Two years into Leon Schreiber’s tenure at Home Affairs, reform is moving — but implementation is exposing gaps that still require attention.
In her latest opinion for Business Day, our Claudia Pizzocri, revisits the transformation of South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs two years into Minister Leon Schreiber’s tenure.
There is much to acknowledge. The Trusted Employer Scheme, electronic travel authorisation, remote work visa, points-based work visa reforms and accelerated digitisation all point to a Department increasingly willing to modernise systems that have historically been associated with administrative inertia.
But reform inevitably reveals its own blind spots. Claudia considers where policy has not yet caught up with the realities encountered during implementation — and where relatively targeted changes could make South Africa’s immigration system more competitive, proportionate and economically responsive.
Remote work — but only for employees?
South Africa’s remote work visa was an important acknowledgement that work is no longer tied to a traditional office or geographic location.
Its present structure, however, largely assumes a conventional employer-employee relationship. That leaves internationally mobile entrepreneurs, consultants, freelancers and other self-employed professionals outside the category, even where their income is generated abroad and ultimately spent in South Africa.
The result is a mismatch between the economic activity South Africa wants to attract and the immigration categories available to accommodate it.
The retired person visa is filling a legislative gap
That mismatch has consequences elsewhere in the immigration system.
Financially independent foreign nationals who continue to conduct professional activities abroad may not fit neatly within the existing remote work framework. In practice, the retired person visa has long provided an alternative route for qualifying applicants who are financially self-sufficient.
Rather than treating this simply as misuse of the retired person category, she argues that the underlying policy question deserves attention: where should South Africa accommodate financially independent people earning foreign-source income outside a conventional employment relationship?
Restricting an existing visa category without first addressing that legislative gap risks removing an imperfect solution without creating a better one.
Are automatic overstay bans still the right tool?
The opinion also revisits South Africa’s treatment of visa overstays.
Since the 2014 legislative changes, an overstay can result in a declaration of undesirability and a ban on re-entry. The consequence applies even though individual cases can arise from very different circumstances, including misunderstanding, administrative difficulty or other mitigating factors.
Those declarations in turn generate applications for upliftment and review, adding another layer of adjudication to a system already under significant pressure.
Would a more proportionate model — including administrative fines for ordinary instances of non-compliance, while retaining stronger exclusionary measures for serious or repeated violations — could achieve immigration-control objectives without unnecessarily increasing the Department’s administrative burden.
Reform means being prepared to refine
The central argument is not that the reform programme has failed. Quite the opposite.
Two years of change have demonstrated that Home Affairs can modernise. The next phase should therefore build on that momentum: adapting immigration policy where implementation has exposed gaps, recognising the realities of the global digital economy, and ensuring that enforcement measures remain both effective and proportionate.
Read Claudia Pizzocri’s full opinion, “Schreiber’s Home Affairs two years on: bold vision and blind spots”, as published in Business Day on 29 July 2026.**
**By Claudia Pizzocri at Eisenberg & Associates Inc.**