Thank you very much, hon House Chairperson. Ask any South African what they think of the Department of Home Affairs and the first two things that would come to mind are the painstakingly long queues and the systems that are perpetually offline. Ask the people of KwaZulu- Natal and they will speak about the poor service delivery that we see that some offices like the Umngeni office. Speak to our grandmothers in our deep rural areas and they will tell us how they have to spend R200 of their Sassa grant monies to travel to Home Affairs offices far away from their own homes, only to find that Home Affairs offices to where they have travelled are offline for days on end.
Perhaps, the biggest failure from this department is its failure to manage immigration. It is a fact that this department has no idea who is in South Africa, from which countries and whether those foreign nationals have entered our country legally or not. They have no clue whether any of the spaza shops or any of the Chinese malls are run by migrants with legal documentation or not.
The Department spends millions on deporting undocumented migrants back to their own countries, only for those economic migrants to cross back over the border because, in fact, there is no border. The Department of Home Affairs recently admitted that it has no legal capacity or resources to enforce its own immigration laws. Thus, now faces just close to R700 million in civil claims brought against it for these failures.
Amnesty international says that South Africa's broken asylum system leaves thousands of applicants undocumented, causing tensions with locals. In the same vein the SA Chamber of Commerce has warned that it is this department's failure to document migrants that leads to xenophobia. The question remains: Can this department fix itself and fix what is broken? Only time will tell.
In the spirit of wanting to fix what is broken, the IFP will support this Budgetary Review and Recommendation Report.
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