South Africa’s Cabinet has approved a revised White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection, setting in motion what Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber has described as the most fundamental reform of the country’s immigration framework since the end of apartheid. The policy, approved following an extensive nationwide public consultation process that covered all nine provinces and generated thousands of submissions, will now be converted into legislative amendments to be tabled before Parliament.
“This is really going to change the way we do things in our country,” Schreiber said, adding that the revised White Paper charts a new course for the country to build modern, efficient and secure systems that serve South Africa’s interests.
At the heart of the reforms is the introduction of the “first safe country” principle, a concept borrowed from international refugee law that has been adopted by several European countries and is now being applied in a sub-Saharan African context for the first time at this scale. Under the principle, asylum seekers who have been granted refugee status or lawful protection in another country, or who pass through safe third countries to reach South Africa, will be ineligible for asylum. The reform is designed to combat what authorities describe as applicants picking and choosing South Africa as their preferred destination while passing through other safe countries on the way.
To manage the risk of returning people to dangerous situations, the Minister of Home Affairs will be required to designate safe third countries annually, limited to those that have ratified the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and the government will be mandated to enter bilateral agreements with those countries to share the burden of migration across the sub-Saharan region.
Schreiber was direct about the motivation. “What we’ve seen over many years is that people pick and choose South Africa as the only destination and that is taking a toll on our society,” he said.
Beyond refugee policy, the reforms introduce a sweeping reconfiguration of how South Africa processes visa applications, grants permanent residence and confers citizenship. New visa categories will be introduced for remote work, start-ups, skilled workers, sports and culture, while corporate visas will be replaced with sectoral work visas tailored to specific industries. A merit-based points-based system will govern certain visa categories and permanent residency applications, and the Electronic Travel Authorisation will be rolled out to digitalise and secure the visa application process while recording biometrics for all foreign nationals in the country.
On citizenship specifically, the reforms introduce merit-based criteria for naturalisation alongside an annual window period for submitting applications, designed to prevent backlogs. A new Citizenship Advisory Panel will objectively consider and advise on applications, and a points-based system will create economic pathways to citizenship based on skills, investment and social contribution rather than purely on the number of years a foreigner has resided in the country.
Schreiber said the goal is to eliminate what he described as “arbitrary, subjective and often highly inefficient” decision-making. “We want objectivity, a merit-based assessment,” he said, adding that the new system “will allow us to grant citizenship more quickly to people who genuinely are contributing to South Africa.”
The enforcement dimension of the reform is already well underway. The Department of Home Affairs reported 109,344 deportations between 2024 and March 31, 2026, under Operation New Broom.
Schreiber confirmed that the 57,784 deportations carried out in the past year represent a 46 per cent increase from the previous year, signalling that the government intends to pursue compliance aggressively even as the legislative framework is still being drafted.
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Academic analysis of the reforms suggests they are more ambitious than any previous attempt in the post-apartheid era. The first post-apartheid immigration White Paper, published in 1997, led to the Immigration Act of 2002, which was criticised for failing to adequately address the legacy of migration patterns in southern Africa. This revision is seen as a far more coherent and systematic rethink, driven in part by the digitalisation of all civil and immigration records into an Intelligent Population Register that would, if successfully implemented, result in a watertight management system integrating citizens, migrants, visitors, asylum seekers and refugees into a single data infrastructure.
However, implementation remains the central question. Some reforms, including the various points-based systems for entry, permanent residence and citizenship and the establishment of dedicated refugee courts, are complex proposals not yet fully explained. Privacy implications of the Intelligent Population Register and the willingness of neighbouring countries to accept designation as first safe countries remain unresolved, and both issues are vulnerable to legal challenge.
Advocacy groups have also warned that the reforms risk marginalising vulnerable migrants if the digital systems, enforcement machinery and bilateral agreements are not carefully calibrated to preserve the protections guaranteed under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which South Africa notably chose to retain rather than withdraw from.
