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South Africa’s immigration debate reflects a deeper crisis of class, race and unequal access to public services. The writer argues that border enforcement alone cannot resolve the structural pressures driving migration and friction.
By DR ZAID LANGA
THE fierce debate over undocumented immigration in South Africa is rarely a single, coherent conversation, but a series of reflections in a hall of mirrors.
Those in charge in boardrooms and gated communities debate theoretical issues, but in townships and informal settlements, it is an existential struggle for basic survival.
At the core is an uneven collapse of the state, with the axis tilting so that people with low incomes carry most of the burden.
For wealthier people, public services have broken down, but they can afford private services. State infrastructure is the only infrastructure for poorer people in the country.
When medicine shortages at township clinics mean families go without medical care or schools turn away children because there is no room, newcomers add weight to a basket that is already very full. The resulting tension, I would say, is panic: too many people grabbing at too little.
This frustration is exacerbated by legacy spatial planning under Apartheid, which channels political responses along racial lines that follow old paths for water. Among working black people, frustration with low wages and strained public services has led to sentiment against immigrants on the ground and created a rift in Pan-African tradition – tradition pulling in different directions.
This issue, perhaps more than most, has proven divisive nationally and how one experiences it seems to depend, to a considerable extent, on one’s social, racial, and religious affiliations.
Among Indian communities, mobilisation against immigration is met with suspicion because there is fear that populism, once unleashed, could easily pivot into broader anti-minority rhetoric.
Muslim residents face additional complexity, balancing religious solidarity with Muslim foreign nationals against their own identity as South Africans.
For coloured working-class movements like Patriotic Alliance, border control is emphasised as a sovereignty issue.
White political and business interests are silent, strategically happy to let undocumented workers quietly support key parts of the economy.
Beyond South Africa’s borders, asymmetries in diplomacy emerge.
Pretoria has shown restraint and not retaliated against neighbouring countries whose nationals enter illegally.
Big businesses continue to operate across the continent, and Pretoria remains committed to the African Continental Free Trade Area, regardless of whether this matters to someone standing outside an empty clinic.
Yet, this diplomatic restraint is rarely mirrored by external commentators or regional leaders, who often reduce South Africa’s complex socio-economic friction to simple accusations of xenophobia. It is easy and convenient, but assessing a building on fire based solely on smoke is not the same as understanding what started the fire.
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But there is a much higher price in terms of the implications of that neat package. Words here act as blindfolds rather than mirrors because, once such a situation is defined in those terms, dialogue abruptly ends in accusation rather than investigating the lack of medical supplies and the closure of schools.
The xenophobia label encapsulates the whole message, but only on the surface. People who are poor and marginalised are overlooked in this narrative, not because they do not exist, but because “xenophobia” is a more refined way of saying “a country that had failed its own people long before anyone else came”. This label also doesn’t address domestic legal abuses, causing local problems along with bigger issues such as mass displacement in Congo and civil conflict in Sudan.
The problem may be symptomatic rather than at the root.
South Africa has been attractive since 1994 and has been an economic centre of the continent, attracting migrants from all over the world. However, development coincided with a failure to address intergenerational poverty and to establish a proper border regime. This left a policy gap, and marginalised groups in South Africa had to bear the consequences.
Border enforcement is an important function for sovereign states, but this alone will not solve the problem. Until systemic underdevelopment across the African continent is addressed, and until South Africa aggressively bridges its own internal socio-economic divides, cross-border migration will remain a source of perpetual friction.
Meaningful progress requires moving beyond moralising rhetoric and confronting the real structural economic realities that drive human movement.
Dr Thulani Zaid Langa serves as a Language Practitioner (Arabic) at the Department of Defence. He is also the Ameer of the Soweto Muslim Shura Council, a researcher, and a da’ee. Dr Langa holds qualifications in Islamic studies, education and law.
