The inconvenient truth is that none of SA’s economic woes can be pinned on immigrants, documented or not.
When in doubt, blame the foreigners. It worked for Donald Trump in his successful bid for the US presidency, and it’s working just fine for SA politicians eager to distract from their own failures.

All you need to do is take a struggling economy, throw in a few national identity crises, add in some populist grandstanding, and you’ve got yourself a fine scapegoat. Immigrants, especially the undocumented ones, are now the plug-in explanation for everything from unemployment to crumbling infrastructure and failing healthcare.

Across the Atlantic Trump and his disciples mastered this craft. “Build the wall!” became more than a slogan — it’s a movement, a rallying cry for what Hillary Clinton called “a basket of deplorables”, convinced that America’s problems could be solved by keeping out desperate people fleeing worse situations.
Now, executive orders flow freely. The latest masterpiece? Trying to scrap birthright citizenship, because nothing says “land of the free” like rewriting the constitution to banish babies from the “home of the brave”.

The result? An America where immigrants — especially those who happen to have the wrong skin tone — are automatically assumed to be criminals and freeloaders. That the economy depends on immigrant labour? Irrelevant. That most violent crime is committed by native-born citizens? Inconvenient.
SA politicians have not been tardy in taking a page from the global populist playbook. The scapegoat of choice isn’t just any immigrant — it’s the “illegal” foreigner, the faceless menace allegedly plundering resources and stealing jobs.

This brings us to the saga of illegal mining, the latest excuse for a xenophobic free-for-all. In the abandoned shafts of mining ghost towns in the North West province we had thousands of miners — most of them undocumented immigrants — trapped underground, starving and, according to reports, resorting to cannibalism.
What did our esteemed leadership propose? Sending help? Rescue? Involve the community? Of course not. Minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni demanded that they be “smoked out.” Because nothing screams good governance like leaving desperate people to die in a hole.

Meanwhile, mineral & petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe, never one to let a populist opportunity go to waste, labelled the miners “economic saboteurs”. A curious accusation considering the real economic sabotage has been happening in boardrooms and government contracts for decades. But why confront systemic failure when you can blame foreigners?

Nothing new here; remember Idi Amin? Distract the public with an “enemy” while dodging accountability. The more dire the crisis — crime, poverty, unemployment — the louder the anti-immigrant rhetoric. The inconvenient truth is that none of SA’s economic woes can be pinned on immigrants, documented or not. The housing crisis? A result of decades of poor planning and corruption. The unemployment rate? A casualty of economic mismanagement. Crumbling infrastructure? A direct consequence of looting on a grand scale.

But pointing fingers at immigrants is easier than admitting failure. It’s also more effective. People love a simple narrative, and “foreigners are the problem” is far easier to digest than “we’ve systematically mismanaged the country for years”.
If you thought this was just an SA or American problem, think again. Ask Elon Musk, whose platform, X (known as Twitter before he had a branding epiphany) has become a global breeding ground for misinformation and hysteria masquerading as “free speech”. Whether it’s election fraud conspiracies, transphobic tirades or good, old-fashioned immigrant bashing. Musk’s free speech crusade has turned his social media empire into a safe space for the world’s most unhinged ideas.

But back at the ranch, sitting on sofas stuffed with dollars, President Cyril Ramaphosa might ask himself at what point democracy becomes a hollow shell of itself. When a government scapegoats its most vulnerable instead of protecting them? When populist fearmongering replaces fact-based policy? When leaders openly dismiss humanitarian crises because they involve the “wrong” kind of people?
When profit trumps the struggles of ordinary folk, I remember Marikana.

How can we help you?
Please email us to info@samigration.com
Whatsapp message us on: +27 82 373 8415

Where are you now?
Check our website : www.samigration.com

Please rate us by clinking on this links :
Sa Migration Visas
https://g.page/SAMigration?gm

The inconvenient truth is that none of SA’s economic woes can be pinned on immigrants, documented or not.
When in doubt, blame the foreigners. It worked for Donald Trump in his successful bid for the US presidency, and it’s working just fine for SA politicians eager to distract from their own failures.

