Migrants bring skills – report

2009-06-23 12:26

Cape Town - Restricting migration is no solution to South Africa's problems, and could even hamper the country's development, according to a newly-released report.

The report was compiled by the Johannesburg-based Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in SA, an NGO whose members include a range of human rights organisations.

The report said that as the economy slowed and South Africans began to lose jobs, there would be growing pressure for even more restrictive migration policies.

"However, bowing to these pressures would be backward-looking, regressive and self-defeating," it read.

"We will find no answers to South Africa's problems by halting migration."

Most migrants bring skills, resources

While a small number of the migrants had humanitarian needs, most were self-sufficient. Many brought skills and resources that generated jobs.

"As such, migration is not a threat to South Africans' economic or physical security. Managed properly, it could lead to investment, job creation and a more productive economy."

South Africa was unlikely to meet its development targets without significant levels of migration of skilled and semi-skilled labour into the country.

And if, as the May 2008 xenophobia had illustrated, it could not protect the migrants within its borders, it would struggle to recruit the people it needed.

Properly managed, migration could, as it had done in South Africa in the past and was doing elsewhere in the world, promote the welfare of all living in the country.

Anti-immigrant sentiments

"To realise this end, we need to move beyond the deceptive goal of sealing off the South African border.

"This has not been possible anywhere in the world... We already spend millions deporting people who are working and paying taxes."

Rather than promote the domestic and regional benefits of mobility, official discussion in South Africa continued to dwell on the risks migration might present to citizens' economic and physical security.

"Anti-immigrant sentiments within and outside of government hinder efforts to develop progressive, developmental migration policies," the report noted.

It said Zimbabwe's temporary political stabilisation had neither stopped nor slowed new arrivals of Zimbabweans in South Africa.

Similar levels of migration should continue for the next two to five years, and could rise if the government of national unity collapsed.

- SAPA