White Paper on migration founders on existing labour policy - Politicsweb

Terence Corrigan 
Although long recognised as a determinant in South Africa’s skills ecosystem, migration has seldom been properly factored into the country’s policy response. It has certainly not been factored in successfully; as a 2023 review admitted: “Existing immigration policies have not worked well to attract skilled global talent.”

The White Paper on National Labour Migration Policy, released recently by the Department of Employment and Labour, attempts to remedy this.

Successful economies recognise the indispensable role that skills play in their economic prospects; they also understand that skills are mobile, and will follow opportunities, national borders notwithstanding.

So, among the White Paper’s recommendations is that “attraction and retention of skills, particularly of critical skills, in the country regardless of their origin (local or foreign) should be made a priority.”

Note the terms “attraction and retention”. The document’s thinking on skilled migration is that South Africa needs to join the global competition for skills, to entice skills from abroad to the country’s shores. Acknowledging the considerable losses of skills to emigration, it argues for working to bring these back, either temporarily or permanently, and that action is needed to keep skills in South Africa in the first place.

Few would quibble with that, and the document puts forward a raft of ideas to achieve these objectives. It also appeals for the various agencies and stakeholders concerned with migration to coordinate and cooperate better.

Conspicuously absent from the White Paper, however, is how its own proposals align with other demands made by the Department.

Foremost here are the new regulations and sectoral targets introduced recently in terms of the Employment Equity Act. These have (accurately enough) been described as quotas in all but name, and signal clearly that transformation objectives will be given priority over just about all other considerations. Prospective fines for non-compliance stand to be crippling if not ruinous to noncompliant firms.

Skills do not exist as a disembodied abstract concept, but are held by specific individuals. As the equity demands make clear, in the worldview of the Department (and the South African state more broadly), people are in the first instance avatars of their race. (Or “national group”, as the President has recently put it.) Far from esteeming skills “regardless of their origin”, the origin of skills is being made key to measuring their prospective utility.

The EEA regulations explicitly exclude two groups from their purview: white males without disabilities and foreign nationals.

The first group is likely to be disproportionately represented among skilled South African emigrees. The implied (and sometimes explicitly stated) goal of the EEA is to reduce the proportion and influence, and perhaps even the number, of white able-bodied male participants in the workforce, especially at senior levels. They – and their skills – are in official parlance, “overrepresented”.

No one should dispute that the pre-democracy educational and labour market disparities originated this state of affairs (though catastrophic failings of post-transition education cannot be ignored), but it remains a reality that skills are not apportioned evenly across the population.

The second group, non-South Africans, have tended to be seen as a deal with the devil: sometimes necessary in South Africa’s economy, but people whose presence must be restricted and whose admission must be exhaustively justified and weighed down with conditions. While more open to international recruitment than previous proposals, one can’t help noticing an ongoing reticence about them in the White Paper – specific skills-transfer measures, for example, might be tied to bringing in foreigners.

In either case, as long as racial apportionment (and an aversion to foreigners) remain bases of labour policy, it’s hard to see a successful skills migration policy having any chance of success. Simply put, there is insufficient space for the skills to be found abroad in the transformation scheme.

Perhaps more to the point is whether South Africa can make a credible offer to skilled people abroad. The White Paper pledges an “aggressive” approach, with a spread of activities, which “should ensure that they capture the full scope of the issue and develop appropriate, innovative and effective policy responses, that may range from regular diaspora mapping, counter-attrition policies based on international benchmarking for wages, incentives for temporary and permanent return, rosters of experts and coordination of professionals’ associations.”

But migration follows prospects for a better future; skilled migration is attracted not just to opportunities of remuneration, but to prospects for growth, for career mobility, for children’s life-chances and for the lifestyle congenialities.

South Africa is a growth laggard, with a dreadful unemployment problem, burdened by governance dysfunction tied to policy courses to which the government (especially the African National Congress) has shown itself doggedly committed. It is not a low-cost lifestyle destination, at least not for those earning locally, given the need to compensate for failing state offerings with privately procured services. Promised interventions such as the National Health Insurance threaten to destroy such options, at any price.

It also suffers a severe reputational problem following its obscene rates of violent crime, its dangerous road traffic, and its decaying urban centres. And as the White House showdown illustrated, the toxicity of its politics has not gone unnoticed. Cosplay revolutionaries chanting about killing may be a treasured part of South Africa’s heritage for its political caste, but is deeply chilling to those watching from Calcutta, Copenhagen or Cape Cod. It’s also a disincentive to South Africans who decamped abroad seeking safety and staid public affairs.

It's recently been reported that more than a million South Africans are living abroad. South Africa is failing not only in the attraction of skills, but in their retention. Increasingly, these are – to appropriate the thinking of the Department of Employment and Labour – “representative” of the country. Every day, another 74 are estimated to be joining them, taking their skills and invaluable economic contributions with them. If they are to be attracted back, and if they are to be accompanied by their foreign friends and business associates, South Africa has to offer a vastly different political and economic trajectory.

Until then, any policy, including that proposed in the White Paper, will fail to “work well to attract skilled global talent”.

Terrence Corrigan is projects and publications manager at the Institute of Race Relations

https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/white-paper-on-migration-founders-on-existing-labo#google_vignette