immigration
ENSafrica’s dedicated immigration team has extensive experience in providing the full spectrum of immigration and civic services advice and practical assistance to a wide range of business and personal clients, both locally and internationally.
As a result of greater global staff mobility amid higher international health, safety and security risks, many countries are enforcing more stringent and complex immigration policies for businesses, and therefore risk management and legal compliance are more crucial than ever. However, the law governing immigration differs substantially from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, making compliance an administrative nightmare.
While complying with immigration regulations in all the countries in which you operate can be confusing and complicated, non-compliance often results in severe penalties and even criminal sanction, impacting your business and the lives of your employees, causing damage to your reputation, delays, loss of productivity and revenue, as well as investigations by other enforcement agencies and the risk of future migration difficulties for all employees of your company.
We are able to help you plan your expatriate employment strategies across Africa, ensuring compliance and mitigating risk, so that you can continue to employ foreign nationals, run a successful global mobility programme and meet your commercial objectives.
We actively lobby for immigration reform by preparing representations to the South African Department of Home Affairs on new and proposed legislative changes.
ENSafrica is recognised by top ranking agencies for achieving consistently high standards when working on the continent.
Our key differentiator is that, as Africa’s largest law firm with over 600 specialist practitioners, ENSafrica has the capacity to deliver on your business requirements across all major industries and the continent. We are able to leverage our resources to suit your pricing preferences and deliver within your timeframes.
Our firm’s scale and depth means that we can, at a very early stage, identify and red flag a wide spectrum of legal, employment and tax risks and challenges facing you and your business before you encounter them, enabling us to offer solutions which stretch beyond immigration law alone.
We also offer visa assistance to personal clients. South Africa is an attractive lifestyle destination for retirees and is very accessible due to the low financial threshold needed to apply for retired persons’ visas. South Africa offers well-established expatriate communities, English as a main language, favourable exchange rates, a modern economy, a high standard but low cost of living, warm weather, high quality housing, excellent schools and universities, and easy access to tourism destinations. The country is in a similar time zone to Europe, the Middle East and the United Kingdom, and its medical facilities are among the best in the world, but much cheaper and with very short waiting times.
We also assist high net worth individuals with estate planning and trusts.
what we offer
We provide the full spectrum of immigration advice, including:
- Filing of all categories of temporary and permanent residence visa applications, including:
- Visitors’ visas
- Visitors’ visas for business purposes
- Work visas, including intra-company transfer, general work visas and critical skills visas
- Retired persons’ visas
- Net worth visas
- Study visas
- Relatives’ visas
- Various categories of permanent residence visas
- Due diligence investigations and compliance audits
- Immigration compliance, including performing audits and due diligences, advising on a tailored, codified internal practice with effective processes, and educating and training staff
- Applications for naturalisation, renunciation of citizenship, determination of citizenship status and resumption of citizenship
- Advisory services on police clearance applications and filing of South African police clearance applications
- Applications to the South African Department of Labour for certification in support of visa applications
- Applications to the South African Department of Trade and Industry for certification of the feasibility of businesses and for waiver of capital investment amounts
- Applications to the South African Director General of the Department of Home Affairs for waiver of regulatory requirements
- Arrangement of sworn translations and apostilles of foreign documentation
- Liaison with the South African Department of Home Affairs and foreign missions on application and status-related matters
- Assisting businesses regarding foreign employees in South Africa during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic lockdown period, including regarding expired visas, compliance, departures, repatriations of groups and planning for upcoming placements
- Repatriation of groups of South African employees from abroad
