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Migration issues highly politicised â€" home affairs minister

Source: The Citizen, 05/10/2017


South Africa is grappling with balancing entry for skilled migrants
and refugees with creating jobs for its 27.7% unemployed citizens.
Migration issues were “highly politicised” because they involved power
relations and contestation for space and scarce resources, that’s
according to the minister of home affairs, Professor Hlengiwe Mkhize.
“Migration issues are highly politicised, they are about power
relations amongst those who are migrating and the receiving countries.
It’s about contestation of space and scarce resources,” she said.
Mkhize was speaking at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Westville
campus in Durban on Thursday during a dialogue on the management of
international migration.
South Africa is grappling with balancing entry for skilled migrants
and refugees with creating jobs for its 27.7% unemployed citizens â€"
the highest in over a decade.
Mkhize said that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
announced this week that, “an unprecedented 65.6 million people around
the world have been forced from home. Amongst these, there are nearly
22.5 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.”
The home affairs minister said South Africa was questioning the
capacity it had to absorb more people and how it would relate to
migrants’ countries of origin.
“The thinking is that as people migrate from their countries, the host
countries should have on-going engagements with the countries of
origin so that, you hope, as their circumstances improve, there will
be possibilities of secure repatriation.”
As a member state of the United Nations, South Africa needed to guide
migratory processes and look after refugees, she said.
“The whole idea is that we have to protect the safety, dignity, human
rights and fundamental freedoms of all immigrants, regardless of their
migratory status, at all times.”
Mkhize admitted that it was seen as contradictory that the country had
embraced the African Union’s Agenda 2063 but was also putting in place
interventions that controlled migration, such as border management.
Agenda 2063 calls for an integrated and politically united Africa and
the free movement of people, capital, goods and services.
“We must know what is of national interest. It is important for us to
secure our borders. If we don’t, we will end up with a situation where
citizens have the impression that the government is failing to control
migration,” she said.
According to the country’s White Paper for International Migration:
“The current average of 62,000 asylum applications per annum makes
South Africa the highest recipient of individual asylum seekers in
Africa”.
The majority are from Zimbabwe, followed by Ethiopia, DRC and Nigeria.
The paper also says that the majority of illegal migrants come from
neighbouring countries.
“Of the total number of 369,726 migrants that were deported between
January 2012 and December 2016, nationals from Mozambique, Zimbabwe
and Lesotho made up 88%.”
The most likely reason a person applied for either a temporary or
permanent residency visa was linked to spouses joining their partner,
according to the paper.
The Paper states that during the 2014/15 financial year, of the 1955
applications for permanent residence based on marriage grounds “… 74%
of these applications (1,362) were recommended for rejection on the
basis that the marriages were found to be fraudulent”.


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