(Bloomberg) -- South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs plans to start consultations over the fate of about 230,000 migrants from Zimbabwe and Lesotho after a court thwarted its attempt to deport them.
The department will now hold consultations without a “pre-determined outcome,” Leon Schreiber, who was appointed as home affairs minister late last month, said in an interview Wednesday.
The presence of migrants in South Africa is a fraught political issue in a country with an unemployment rate of more than 30% and a government that’s struggled to supply basic services. The country has been hit by periodic xenophobic riots since 2008 and the decision to end the special permits for those Zimbabwean and Lesotho nationals had been portrayed by some critics as an attempt to bolster support for the then ruling party, the African National Congress.
The court told us “you can’t have a pre-determined outcome and then retroactively pretend to consult,” said Schreiber, a member of the Democratic Alliance, which is in a ruling coalition with the ANC following May 29 elections. “We need to actually see what works for South Africa and what works for the affected people.”
Schreiber’s predecessor, Aaron Motsoaledi, had in 2021 set in motion a process that would force the migrants, most of whom have had the right to live and work in South Africa since 2009, to apply for other categories of work permits, which most would not qualify for, or leave the country. That led to a legal battle that culminated in the department losing an appeal in the Constitutional Court in June.
The 2009 decision to allow the Zimbabweans to stay in the country legally was based on that country’s economic collapse and there has been little improvement since. Today, the 178,000 Zimbabweans who benefited from that decision along with many hundreds of thousands of documented and undocumented migrants from the country work in a variety of occupations in the country ranging from chief executive officers to gardeners and waiters.
The Lesotho Exemption Permit was implemented in 2016 because of what the department described as a “socio-economic” crisis in that country.
Currently those under the permits are legally allowed to remain in the country until Nov. 29 next year.
Schreiber said he is reconstituting an immigration advisory board, that despite being a legal requirement hasn’t been in place for a decade, and will tap its expertise to design a way forward.
(Updates with advisory board in last paragraph)
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