Most of them were spouses of acknowledged Jews. About 208,000 of the 900,000 Russian: fsu immigrants as of 1999 were not Jewish, and more than halves of those arriving in the late 1990s were non -Jewish." (Middle East pattern: p. 307).
Immigration has been a major strategy of nation building in the state of Israel. The whole idea of immigration came in the year 1897 during the first Zionist meeting stating that Zionists are people without land and Palestine was a land without people. The process of immigration itself was rather unique. Two major waves of immigration occurred during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, first from 1882 to 1903, an estimated number of 25,000 Jewish immigrants arrived doubling the 1880 Jewish population in Palestine. During that period the newly immigrants have lacked funding and had very little agricultural skills, they were rescued by outside capital or in other words they were funded by foreign Jewish investors, overtime they hired Arabs to work as cultivators in their lands. A second wave of immigrants, estimated to a number between 4o,ooo and 55,ooo, entered Palestine during the decade beginning in 1904 and followed the foundations of the first wave. Many had been part of the organized Zionist movement in Europe and had been active socialists in Russia. Their main objective was to create new order in Palestine Built on socialist principles and Zionist ideology.
The second massive immigration streams occurred in the mid 1950's where over half of the immigrants were from northern Africa. Due to the difference of educational and occupational background between the immigrants from north Africa and the earlier European immigrants, selective immigration quotas and regulations have been forced on the immigrants as to avoid the negative economic impact of large scale migrations. .
The third immigration stream began after the 1967 war, due to the economic and geographical expansion.
