Marion Edmunds
THE Home Affairs Department’s control over immigration and migration should be handed over to a new ministry, recommends research carried out by a government task team.
The task team – chaired by Wilmot James, the Institute for a Democratic South Africa’s executive director – was appointed by Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi last year to study flaws in immigration policy. The current policy is proving to be inadequate, inappropriate, and in many instances unconstitutional.
The team, which includes Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s wife, Zanele, academics, unionists and lawyers, is to compile a Green Paper on international migration. It will report to cabinet in May.
Researcher Sally Peberdy told the task team in Parliament this week that current immigration legislation was rooted in the racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia of past South African governments.
She said there should be a fresh start, with a new Immigration Act as the cornerstone, and a new ministry.
“South Africa needs to formulate a coherent, positive, proactive alternative vision of the role of immigration that recognises that immigration, properly managed, can be of great economic, social and cultural benefit to a receiving country,” she said.
The current Act governing the entry and exit of non-citizens is exclusive and defensive in nature, seeking to protect South African citizens from the threat of “outsiders” who might jeopardise their livelihood and be a drain on the state’s resources and Reconstruction and Development Programme.
While successfully keeping out many skilled foreigners, the policy, the department, and immigration officials have failed to stem the tide of immigrants from the rest of Africa, many of whom come illegally to South Africa to trade informally and are deported regularly at great cost to the taxpayer to their countries of origin. Researchers at the Human Sciences Research Council estimate that R210-million a year is spent on deporting illegal immigrants.
In 1990, 53 418 illegal immigrants were repatriated; by 1995 this had risen to 157 084.
The Mail & Guardian has also recorded instances where the Act, implemented by Home Affairs officials, has jeopardised foreign investment and the entry of needed skilled people.
Peberdy said South African immigration legislation had been developed with the original intention of keeping out all people except whites, and from the 1920s onwards laws were also used to diminish the stream of Jewish people coming to South Africa from Eastern Europe.
Arguing that the laws reflected the racial anxieties of the time, she described legislation introduced in Parliament in 1930 to control Jewish immigration to South Africa.
She quoted an internal government document of 1926, titled “Immigration of Hebrews into South Africa”, which read:”One in every four who has entered the Union this year is a Hebrew, generally of a low type …
“The European population of the Union is small and every possible endeavour should be made to strengthen it and to ensure the quality of any additions to it in order to preserve its position in relation to the hordes of native and coloured inhabitants …”
According to Peberdy, the 1930 Act provided the foundation for the Aliens Act of 1937, on which subsequent immigration legislation was built. This subsequent legislation also vested enormous powers in police and immigration officers, giving them the legal right to make arrests without warrants – powers which are still used in immigration policy today.
The legislation also gave the state the right to refuse entry to individuals seeking to immigrate without giving them reasons for their rejection, a practice deemed unconstitutional but which still happens today.
The task team is to hear a number of viewpoints on immigration over the next months. While some researchers will argue that South Africa ought to be more accommodating of people from neighbouring states, others such as Hussein Solomon of the Institute for Defence Policy, will maintain that illegal aliens are a threat to domestic and regional stability and should be controlled more strictly.
Solomon told the task team this week that illegal aliens were contributing to rising crime, having a negative impact on the labour market, increasing the problem of squatting and were a burden on the state.
He recommended bolstering border security and strengthening internal controls on the movement of foreigners within South African. His thesis was challenged by members of the task team.