SA Migration International

News Articles

Home Affairs commits to implementing remote working visa by end of June

Source: Cape Argus, 10/05/2023

The report recommended, among others, the introduction of new visa categories to cater for remote workers and start-ups.
implementation of the much-talked about and long-awaited Remote Working Visa is within reach after a commitment from the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) to finalise the remaining legal processes by the end of next month.
Acting deputy director-general Immigration, Nischal Jaynarayan, told the legislature’s Standing Committee on Finance, Economic Opportunities and Tourism that the state Law Adviser approval process was under way.
The committee had invited officials from DHA, the Airports Company South Africa, the provincial Department of Economic Development and Tourism (Dedat), and Wesgro for an update on the introduction of the visa.
Making his presentation to the committee, Jaynarayan said a comprehensive report on the review of the work visa system was recently handed to the Presidency by the Operation Vulindlela team led by former director-general of Home Affairs, Mavuso Msimang.
“The DHA has drafted an implementation plan for the introduction of the remote working visa as recommended by the Operation Vulindlela report.”
The report recommended, among others, the introduction of new visa categories to cater for remote workers and start-ups.
“These new visa categories will be included in the revised Immigration Regulations to be published by the end of June 2023, subject to State Law Adviser approval and public consultation.”
The province has been campaigning for the introduction of the visa since May 2021, when it sent a comprehensive proposal to the government.
The proposal was for a short-term remote work visa for an initial one-year period, with the option to renew it for two more years.
During last year’s State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the visa would be implemented soon. He made the same pledge in this year’s Sona.
Committee chairperson Cayla Murray (DA) said: “The implementation of a remote working visa is a no-brainer as it brings remote workers with a stable income to our shores to provide a boost to the local economy by spending their money on accommodation, food and entertainment.”
She said the committee would follow up to ensure the DHA stuck to its commitment.
Provincial Director of Tourism Jacques Stoltz told the committee that Dedat had started working with the Department of Higher Education at a National Working Group regarding the critical skills visa.

Search

Latest News

As a South African who has adopted a nomadic work lifestyle alongside my wife, Ingrid Lotze, I’ve been an interested observer of South Africa’s snail-pace digital nomad visa (DNV) development process. Despite the optimism surrounding its introduction, the visa seems to miss several crucial marks for digital nomads like us.... Read more...

EREMY MAGGS: I want to stay with crime now. Individuals with a criminal record may be faced with significant challenges when seeking employment, I think that’s a given. Here in South Africa, employers may legally exclude an applicant from consideration for a position if having a clean criminal record is what is termed an inherent requirement of the job. That phrase, inherent requirement, is important, but what exactly does that mean, and when can an applicant be lawfully excluded for having a criminal record?... Read more...

There are fears that more people will be separated by the introduction of a minimum salary level for those wanting UK family visas. Families living in the UK and abroad have raised concerns about what new rules will mean for them as they try to reunite with foreign spouses. In December, the Home Office, which says migration to the UK is too high, announced a package of measures to reduce net migration, following a spike in arrival numbers.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail.Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail. Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

North Korean hackers have been exploiting the updating mechanism of the eScan antivirus to plant backdoors on big corporate networks and deliver cryptocurrency miners through GuptiMiner malware. Researchers describe GuptiMiner as `a highly sophisticated threat` that can perform DNS requests to the attacker`s DNS servers, extract payloads from images, sign its payloads, and perform DLL sideloading. Delivering GuptiMiner via eScan updates In a report released today, cybersecurity company Avast says that the threat actor behind GuptiMiner had an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) position to hijack the normal virus definition update package and replace it with a malicious one named ‘updll62.dlz.’... Read more...

Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) this week revealed that Cape Town International Airport (CTIA) has achieved a ground-breaking milestone by processing more than 10 million passengers over a single financial year. This is the highest number of regional and international passengers processed since COVID-19... Read more...

DA MP says hours lost continue to result in persons being unable to collect their ID documents due to unmanageable queues The DA has been inundated with complaints that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) systems are offline, resulting in long queues and delayed processing of documents. Through questions posed to the Minister, the DA can now reveal that the DHA has lost over 77 years’ worth of working hours due to system downtime and load-shedding from 2019 to date. Concerningly, this data only relates to hours lost for the application of smart IDs, meaning decades more of working hours could have been additionally lost in other spheres such as passport or visa applications.... Read more...

Home Affairs’ seemingly endless court battles set the department back more than R110-million between April 2023 and the end of February this year. This was revealed in a written parliamentary response by minister Aaron Motsoaledi. He said the department accumulated a litigation bill of R117 692 996.3, higher than the R72 637 944.51 spent the year before.... Read more...

Due to system downtime and load-shedding, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) lost nearly 141,000 hours of Smart ID application and production time between the 2019/20 and 2022/23 financial years. Minister Aaron Motsoaledi revealed this figure in a recent response to questions raised in Parliament by Democratic Alliance MP Adrian Roos. Motsoaledi provided a breakdown of smart ID production and application hours lost to technical difficulties and load-shedding per province for each financial year from 2019/2020. These disruptions hit home Affairs offices in the Eastern Cape the hardest, with over 34,000 hours to rotational power cuts and system downtime. Mpumalanga offices lost the next-highest number of hours at 17... Read more...