Cape Town - An inter-ministerial commission will present a revised immigration policy for South Africa to the Cabinet in a month’s time, Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe said at the World Economic Forum on Africa on Friday.
“We are looking to complete it in a month. It will then go to Cabinet,” Radebe told ANA after an at-times testy panel discussion on migration.
Radebe said the new draft policy would deal with “everything, refugees and economic migrants, all of it”.
During the earlier discussion, Radebe’s insistence that an African solution was needed to the mass influx of asylum- and job-seekers into South Africa from the rest of the continent, was met with some dissent.
The minister said unofficial estimates put the number of migrants in South Africa at six million.
“That is about ten percent of the population,” he said.
“We need an African solution in South Africa. We need infrastructure delivery across our borders so that we can create opportunities in all African societies so that we have a vibrant economy.”
Fellow panelist Ann Bernstein, head of the Centre for Development and Enterprise, suggested that this was unrealistic because of delivery timelines.
“We have to be a lot more realistic about South Africa’s migration policy. We need to manage migration,” Bernstein said. “Government cannot be making ambiguous statements.”
Radebe countered that realism meant considering facts. It was a fact, he said, that while South Africa was reeling from a wave of xenophobic attacks in early May, the government heard warnings that were the political situation in Burundi to destabilise, the Great Lakes region would see a refugee problem.
“As sure as the sun rises... more than 100 000 people have fled Burundi,” he said.
This showed, Radebe added, that it was impossible to for one single country to resolve its migration problems without addressing regional political and economic problems.
Khalid Koser, executive director of the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, pointed out that the influx of foreigners to South Africa was roughly as great as that to the entire European Union.
“We should not underestimate the challenges here.”
ANA