South Africa cracks down on Zimbabweans with illegal SA passports

South Africa is cracking down on Zimbabweans holding illegal South African passport, reports from Limpopo say. “There is nothing new about the exercise. It is a just routine operation that Home Affairs conducts every year, especially after the festive season, to flush out foreigners who fraudulently acquired South African passports. There is a special team which was deployed to Beitbridge by our head office to conduct the exercise,” a Home Affairs official was quoted as saying. South Africa has just concluded a documentation exercise for Zimbabweans that will allow permit holders to work in the country until 2017. It carried out the first exercise in 2010 and gave Zimbabweans who had illegally obtained South African passports an amnesty if they surrendered them and got Zimbabwean passports and work permits. Although there have been reports of as many as three million Zimbabweans in South Africa less than 300 000 registered in 2010 and fewer than 250 000 registered in the exercise just concluded.

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