The government is to review the visa regime inherited from ”the bad old days”, Director General of Home Affairs Barry Gilder said on Tuesday.
He was speaking to journalists on the final day of a regional meeting of the United Nations-backed Global Commission on International Migration.
Gilder said South Africa’s current visa regime was, to some extent, inherited from the pre-1994 era.
Certain countries in South America with which the apartheid government had had good relations were exempt from visa requirements, while visitors from other states had to obtain visas.
In the Southern African Development Community there was ”no obvious logic” to visa requirements. Botswana, Lesotho and Swazi citizens did not need visas, while Zimbabweans and Mozambicans did.
Though there has been case-by-case lifting or relaxation of visa requirements since 1994 — for example, South Africa is about to conclude discussions with Mozambique — there has been no review of the entire visa regime, he said.
Issues that will have to be taken into consideration include South Africa’s relations with a particular country, whether there is a likelihood of ”problematic” migration, security concerns and reciprocity.
On a regional basis, making legal entry possible will discourage illegal migration and allow better management of cross-border movement, Gilder said.
Though the official immigration advisory board may be used as a sounding-board, the review is ”ultimately a political process”.
This week’s meeting of the global commission was the fourth of five regional gatherings of the body, which seeks to make recommendations for what a ”coherent, comprehensive global response” to migration.
Co-chairperson Dr Mamphela Ramphele, a World Bank manager, said the Cape Town meeting had been important in putting the voice of Africa on to a very Euro- and northern-centric international agenda.
In any development setting, countries need skills, and not even scarce skills. However, because of political imperatives, they pretend they do not.
If all the illegal migrants in California were repatriated, the state’s economy would ”close by breakfast time”, she said.
Her co-chairperson, Jan Karlsson, former Swedish minister for migration and asylum policy, said African countries that fail to recognise that the labour market is now global run the risk of a brain drain rather than a ”brain exchange”.
If these countries are to ”fight [their] way through”, they have to ensure that some of these migrants come back, enriched.
Mankind has always been mobile. ”The thing is we’re not only moving away, we’re also moving here … everywhere is the centre,” he said. — Sapa