Immigrants won't be sent back

South Africa will not order mass deportations of Zimbabwean immigrants without permits when an exercise to document illegal immigrants from its northern neighbour is completed next month.

Pretoria has refrained from deporting illegal Zimbabwean immigrants while carrying out a special project to issue permits to thousands who flock to their more prosperous neighbour in search for jobs and better living conditions.

Department of Home Affairs deputy director-general, Jackson McKay, told reporters in Pretoria this week that the Zimbabwe documentation project was almost complete. But he dismissed as "myths and legends" reports that the department would follow up the exercise with a clean-up operation to expel any remaining illegal Zimbabwean immigrants.

"I do not know how to deal with myths and legends with regard to the deportation of Zimbabweans ... and I do not know about trucks being parked anywhere for deportation."

McKay said immigration officials would not target Zimbabweans but would deport any foreign national staying in South Africa without permission to do so. Zimbabweans would conti-nue to be exempt from deportation until finalisation of the documentation exercise.

According to McKay, the department has to date adjudicated 273514 applications for permits and issued 133810.

Only 2248 applications remain to be adjudicated out of the 275762 received at the end of December 2010, the deadline that the department gave undocumented Zimbabweans to submit applications for permits.

McKay said the department will finish adjudicating remaining applications by July 31 and would use the month of August to finalise applications that have already been adjudicated but without any permits issued for one reason or another.

McKay added that the department was looking to approve as many as 99% of applications after it significantly lowered the bar for Zimbabweans to qualify for permits under the special documentation project.

The actual cut-off date for the documentation project will be set in consultation with the Zimbabwean government.

There are no exact figures of how many Zimbabweans live in South Africa, but various estimates put the number at anything above 1.5 million, or above an eighth of Zimbabwe's total population of 12 million people.

An outbreak of xenophobic violence in 2008 left at least 62 foreigners dead and thousands of others displaced, to leave South Africa's image as one of the most tolerant societies in the world tarnished.