All you need to do is take a struggling economy, throw in a few national identity crises, add in some populist grandstanding, and you’ve got yourself a fine scapegoat. Immigrants, especially the undocumented ones, are now the plug-in explanation for everything from unemployment to crumbling infrastructure and failing healthcare.

Across the Atlantic Trump and his disciples mastered this craft. “Build the wall!” became more than a slogan — it’s a movement, a rallying cry for what Hillary Clinton called “a basket of deplorables”, convinced that America’s problems could be solved by keeping out desperate people fleeing worse situations.
Now, executive orders flow freely. The latest masterpiece? Trying to scrap birthright citizenship, because nothing says “land of the free” like rewriting the constitution to banish babies from the “home of the brave”.

The result? An America where immigrants — especially those who happen to have the wrong skin tone — are automatically assumed to be criminals and freeloaders. That the economy depends on immigrant labour? Irrelevant. That most violent crime is committed by native-born citizens? Inconvenient.
SA politicians have not been tardy in taking a page from the global populist playbook. The scapegoat of choice isn’t just any immigrant — it’s the “illegal” foreigner, the faceless menace allegedly plundering resources and stealing jobs.

This brings us to the saga of illegal mining, the latest excuse for a xenophobic free-for-all. In the abandoned shafts of mining ghost towns in the North West province we had thousands of miners — most of them undocumented immigrants — trapped underground, starving and, according to reports, resorting to cannibalism.
What did our esteemed leadership propose? Sending help? Rescue? Involve the community? Of course not. Minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni demanded that they be “smoked out.” Because nothing screams good governance like leaving desperate people to die in a hole.

Meanwhile, mineral & petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe, never one to let a populist opportunity go to waste, labelled the miners “economic saboteurs”. A curious accusation considering the real economic sabotage has been happening in boardrooms and government contracts for decades. But why confront systemic failure when you can blame foreigners?

Nothing new here; remember Idi Amin? Distract the public with an “enemy” while dodging accountability. The more dire the crisis — crime, poverty, unemployment — the louder the anti-immigrant rhetoric. The inconvenient truth is that none of SA’s economic woes can be pinned on immigrants, documented or not. The housing crisis? A result of decades of poor planning and corruption. The unemployment rate? A casualty of economic mismanagement. Crumbling infrastructure? A direct consequence of looting on a grand scale.

But pointing fingers at immigrants is easier than admitting failure. It’s also more effective. People love a simple narrative, and “foreigners are the problem” is far easier to digest than “we’ve systematically mismanaged the country for years”.
If you thought this was just an SA or American problem, think again. Ask Elon Musk, whose platform, X (known as Twitter before he had a branding epiphany) has become a global breeding ground for misinformation and hysteria masquerading as “free speech”. Whether it’s election fraud conspiracies, transphobic tirades or good, old-fashioned immigrant bashing. Musk’s free speech crusade has turned his social media empire into a safe space for the world’s most unhinged ideas.

But back at the ranch, sitting on sofas stuffed with dollars, President Cyril Ramaphosa might ask himself at what point democracy becomes a hollow shell of itself. When a government scapegoats its most vulnerable instead of protecting them? When populist fearmongering replaces fact-based policy? When leaders openly dismiss humanitarian crises because they involve the “wrong” kind of people?
When profit trumps the struggles of ordinary folk, I remember Marikana.

How can we help you?
Please email us to info@samigration.com
Whatsapp message us on: +27 82 373 8415

Where are you now?
Check our website : www.samigration.com

Please rate us by clinking on this links :
Sa Migration Visas
https://g.page/SAMigration?gm

The inconvenient truth is that none of SA’s economic woes can be pinned on immigrants, documented or not.
When in doubt, blame the foreigners. It worked for Donald Trump in his successful bid for the US presidency, and it’s working just fine for SA politicians eager to distract from their own failures.

