Duties
The department is responsible for:
- Maintenance of the National Population Register (the civil registry), including the recording of births, marriages/civil partnerships and deaths.
- Issuing identity documents and passports.
- Issuing visas for visitors to South Africa (although visa applications pass through embassies or consulates which are part of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation).
- Managing immigration to South Africa and naturalization of permanent immigrants.
- Handling refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa.
- Controlling ports of entry at land borders, seaports and airports.
Read more about this topic: Department Of Home Affairs (South Africa)
Famous quotes containing the word duties:
“The traditional husband/father has always made choices concerning career, life-styles, values, and directions for the whole family, but he generally had another person on the team—called a wife. And his duties were always clear: Bring home the bacon and take out the garbage.”
—Donna N. Douglass (20th century)
“The duty of the State toward the citizen is the duty of the servant to its master.... One of the duties of the State is that of caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstances as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others.... To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by government—not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a “taxing- machine;” to the contented, a “machine for securing property.” Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)