Breakfast with Gigaba: South Africanization of immigration policy

Source: Gary S Eisenberg, 03/06/2016

A few days ago I had the honour of having breakfast with the Minister
of Home Affairs, Malusi Gigaba, at the Cape Town Press Club.


The Minister is a stylish gentlemen, articulate, with sharp
intellectual acuity. While I engaged with him, he looked into the
distance beyond us, obviously with a specific vision in mind. The
Minister certainly has flair and is well seasoned, having occupied the
positions of Deputy Home Affairs Minister, Minister of Public
Enterprises, and now Minister of Home Affairs.


Gigaba extolled the Department of Home Affairs as a "modern, digital,
secure custodian of national identity, responding to the present and
future needs and circumstances and run by professionals, operating in
a highly secured environment to protect the precious records of the
lives of our people."


While the Minister`s "re-imagined" Home Affairs is laudable, it also
reflects a disturbing myopia. The Minister`s address was extraordinary
in its silence on a policy which recognises the essential importance
of foreigners and their contribution to making South Africa a better
and more competitive country. The Minister`s emphasis on border
security and the establishment of the border management agency is the
touchstone of a closed South Africa, a fortress against the influx of
skills and foreign direct investment.


It is now crystal clear that Minister Gigaba is an isolationist, bent
on the creation of a Department of Home Affairs for South Africans,
not for immigrants. Foreigners are now anathema to South Africa`s
closed border policy. In a modern, open world, the Minister falls on
his own sword.


The United States Federal Reserve Bank found, through extensive
research that "immigrants expand the economy`s productive capacity by
stimulating investment and promoting specialization…this produces
efficiency gains and boosts income per worker". It was found that this
economic impact on the inflow of foreigners is owed in part to the
fact that immigrants tend to be "exceptional people" who strive to
overcome adversity. Professor Ian Goldin, once the managing director
of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, and now professor of
Globalisation at Oxford University, concludes that the diversity that
foreigners bring serves as a catalyst that spurs creativity and
performance, in business, academia, medicine, science, politics, food,
culture, entertainment and sports. In writing for the World Economic
Forum, Professor Goldin concludes that "migration has always been one
of the most important drivers of human progress and dynasim…and in the
age of globalisation, barriers to migration pose a threat to economic
growth and sustainability."


What Minister Gigaba seems to be accomplishing is the creation of a
modern, efficient government department which delivers super optimised
services to South Africans while rendering dismally inefficient
services to foreigners. This profound disparity illustrates my point
without more.


Radical amendments to the Immigration Act in May 2014 have created
unprecedented bureaucratic barriers to the inflow of migrants, the
very people government declares it is targeting. Last year some 51% of
all temporary and permanent residence applications submitted in South
Africa were denied, mostly for reasons which are nonsensical.


The general work visa program is paralyzed by the involvement of the
Department of Labour which militantly protects employment
opportunities for South Africans and rarely if ever issues to
foreigners the obligatory certifications required to support such work
visas. Critically skilled foreigners must abide by the most strenuous
regulatory requirements imaginable. Business visa applicants, on the
basis of foreign direct investments, now have to obtain the support of
the Department of Trade & Industry, and most of these foreigners
simply give up because the process is too frustrating and laborious to
make it worth their while. Even the most patently incorrect refusals,
once appealed, force applicants to wait for so long (up to a year or
longer) that the entire process becomes moot.


South Africa is, in historical terms, a country of foreigners.
Buntu-speaking Africans moved south of the Limpopo River about 1500
years ago and since then waves of immigrants from Africa and Europe
have taken place. The Portuguese in the 1600`s, French in the 1700`s,
English in the early 1800`s and since the 1880`s Jews, escaping from
Eastern European Pogroms, settled in this Country, all of these
extraneous communities contributing wealth, creativity, diversity, and
South Africa`s competitiveness. South Africa has also enjoyed the
fruit of other important minorities including the Greek, Italian and
Lebanese communities, to name a few others.


Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu termed the phrase "Rainbow People of God" to
describe the unity of South Africa`s multi-culturalism. South Africa
is a nation of foreigners, but we seem to have arrived at a point in
our history where South Africa has made it its policy to stem the tide
on foreigners, closing the draw-bridge which divides South Africa from
the rest of the world..