President Cyril Ramaphosa has welcomed the significant reforms to South Africa’s visa regime as a key step towards attracting international skills and investment, growing tourism, and creating jobs.
This comes after Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Leon Schreiber gazetted the reforms on Wednesday.
Ramphosa highlighted this as another success under Operation Vulindlela, a joint initiative of the Presidency and National Treasury to accelerate the implementation of structural reforms and support economic growth.
These reforms look to achieve more rapid and inclusive growth and create jobs by removing the constraints that have held the South African economy back in the past.
As gazetted, the Remote Work Visa will enable highly paid individuals who are employed abroad and thus do not compete with local workers, to spend foreign currency in South Africa, pay Value-Added Tax (VAT) into the South African fiscus, and buy South African goods and services, helping to grow local jobs.
The new Points-Based System for skilled work visas will create more flexible pathways for highly skilled applicants while combatting corruption and inefficiency.
The new system, which was a key recommendation of the work visa review published in 2023, introduces a transparent set of criteria to objectively determine who qualifies for a Critical Skills or General Work Visa.
Ramaphosa said this would better protect existing jobs at the lower end of the labour market while injecting skills at the top.
“These reforms remove bureaucratic hurdles and are designed to make it easier for South African companies and multinationals to hire skilled workers, as well as making South Africa a realistic prospect for remote workers seeking an opportunity to combine work with tourism.
“The opportunities unlocked by our new system are a passport to faster economic growth and to welcoming more people around the world to our beautiful country. Many more reforms are in process with the aim of us achieving more rapid, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, which is the top priority of the Government of National Unity,” Ramaphosa said.
robin.francke@iol.co.za
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