South Africa’s borders may become even more unwelcoming to asylum seekers

Source: The Daily Vox, 20/06/2017

Asylum seekers may face greater difficulties entering South Africa
once Parliament enacts legislation to create a new agency that will
have full control of the country’s borders and ports, and once the
department of home affairs opens new processing centres for asylum
seekers.


Border management is currently provided by several state departments
and agencies including the department of home affairs, the South
African Revenue Service (SARS) and the South African Police Service
(SAPS), overseen by the Border Control Operational Coordinating
Committee.


This month Parliament approved the controversial Border Management
Authority Bill, which could simultaneously subject asylum seekers to
far worse conditions than they currently face, while paving the way
for greater levels of corruption at the country’s ports of
entry.


One MP described the bill as “one of the worst pieces of legislation
that has come before the House” and the Daily Maverick’s Richard
Poplack dubbed it the country’s “next nightmare”.


Loren Landau, the South African Research Chair in Mobility and the
Politics of Difference at the African Centre for Migration and
Society, said he feared that the bill would create a largely
unaccountable agency that will regulate the border as much for profile
as for protection of South Africans or migrants. This could give rise
to greater levels of exploitation, organised crime and
violence.


For example, the bill empowers agents to search people without
warrants and to “seize anything found in that search or inspection
that may be lawfully seized”. Landau said asylum seekers were already
subject to a range of invasive practices, but that the checks proposed
in this bill “give officials enormous opportunities to extract
resources of various kinds from asylum seekers”.


One of the criticisms of the bill has been that resources collected by
customs â€" estimated to be worth R3-billion a year â€" would be collected
by home affairs rather than SARS, and that there was no indication of
how the money would be used. It is also unclear where the bill’s
proposed ‘border guards’ would be drawn from and what powers they
would hold.


Landau said we must ask whether the bill is solving a problem.
“Clearly there is an impression that it will solve uncontrolled
migration into South Africa. I don’t think that is such a problem and
I don’t think this bill …will address the problems that people think
we have,” he said.


Earlier this month, Minister of Home Affairs Hlengiwe Mkhize said in a
statement that the bill would represent a “radical shift from the
colonial and apartheid systems”. But Landau disagreed, saying the bill
suggests a recolonisation and nationalisation of border control “in
much of the way the militarisation of the borders happened during the
apartheid era.”


Meanwhile, government has been laying down plans to begin building
massive border camps in which to house the approximately 70 000 people
who apply for refugee status in South Africa each year.
Roshan Dadoo, director of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in
South Africa (Cormsa) said processing centres at borders urgently need
to be looked at. “These new processing centres are so unclear, even in
the Refugee Amendment Bill, the way it is worded means they will be
detention centres,” she said. This is because people would only be
allowed to leave the centres if they met specific requirements before
the interview deciding their refugee status is held.


According to the department of home affairs, over 90% of asylum
seekers don’t qualify for refugee status. Administrative errors have
also lead to a massive backlog of cases, a problem Dadoo said was not
being addressed by the Department of Home Affairs.


“What is needed is to improve the status adjudication system so people
can have interviews done in a much quicker way. At the moment, people
are running on asylum-seeker status for ten years or more.”


Although government says the Border Management Authority is being set
up to prevent drug-related crimes, human trafficking, the illegitimate
movement of goods and the unauthorised movement of persons, and that
its border processing centres are meant to reduce backlogs in
applications for asylum, these moves could further alienate asylum
seekers even future. With many South Africans already hostile towards
immigrants, the country could soon become an even more dangerous place
for those fleeing persecution in search of a better life