1 April, 2008
Emigration consultants and removal firms no longer need to market themselves, write Adele Shevel and Brendan Boyle.
Emigration consultants and removal companies report a big surge since late last year in the number of people leaving South Africa for new lives abroad.
The favoured destination remains Australia, with New Zealand a popular stepping stone, but skilled artisans, experienced professionals and highly trained specialists are leaving in droves for just about any country that will have them — and they’re not all white.
“The last two months have been quite depressing in this business,” said David Wilcocks, an emigration consultant at Four Corners Emigration in Cape Town.
“We haven’t done any advertising. I will not advertise for essential skills like nurses, doctors and teachers, although they do come in,” he said.
Emigration consultants don’t need to market themselves when the jobs pages of newspapers like The Times are plump with adverts from mining, engineering, pharmaceutical and financial services companies around the world.
“The Future is Yours ... in Australia” said a three-quarter page advertisement for Barrick, the Australian gold mining company, in The Times this week.
International SOS advertises for doctors, nurses and other health professionals for positions around the world and Profiled is advertising for engineers and geologists to work in the Gulf. The Engineering Council of South Africa estimated earlier this year that one qualified engineer was leaving almost every day and the Southern African Migration Project said in a report backed by the Institute for Democracy that nearly half of 1700 health professionals polled in a recent survey hoped to be out of the country within five years.
Crown Relocations managing director Ian Pettey said his removals company was handling three times the number of family emigrations it handled a year ago.
He said that at one recruitment expo last September, 9000 people had signed up to leave. “They’ve got their permits and they’re leaving the country now. Guys are leaving the country lock stock and barrel and locking the door behind them,” he said.
Wilcocks said his company had experienced a 500% to 600% increase in emigration inquiries since last year.
Wessel Ludewig of Global Migration SA said he received up to 180 e-mailed inquiries a day from people asking how to get out permanently or for a few years of exploratory foreign work experience. About 25 to 30 of those are serious inquiries from highly qualified people thinking about going.
A European diplomat told Business Times there had been a marked increase in the number of inquiries about exercising dormant citizenship rights. “A lot of people seem to be checking their status and trying to make sure they have a passport in the drawer in case the do decide they want out,” he said.
“During the first half of last year, we saw a steady increase in inquiries. That trickle by late last year became a torrent. It is now a flood”, said Iain MacLeod, the director of Protea Pacific in New Zealand, which helps South Africans cross the ocean.
He said the overwhelming majority were white, but there were increasing numbers of coloured, Indian and black African applicants too.
Wilcocks said the nature of the inquiries had also changed. People were now asking where they could go, not just whether they could get into Australia. While most used to tick just one or two possible destinations, they now try for more.
“Now it’s: find me a place I qualify for and I’ll go. Previously, they would say Australia or one or two of the others, nowadays they tick them all,” he says, referring to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and Britain.
Jacqui Simpson and her IT-specialist husband Lee are trying to get into Australia, but will look at Canada or the US if they fail.
She said that after they started talking to friends about going, more and more had decided to start the process themselves. “We’re in the middle of the process and we hope to have our permits for Australia by the end of the year or early next year,” she said.
Crime was a big factor in their decision, she said, but career prospects, earning power, schooling for their three-month-old daughter and the Eskom power crunch were crucial considerations, too.
“Australia is a first-world country where everything works and you can be safe,” she said. After working in a number of countries, her husband is keen to consolidate his career as a software architect.
Wilcocks said the skills shortage plaguing South Africa was a worldwide phenomenon.
“I can move a bricklayer into Australia faster than I can a stockbroker. Trade skills are in critical shortage in Australia, New Zealand and Canada,” he said.
Also on the demand list are engineers, doctors, nurses and midwives. Teachers, while not in demand, could generally find a job anywhere.
Wilcocks said applications for business visas had soared from an average of three or four per quarter to 12 in the past six weeks as entrepreneurs opted to cash in and risk their capital on a new start-up elsewhere. He finds the increase in business visa applications particularly discouraging.
“The clients I’ve signed up have a turnover of R5.5-million a year to R200- million a year.” Some are trying to sell their businesses, others are just closing up shop and will start over.
“What’s more worrying to me is if you’re turning over R200-million how many people are you employing? For every one business owner that leaves, so many people lose their jobs,” he said.
“The highly skilled see no promotion prospects . A lot want to do better financially, but have hit the ceiling. And they’re sitting with the crime problem.”
Sandra Krysztofiak, the national marketing manager for specialist immigration consultants Hitchcock & Associates, said there had been a marked increase in inquiries for migration to Australia.
“Particularly this year, since December, but a general trend started two years ago. The biggest fear is what is going to happen further down the line in terms of education and safety.
“The crime and education possibilities in the country are the number one factors,” said Dawn Raphaely, an Australian migration consultant with 16 years of experience.
MacLeod said emigrants included many who had backed the changes in 1994 and also their children, a second generation who had not experienced apartheid but who found that they could not get into university because of colour quotas and even if they could, they were the wrong colour to fill affirmative action positions on graduation.
“This new wave of emigration is, I strongly believe, not going to stop. It isn’t any longer just middle-class whites, it is their elderly parents, it is their children in their late teens and early 20s, their coloured neighbours and the Indian family living across the road,” he said.
Brent Rouse, the general manager of the Durban branch of removal and relocation company Elliott International, said there was a huge exodus, but the situation was not as grave as people made out. Though Pettey estimates that emigrants outnumber contractors coming in three-to-one, the flow is not one-way.
“There are people coming in to take the places of those who are leaving, but they’re contract workers coming for a short stay,” he said.
- The Times
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