White South Africans no longer packing for Perth



The great white flight appears to be a fallacy. Numbers released by Stats SA yesterday show that over a 30-year period the country experienced a net loss of only 650,000 white people.What this means is that, taking into account the number of white people returning, over 500,000 have left permanently.This figure, released in the stats agency's mid-year 2015 population estimates, is just over 10% of the current white population.The number of whites thought to have left between 2011 and last year is 95,158, just over 2% of the current population."In numbers it is not so high," SA Institute of Race Relations researcher Thuthukani Ndebele said."What was really needed is an estimate of how many skilled people emigrated. This would indicate if white emigration is to be worried about."But South Africa stopped collecting data on people leaving and entering the country in 2003, when the Immigration Act came into effect.Solidarity researcher Paul Kruger said issues like crime led to white people feeling unwelcome , "but how many leave as a result is unclear".