Johannesburg — MOST developing countries fail to capitalise on the benefits immigration offers them, a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report warned yesterday.

While many developing countries rely on the income that their expatriate workers send home, few make it easy for skilled and unskilled workers to come into their economies, the UN's latest Human Development Report says.

"Most countries are yet to put in place policies to allow an orderly movement of skilled and unskilled people into their countries," said Tegegnework Gettu, the UNDP's regional director for Africa.

SA is a case in point. Despite last year allocating about 35000 visas to fill shortages for skilled positions in the economy, the government is slow to fill them. The Department of Home Affairs said yesterday in the five months to the end of August, just 519 such visas had been issued.

"Sub-Saharan governments should see migration as an integral part of their development strategy," Gettu said at the report's Johannesburg launch. "They need to design policies to make immigration a more productive tool for development."

While popular concerns about immigration frequently focus on foreigners coming to a country and taking jobs or houses from locals, as expressed in xenophobic riots in SA last May and again in July this year, the movement of people across international borders is dwarfed by domestic, or internal migration.

While nearly 1-billion people are migrants, 740-million are internal migrants and just 214-million are international migrants, according to yesterday's Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development report. SA, as a regional economic hub, has a larger proportion of foreign immigrants than the global average -- although the 1,5-million foreign immigrants are still less than the number of people who have moved between provinces in SA over the past five years.

"The reality we face in SA is that the largest migration of immigrants into SA are poor working-class immigrants with low skills," Deputy Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba said . He said the government was reviewing its international immigration scheme and was considering legalising the inflow of unskilled workers by means such as seasonal or temporary migration.

Managing migrants however, requires co-ordination across a range of government agencies that is frequently lacking. Cities such as Johannesburg, which receive the influx of migrants -- the daily population of the inner city is about 1-million -- have limited resources and a limited ability to make changes. Offering health and education services, for example, to these people is not a municipal function.

"There is too much demand for public infrastructure, but the supply is not matching demand because of immigration trends. It's going to get worse. More people are going to come to Johannesburg as a matter of economic survival," Nathi Mthethwa , the city's director for the inner city region, said in May.