All you need to do is take a struggling economy, throw in a few national identity crises, add in some populist grandstanding, and you’ve got yourself a fine scapegoat. Immigrants, especially the undocumented ones, are now the plug-in explanation for everything from unemployment to crumbling infrastructure and failing healthcare.

Across the Atlantic Trump and his disciples mastered this craft. “Build the wall!” became more than a slogan — it’s a movement, a rallying cry for what Hillary Clinton called “a basket of deplorables”, convinced that America’s problems could be solved by keeping out desperate people fleeing worse situations.
Now, executive orders flow freely. The latest masterpiece? Trying to scrap birthright citizenship, because nothing says “land of the free” like rewriting the constitution to banish babies from the “home of the brave”.

The result? An America where immigrants — especially those who happen to have the wrong skin tone — are automatically assumed to be criminals and freeloaders. That the economy depends on immigrant labour? Irrelevant. That most violent crime is committed by native-born citizens? Inconvenient.
SA politicians have not been tardy in taking a page from the global populist playbook. The scapegoat of choice isn’t just any immigrant — it’s the “illegal” foreigner, the faceless menace allegedly plundering resources and stealing jobs.

This brings us to the saga of illegal mining, the latest excuse for a xenophobic free-for-all. In the abandoned shafts of mining ghost towns in the North West province we had thousands of miners — most of them undocumented immigrants — trapped underground, starving and, according to reports, resorting to cannibalism.
What did our esteemed leadership propose? Sending help? Rescue? Involve the community? Of course not. Minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni demanded that they be “smoked out.” Because nothing screams good governance like leaving desperate people to die in a hole.

Meanwhile, mineral & petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe, never one to let a populist opportunity go to waste, labelled the miners “economic saboteurs”. A curious accusation considering the real economic sabotage has been happening in boardrooms and government contracts for decades. But why confront systemic failure when you can blame foreigners?

Nothing new here; remember Idi Amin? Distract the public with an “enemy” while dodging accountability. The more dire the crisis — crime, poverty, unemployment — the louder the anti-immigrant rhetoric. The inconvenient truth is that none of SA’s economic woes can be pinned on immigrants, documented or not. The housing crisis? A result of decades of poor planning and corruption. The unemployment rate? A casualty of economic mismanagement. Crumbling infrastructure? A direct consequence of looting on a grand scale.

But pointing fingers at immigrants is easier than admitting failure. It’s also more effective. People love a simple narrative, and “foreigners are the problem” is far easier to digest than “we’ve systematically mismanaged the country for years”.
If you thought this was just an SA or American problem, think again. Ask Elon Musk, whose platform, X (known as Twitter before he had a branding epiphany) has become a global breeding ground for misinformation and hysteria masquerading as “free speech”. Whether it’s election fraud conspiracies, transphobic tirades or good, old-fashioned immigrant bashing. Musk’s free speech crusade has turned his social media empire into a safe space for the world’s most unhinged ideas.

But back at the ranch, sitting on sofas stuffed with dollars, President Cyril Ramaphosa might ask himself at what point democracy becomes a hollow shell of itself. When a government scapegoats its most vulnerable instead of protecting them? When populist fearmongering replaces fact-based policy? When leaders openly dismiss humanitarian crises because they involve the “wrong” kind of people?
When profit trumps the struggles of ordinary folk, I remember Marikana.

How can we help you?
Please email us to info@samigration.com
Whatsapp message us on: +27 82 373 8415

Where are you now?
Check our website : www.samigration.com

Please rate us by clinking on this links :
Sa Migration Visas
https://g.page/SAMigration?gm

Accurate information about the population is vital for the public and private sectors to be able to make effective decisions and implement policies properly, the writer says. Picture: 123RF
US President Donald Trump recently stated that many centenarians, allegedly aged from 100 up to 360, have been receiving social security benefit payments in the US. Though these have been revealed to be inaccurate and inflated numbers, evidence of any such payments over an extended period would be symptomatic of a defective population register.

