Marion Edmunds
THE Labour Market Commission has recommended that the Home Affairs Department relax its immigration selection policy to allow more skilled foreigners to settle and work in South Africa.
And in its report, released by the government last week, the commission recommends that immigration policy be overhauled completely to suit the economic and social realities of Southern Africa.
Home Affairs had still not commented by the time of going to print, but next week the department will introduce regulations which effectively make it more difficult than ever for skilled foreigners to get permanent residence or work permits. These include charging more than R5 000 for a permanent residence application and forcing foreigners to apply from their native country for a work permit, rather than allowing them to do it from inside South Africa.
The commission also pointed out that there is an acute shortage of data on labour shortages, meaning the government cannot assess accurately its short- term and long-term labour needs. This makes it difficult for Home Affairs to decide which sorts of professionals and skilled labourers should be encouraged to immigrate to help the economy grow, and which should be kept out.
“The development of policy is severely hampered by a lack of accurate and comprehensive data … Labour shortages are thus determined in a rather ad hoc manner. It is vitally important for the development of a coherent labour migration policy that current methods of data collection be reviewed, expanded and updated,” the report says.
It is practice for the Immigration Selection Board not to give reasons for rejecting applications for permanent residence, although the department said it changed its policy this month.
It is practice for Home Affairs to ask the Department of Labour to check if there is a shortage of any skill before making a decision on a work permit or an application for permanent residence. However, it appears now that the checking process is flawed because of a lack of data.
Because of this shortage, the commission argues, it is difficult to assess the impact of non-South Africans, skilled and non-skilled, on the labour market. To correct this problem, the commission calls for greater co-operation between the departments of Labour and Home Affairs, for an overhaul of labour migration policy, and a change in the way Home Affairs issues work permits and permanent residence permits.
Meanwhile, Home Affairs appears to be confused as to who appointed the current Immigration Selection Board, and on what date. In the first instance, the department said the chair of the board was appointed by “the minister” on July 1 1991 and the remaining three members on July 1 1993.
The minister at the time was the National Party’s Danie Schutte, who has denied that he appointed the board. He said he had taken a personal interest in immigration, and would have remembered if he had made such appointments. His predecessor, Louis Pienaar, said he could not remember appointing the board.
Subsequently, current Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi told Parliament that the board had been appointed on July 1 last year, during his term as minister.
The department says the board members — a retired sociology professor, a retired banker, an attorney and a theologian — were chosen by “the minister … specifically for their skills and suitability by virtue of their qualification and experience to consider applications for permanent residence”. The selection criteria were “representivity, qualifications, experience, objectivity and impartiality”.
A Pretoria-based immigration lawyer, Eitel Kruger, told the Mail & Guardian this week that in his 10 years of arguing immigration cases, he had never heard of any members of the board until reading their names in the M&G at the beginning of this month.
Other immigration lawyers approached for comment said they suspect that the immigration board was more recently appointed than the department maintains, and that the department had possibly functioned without a board until this year.