South Africa’s new immigration policy takes a digital direction – will it succeed?

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber. Picture: Gallo Images / Jaco Marais South Africa has a new draft white paper on immigration, citizenship and refugees. This, the fourth in three decades, represents a step change from the previous efforts.

It is a genuine attempt to develop an efficient but humane set of policies. Based on my work on migration over two decades, I am convinced that the policies in this new paper are far more ambitious than previous reforms. They represent a genuine attempt to address a complex and sensitive set of challenges in a comprehensive way, using state-of-the-art technological tools.

The key question is: are the reforms practically and politically feasible? The first post-apartheid immigration white paper, published in 1997, led to the new Immigration Act of 2002. This was the second significant reform to immigration policy in the post-apartheid era.

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The first was the Refugee Act of 1998. The Refugee Act represented a bold realignment. In it South Africa acceded to global and African refugee treaties.

It also placed human rights at the centre of the policy. The 2002 Immigration Act was reformist rather than revolutionary. It was rightly criticised for not getting to grips with the legacy of migration patterns in southern Africa.

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