Bid to contain asylum seekers
THE state is proposing a new approach that will mean asylum seekers will no longer be able to live and work in local communities while they wait to be processed for refugee status.
THE Department of Home Affairs is proposing a radical new approach to migrants, which will mean asylum seekers will no longer be able to live and work in local communities while they wait to be processed for refugee status.
SA has one of the highest numbers of incoming migrants in the world, which has led to fierce competition with locals for jobs and small business opportunities, sometimes manifesting in bouts of xenophobic violence.
Launching a new green paper on migration in Pretoria on Thursday, Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba said: “SA has become a major source, transit and destination country for mixed-migration flows which need to be managed more robustly if the process is to have clear and tangible benefits for the country in terms of economic development, social cohesion as well as security.”
The green paper was gazetted on June 24 for public consultation and the public have until September 30 to comment.
Gigaba said a new policy had to be found which balanced the rights and needs of South Africans with those of refugees and economic migrants from the region.
“National thinking and attitudes to international migration are currently influenced by an unproductive debate between those who call for stricter immigration controls and those who call for controls to be wholesale relaxed.
“The discourse is in general characterised by strong emotions, stereotypes, unreliable anecdotes and contested statistics,” he said.
The paper proposes that a distinction be made between refugees, whose status has been clarified, and asylum seekers who are awaiting determination by the authorities.
While refugees will be allowed to live, work and study in communities, asylum seekers will have to remain in processing centres as close to points of entry as possible, where all their needs will be cared for. It is also proposed that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Red Cross play a role in running the centres.
The paper recognises that 90% of migrants entering the country have an economic motive.
Three policy options are pro- posed for the Southern African Development Community (Sadc), which include: the status quo; free access to SA by all Sadc citizens; or a new permitting system that will allow a prescribed number of people from neighbouring states to live and work in SA. The options will be debated during the public consultation process.
Earlier in June the UNHCR estimated that 65.3-million people — almost 1% of the global population — were either refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced at the end of 2015. At one in 113, this was the highest level recorded.
Prof Loren Landau, a researcher at Wits University’s African Centre For Migration and Society and the South African research chair in mobility and the politics of difference, said the review was long overdue but seemed biased towards business considerations, skilled migrants and electoral considerations.
“On one side is strong effort to close and limit the access to asylum, which is not being accompanied by any effort to encourage development of economic avenues.”
While it appeared highly skilled migrants would still be able to enter, a failure to consider regional approaches to migration would simply encourage the development of underground economies, he said.