A task force reports that immigrants to South Africa need not be bad news, reports Marion Edmunds
THE Green Paper on immigration recommends scrapping the country’s current system and dealing with skilled immigrants as national assets. The proposals, handed to Minister of Home Affairs Mangosuthu Buthelezi last week, call for his department officials to be stripped of many of their powers, and for South Africa to seek to attract highly skilled foreigners and entrepreneurs.
The Green Paper, due to be gazetted this week for public comment, follows months of investigation by a task team led by Institute for a Democratic South Africa executive director, Wilmot James.
Buthelezi appointed the team late last year following long-running criticism that current policy, under the Aliens Control Act, is outdated, xenophobic and denies basic human rights. Home Affairs officials have also been accused of wielding excessive power over immigration policy.
If implemented, the recommendations will lessen such power, fundamentally changing the way the system operates.
“Immigration can … be viewed as being in the national interest and a potential aid rather than an impediment to nation- building,” the paper says.
“Because of our past, South Africans tend to take a negative view of immigration … Policy is therefore focused primarily on control and expulsion rather than facilitation and management … we argue that immigration policy needs to be refocused as an issue of growth and development.”
Home Affairs officials should be stripped of all their functions, other than those relating to citizenship and immigration, the proposals say. The department should be renamed the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The department should also be monitored by an independent immigration review board, which would serve as a board of appeal against the department’s decisions.
The Green Paper recommends that applications for immigration be determined by a points-for-skills system, where high point-scorers’ applications succeed.
“The challenge for South Africa is to transform a racially motivated immigration/migration system into a non- racial and rational policy response to the objective needs of our country,” the proposals say.
The proposals also suggest that immigration policy acknowledge the importance of foreign informal traders.
“The majority have no intention of remaining permanently in South Africa,” the paper says. “Most recycle their earnings from sales of imported goods into the South African economy by buying goods and stock to trade back home … hence contributing indirectly to job-creation in the South African manufacturing sector.”
The proposals also show particular concern to open up South Africa for greater interaction with the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
“South Africa should work in the longer term towards the freer movement of people within the region,” the paper says, but concedes that complete free movement is not viable as long as “gross regional economic disparities” exist. “Nevertheless as an indicator of the direction in which South Africa wishes to move, policy should differentiate between SADC-country citizens and those from elsewhere.”