Two Pretoria migration specialists say that no valid scientific method exists to estimate the number of undocumented residents — often referred to as illegal aliens — in the country.
Dr Pieter Kok and Johan van Zyl, of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), said in the latest council publication, HSRC Review, that it was ”virtually impossible” to count illegal aliens correctly.
They were responding to the contents of a court application in Pretoria earlier this year in which a Department of Home Affairs senior official quoted figures which were attributed to an HSRC study.
In the application, the number of illegal aliens in South Africa was estimated at more than 4-million people.
But Kok and Van Zyl said in the HSRC Review the disputed figures came out of a poorly conceived and analysed immigration study done in the mid-90s, and which had been publicly withdrawn.
On Tuesday the results of Census 2001 were released, and Statistics SA (Stats SA) said among others, that an estimated one in six South Africans was not counted during the census in October 2001.
Despite the undercount, the final figure was believed to be ”reasonably accurate”. The final figure was calculated with adjustments for the undercount, which was uncovered during a post enumeration survey, Stats SA said.
Kok and Van Zyl said people who crossed borders without the necessary documentation or overstayed their visa requirements usually attempted to conceal their status, if not their presence and would evade any form of perceived official enquiry, to avoid being identified as illegal immigrants.
Their ”reluctance to identify themselves for fear of being harassed or repatriated should be understood”, they said.
A population census would be unlikely to count people who did not want to be counted, and all other surveys would have difficulty in identifying such people.
The only acceptable numbers were the official figures on ”overstayers” –people who entered the country legally but then violated their visa requirements, they said.
The migration experts said the methods used to arrive at the disputed figure contained fundamental flaws.
”The surveys asked clusters of households in a national sample if they knew of any illegal immigrants living nearby, but the analysts failed to correct for the probability of several households referring to the same immigrants.”
Trying to estimate the number of people who had entered the country without the necessary documentation was an attempt at ”counting the uncountable”.
Kok and Van Zyl also warned that quoting inaccurate information added to the immigration policy problems by fuelling xenophobic sentiments.
According to Census 2001, the latest official figures, about 2,3% — or one million — of the people counted in October 2001 were not born in South Africa.
One percent of the total of 44,8-million also were not South African citizens, and Stats SA deputy director general Dr Ros Hirschowitz said that respondents were not asked whether they were in South Africa legally or not.
Out of the total of 44,8-million people counted, 687 679 gave another member state of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) as their country of birth, 41 819 another African country and a further 228 314 a European one.
Of the non-SA citizens, 320 178 had citizenship of another SADC country, 24 983 of an African state outside SADC and 88 761 of a European state. – Sapa