally don’t score highly on standardized pre-employment screening tests, due to the cultural biases of the tests. Candidates who pass this hurdle and are hired often face daily commutes of hundreds of kilometers; high-tech is still largely concentrated in central Israel and not the north. And if a family decides, for example, to move from its home in the Galilee village to Herzliya, for example, it will struggle to rent an apartment and find an appropriate school for the children. And over all this hovers the constant fear of the other, the alien, especially during periods of tension, and the desire to keep the high-tech bubble homogenous and based on veterans of the Israeli military.

Nevertheless, all these problems can be overcome. A long-term strategic plan that includes raising awareness of the situation and, especially, subsidizing employers, is one possibility. This would admittedly require a long-term investment and, above all, a genuine desire to integrate Arab citizens into the heart of Israeli business life. But that’s the job of a government, which is supposed to look out for all its citizens.