Government efficiency can easily be undermined by a flawed population register. Accurate information about the population is vital for the public and private sectors to be able to make effective decisions and implement policies properly. Perfecting record collection, promoting and facilitating population interaction with those records and purging errors is rightfully a goal of any functioning democracy, but for some — including SA — implementation remains an ambition that faces many practical challenges.

In its early stages of implementation (1950s-1990s) the SA population register was underpinned by racial panopticism, and today it remains encumbered by bureaucratic mismanagement and incompetence, fraud and the phenomenon of citizenry dissociation. The National Population Register thus remains highly inaccurate. The ripple effect of this, with a national census with an undercount believed to be 30% or more, should be cause of great concern.

Under the auspices of the Identification Act of 1997 a more efficient management of the register was meant to be promoted and followed. Biometric smart-IDs are the latest, alas decade long, attempt to get things right once and for all. Though home affairs minister Leon Schreiber initially confirmed his department’s goal of phasing out green ID books by 2025, the challenges faced in achieving full implementation are magnified by the past mismanagement of the population register, which remains dogged by a history of fraud, “clerical errors” and missing records.

Plenty has already been said about the underlying issue of fraud. Only last year 700,000 IDs were blocked by the department in its bid to clamp down on fraud. Two weeks ago it was reported that Anabela Rungo, mother of withdrawn Miss SA contestant Chidimma Adetshina, was being detained pending deportation.
For decades many SA citizens have dissociated themselves from the register and its purpose. About 100,000 children born in SA every year are not registered at birth. To this number one must add all foreign-born SA children who were not registered at birth over the years. Unsurprisingly, late registration of births, which the department of home affairs wanted to stop entirely in 2015, remains a necessity in the SA landscape.

Many South Africans who have married abroad have, over the years, failed to register their marriages in SA. This has led to a recent pattern of rejections of spousal visas and permanent residence applications, despite that in terms of the SA Immigration Act the definition of “marriage” includes “a marriage concluded in terms of the laws of a foreign country”.

The department has no way to know whether a citizen has married overseas, has had children, or has acquired another citizenship, unless the citizen stays proactively connected with the SA government. Citizenry dissociation is partly responsible for the impeachment of the population register.
There are also far too many cases of “clerical errors” (read “institutional incompetence”), which over time affect many individuals who are unaware of the error until their identity is suddenly purged. It’s not just about numbers — behind each of these compromised or missing records are real people, their lives and stories. Each breach or lacuna affects the life of an individual and can jeopardise an identity, with no redress. Here is one of their stories.

A tale of institutional incompetence
Zain (a pseudonym) was born in Cape Town in early 2015 of an SA permanent resident father, an accomplished global equity analyst and asset manager. His parents, both from Pakistan, registered Zain’s birth with home affairs and were issued a birth certificate. Home affairs officials told his parents that Zain had been born an SA citizen, and his SA birth certificate confirmed that Zain was registered in the National Population Register as an SA citizen against an identity number.

The issuance of the birth certificate was the first of no fewer than three shocking “clerical errors” perpetuated for a full decade by the department, due to incompetence and lack of legal training. In 2015, two years after the coming into effect of the SA Citizenship Amendment Act of 2010, home affairs officials were still oblivious to a fundamental change in the legislation. That is, effective January 1 2013, in terms of the amended act the child born in SA of a permanent resident parent was no longer born a citizen.
As his father’s profession entails frequent travel, an application for Zain’s first SA passport quickly followed the registration of his birth. The passport application gave the department a second opportunity to implement due checks and balances, yet this did not happen and Zain’s first SA passport was issued in 2015 when he was only four months old.

