Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Working Holiday Visas
Though an English-speaker living in Durban, Peg has primarily Afrikaans heritage and
does not qualify for an ancestral visa—and again she makes explicit mention of her her-
itage when describing how she had to resort to using the working holiday visa to enter
the UK to work:
The whole plan in going was basically just a change. I was twenty-six, and
I could only be in London up to the age of twenty-seven, because you can't
get a working holiday visa [after that age], so….
Peg:
Max:
OK, so that's what you used?
Peg:
Ja, so I used a working holiday visa to go.
Max:
Were you eligible for an ancestral visa? Did you try?
No, because I don't have any grandparents living there, that are close. It's
more, further down the tree.
Peg:
As Randi illustrates, meeting the eligibility requirements for securing a working hol-
iday visa as her means of last resort (despite the fact that she would have been eligible
for an ancestral visa), was not difficult:
Max:
Were you on the working holiday [visa]?
Randi:
Ja, I just took that out … quick and easy.
Meeting the requirements of age, South African citizenship, and, crucially, the ability
to prove they had the means to support themselves, Randi and Peg did not encounter
muchdifficultyinattainingworkingholidayvisas,themeansusedbymanywhiteyouth
of Afrikaans and Jewish extraction and those with only very distant roots in the UK.
Scales of Motility
ScaleisalsorelevantinthewayinwhichtransnationalSouthAfricansareabletodeploy
various levels of membership in order to enhance their motility. Suzette, whose fath-
er immigrated to South Africa from Italy, was able to use the scaled-up citizenship re-
gime of the EU to achieve easy motility into the UK. She explicitly recognizes that this
embodied motility places her in a different spatially inflected subject position to other
South Africans without EU or other foreign passports. Speaking of the persistent fear of
crime that stimulates much emigration, she notes that:
