Within days of announcing figures showing that convictions under the pass laws increased sharply during 1983, the government tabled a bill in parliament which, if passed, will tighten the system of influx control to an even greater extent.
Every year the government gives figures for convictions under the pass laws during the previous year in the main urban areas of South Africa. As the table below shows, there has been a very large increase over the last two years. There were almost twice as many convictions during 1983 as there were during 1981. In the Pretoria-Witwatersrand area, where over 90 percent of the reported convictions occurred in 1983, the number more than doubled. On the East Rand, which alone accounted for well over a third of all convictions during 1983, there has been a threefold increase since 1981.
While the causes of the increases vary to some extent from area to area, three factors in particular were important: Recession, Drought, and Urban removal and relocation.
These developments provided the context both for the sharp increase in arrests and convictions and for the government's announcement in November 1983 of its plans, as a matter of the highest priority, to intensify influx control. The Aliens and Immigration Laws Amendment Bill, tabled in Parliament early in May, will, if passed, give the regime considerable powers to pursue its aims.
The bill embodies some of the powers proposed in the Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Bill which, in the face of widespread protest, had been referred to a Parliamentary Select Committee. The new bill, with its increased penalties and tighter restrictions, will have the most severe effects on Africans from those bantustans on which the status of 'independent' has been imposed. In law, all those people declared by the government to be citizens of these bantustans, are aliens.
During the parliamentary debate on the bill, government spokesmen repeatedly denied that it would be used against people from the bantustans as a means of influx control. They have said that it is only aimed at 'aliens and immigrants in the traditional sense'. Neither anti-government groups nor the English-language press have been convinced by the denials.