Pakistan only has dual nationality agreements with 22 countries, and SA is not among them. As SA passports have historically outranked Pakistani passports in terms of global mobility scores, faced with the option his parents easily and reasonably settled on SA citizenship and passport for Zain.
In 2017 Zain’s father’s work led the family to relocate to the United Arab Emirates and Zain travelled on his SA passport while living there. As children’s passports are valid for five years, in 2020 Zain’s passport was due for renewal. The SA embassy in the UAE forwarded the renewal application to home affairs in Pretoria and again it failed in its role of custodianship and issued a new passport to Zain.
Fast forward to today. Zain is now 10 and has already travelled to the UK, Turkey, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Pakistan on his SA passport, and visa applications have been processed on that passport throughout. But recently, another passport renewal application was submitted via the embassy, and home affairs finally latched onto the error. An official from the embassy called Zain’s father and politely yet unapologetically informed him that Zain was not an SA citizen and he would therefore not be issued a new passport.

Zain has no redress against home affairs’ incompetence and his family is now left to face the many complications that will follow, with nothing more than a one-page letter issued by home affairs stating the conclusion. No accountability, no official explanation that can be shown to other governments with which Zain has interacted as an SA citizen.

Sadly, Zain’s story is far from unique. Many other children who were born in SA after January 1 2013 of at least one permanent resident parent, will be faced with the same stark realisation as their lives progress and their identities are suddenly purged. Unless Schreiber’s home affairs can rise above the issues of the past, some of these children will soon be writing matric, buying property, marrying and having children, all under an identity they were never entitled to in the first place.

The error could be endlessly perpetuated, creating yet more innocent victims of the institutional vandalism that has plagued the department for far too long...

How can we help you?
Please email us to info@samigration.com
Whatsapp message us on: +27 82 373 8415

Where are you now?
Check our website : www.samigration.com

Please rate us by clinking on this links :
Sa Migration Visas
https://g.page/SAMigration?gm

The father, who has been embroiled in a protracted legal conflict with his former partner since July 2024, initiated an application to seek contact with his daughter.

In a significant ruling heralded as a victory for parental rights, a father seeking access to his seven-year-old daughter and to have his name on her birth certificate has succeeded in a landmark case at the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg.
The father, who has been embroiled in a protracted legal conflict with his former partner since July 2024, initiated an application to seek contact with his daughter. The couple, who were never married, faced challenges reaching a settlement on their own, ultimately compelling the father to escalate the matter to the courts after the mother’s attorney asserted, he would not gain access without a formal court order.

In subsequent legal proceedings, tensions heightened when the mother failed to respond promptly, only submitting her affidavit just before the hearing was set to commence. Judge Seena Yacoob expressed concern over the lack of substantial evidence presented by the mother, particularly in light of the father’s documented claims and evidence supporting his application.

A core issue that emerged was the mother’s refusal to include the father's name on the child's birth certificate. She argued that this would impede her plans to relocate to Papua New Guinea for a lucrative job opportunity. However, Judge Yacoob highlighted the absence of factual support for this claim, which raised alarms about the potential implications of the mother taking the child abroad without the father’s consent.

Given that she possessed both a passport and a birth certificate solely in her name, Judge Yacoob ordered that the child's passport be surrendered to an independent attorney. This measure would prevent the mother from travelling internationally with the child without both parents' agreement.
Regarding the father's access to the child, the mother argued that the father already had contact, but it was noted that the father had to bring an application after he was told by the mother's attorney that he would not get contact without a court order. The judge said it would be in the interest of the child for there to be an order to avoid any change being made unilaterally.

In addressing the father's request for his name to be added to the birth certificate, Judge Yacoob elucidated that the law provided no valid justification to refuse this relief. The judge indicated that objections were largely driven by the mother’s logistical preferences rather than any substantiated legal rationale. Furthermore, it was determined that facilitating the father's inclusion on the birth certificate would serve the best interests of the child and reinforce the father’s role in her life.

Sustaining a balanced approach, the judge acknowledged the father's concerns about the current parenting coordinator, noting that while his apprehensions were justified, a comprehensive assessment would be necessary to avoid frivolous claims hampering crucial parental agreements.

How can we help you?
Please email us to info@samigration.com
Whatsapp message us on: +27 82 373 8415

Where are you now?
Check our website : www.samigration.com

Please rate us by clinking on this links :
Sa Migration Visas
https://g.page/SAMigration?gm