Ramaphosa names panel to review immigration law as Home Affairs clears permit backlog
The government has paired enforcement against illegal immigration with a formal review of the law and a push for regional cooperation, and the record shows both tracks are moving.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has kept the immigration question on the cabinet’s agenda through a combination of law enforcement, a formal review of the Immigration Act and quiet diplomacy with South Africa’s neighbours, and the record shows movement on all three tracks.
Home Affairs has been working through a permit backlog that built up over years, clearing applications that had left employers and families waiting, and the department has been explicit that the system it inherited was not fit for the volume it was asked to process. The department has said the backlog is being reduced, and it has reported progress on the issuing of critical skills and business visas that the economy needs.
A review of the law, not a slogan
The more consequential work is the review of the Immigration Act itself. A ministerial panel was appointed to examine whether the current framework gives the department the tools it needs, and to recommend changes to a law that has been amended piecemeal for two decades. That is the unglamorous work of governance, and it is the work that decides whether the next decade of immigration administration is any better than the last.
The question is not whether South Africa controls its borders. It is whether the state has the instruments to do so lawfully, and whether those instruments are being used.
The panel’s terms of reference cover the permit regime, the treatment of asylum seekers, and the enforcement powers available to inspectors. Its recommendations are expected to inform a new amendment bill, which would go to Parliament in the ordinary way, with public comment and committee scrutiny.
Diplomacy with the region
On the regional track, the presidency has taken the migration question to SADC and to the African Union, arguing that movement across the continent’s borders cannot be managed by any one country acting alone. That position has been repeated at summit level, and it has produced commitments on shared border management and on the documentation of cross-border traders.
It is slow work. Regional bodies move at the speed of their slowest member, and the commitments are not self-executing. But the alternative, which is for South Africa to treat a regional problem as a purely domestic one, has been tried and has not worked.
What the state is doing, and what it is not
Where the government deserves credit, it is for keeping the enforcement and the reform in the same conversation. The South African Police Service and Home Affairs inspectors have conducted operations against illegal immigration, and the department has been clear that the authority to enforce immigration law belongs to the state and not to any group or individual. That is the correct constitutional position, and it has been stated plainly.
Where the accountability question remains, it is about pace. The panel’s recommendations are not yet law. The backlog, while reduced, is not cleared. And the regional commitments have not yet produced a functioning shared system at the border. Those are fair questions to put to the department, and the department should answer them with dates.
The next dated step is the tabling of the panel’s recommendations and the amendment bill that follows. Until that bill is before Parliament, the review is a promise, and the backlog is the measure that matters.
