South Africa / 400 000 have come back home

While as many South Africans as live in central Cape Town have returned to the Beloved Country since 2008, state immigration policies mean that South Africa’s brain drain remains as serious as ever, a new report shows

Surveys have shown that the push factors (those pushing South Africans out of the country) are chiefly political and security-related, while the pull factors that attract South Africans to the first world are mostly financial. While the pull factors have scarcely changed – South Africa is not very noticeably safer or more stable than it was in the peak emigration years – the financial situation abroad most definitely has. South Africans in Europe have been particularly hard-hit by a grindingly slow recovery from the global financial crisis, in which the jobs and optimism that vanished in 2008 have taken far longer than expected to return.

According to the Adcorp report, released this month, South Africans are returning home in significant numbers. While lack of job security and falling spending power are an important factor driving skilled South Africans back home, the financial implications of the move are not the full story: despite relatively higher buying power in Mzansi, most repats still face a steep drop in personal income when they resettle inside South Africa.

The reasons repats come home, on the whole, are deeper and harder to define: anecdotally, it’s a simple desire to reconnect with family and personal networks, a desire for the South African quality of life, and the desire to raise families with familiar values.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

via 400 000 SA ‘repats’ have come home, but brain drain persists | The South African.