Immigration bill hampers skills

The recently tabled draft Immigration Amendment Bill will hamper the immigration of skilled people to South Africa, the Law Society of the Northern Provinces warned on Thursday.

"The country needs to import skills as a bridging mechanism to deal with the skills vacuum. Yet the bill threatens... to tinker or even complicate the whole process of the importation of skills as currently provided for in the current Act," it said in a statement.

The draft bill, tabled last week, has yet to start its parliamentary passage, including inspection by the institution's home affairs portfolio committee.

The law society said the measure had been published against the background of an absence of a revised national policy framework, or an updated White Paper on migration.

"In essence, this is placing the cart before the horse."

It said that while there was no doubt the current Immigration Act needed changing, there were a significant number of proposed amendments in the draft bill that "require greater reflection".

One was that the "principles of the bill fly in the face of the stated intentions of the Immigration Act, which are to permit an easy flow of highly skilled foreigners and investors into South Africa".

It would limit incoming entrepreneurs and new businesses to those working in areas prescribed to be in the national interest.

"The number of jobs the new business might create, tax revenues generated or skills imparted is apparently of no consequence. This has to fly in the face of the country's international obligations on free trade," the law society said.

The Law Society of the Northern Provinces is a statutory body representing attorneys practising in Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and North West.