A Foot in the Door: Access to Asylum in South Africa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.26030Keywords:
South Africa, Department of Home Affairs, refugee status determination, protectionism, asylum seekers, access barriers, receptionAbstract
Asylum seekers in South Africa experience extreme difficulties lodging their claims at the Department of Home Affairs. This paper utilizes new survey data to measure the extent of the Department’s failures to provide access to the status determination process. The principal finding is that South African officials often go out of their way to prevent asylum seekers from entering the system. This provides support for the argument the Department is beholden to an institutional culture of immigration protectionism. This assessment differs from conventional analyses of poor African performance of status determination which emphasize issues of corruption and institutional capacity.Metrics
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Published
2008-09-01
How to Cite
Vigneswaran, D. (2008). A Foot in the Door: Access to Asylum in South Africa. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 25(2), 41–52. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.26030
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Feature Articles
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Copyright (c) 2008 Darshan Vigneswaran
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Refuge authors retain the copyright over their work, and license it to the general public under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows for non-commercial use, reproduction and adaption of the material in any medium or format, with proper attribution. For general information on Creative Commons licences, visit the Creative Commons site. For the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, review the human readable summary.
