Immigration has been a defining feature of SA for more than 100 years. It is therefore no surprise that it has periodically flared up — as it has now — in the political arena. In the past immigration has been a major factor in electoral outcomes.
It has always had two key elements. The first was the need to bring in skilled workers, initially to help with the development of the mining industry and later the broader economy. The second was about the gold mining industry’s need for cheap, unskilled labour, a crucial factor for an industry faced with the challenge of keeping a lid on costs.
That’s because it received a fixed price — there were some adjustments in the 1930s — for its product. The price of gold was fixed until 1973, when the US abandoned the remnants of a monetary system whereby the value of national currencies was linked to a fixed amount of gold.
Both — the influx of unskilled labour and the economy’s appetite for skilled workers — continue to be a defining feature of SA. Recently there has been a spike in tensions about the role of unskilled immigrants and foreign informal business operators in the economy.
For years, local and overseas economists have pointed to the benefits of allowing skilled foreigners into SA because of an acute shortage of skilled workers. President Cyril Ramaphosa emphasised the same point in his 2022 state of the nation address. “The world over, the ability to attract skilled immigrants is the hallmark of a modern, thriving economy,” he said.
Yet the government has for many years failed to keep up with demands by the private sector for the relaxation of entry requirements for skilled immigration. It is now reviewing its labour migration policies as well as the policy regime for the entry of skilled labour into the country.
But as the increase in tensions between local groups and immigrants shows, immigration policy — or reactions to it — are driven more by political emotions than economic arguments. This is not new.
At the end of the Anglo-Boer War part of British high commissioner Sir Alfred Milner’s grand design was the anglicisation of the country, in particular the Afrikaner strongholds. This included settling English-speaking farmers in the rural districts of the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal, the two Afrikaner provinces. Though Milner and his coterie of British officials, dubbed “Milner’s Kindergarten”, did not succeed, their British immigration plans did raise the political temperature.
The second immigration episode was more politically intense. After the end of World War 2 Gen Jan Smuts saw an opportunity for SA to allow immigrants, “the good and the bad”. Smuts’s government argued that taking European immigrants would strengthen the white population, and that such a favourable opportunity would perhaps not recur.
His plan to attract European settlers came at a time when SA was resettling its soldiers. This triggered concerns about housing and health, two of the issues that are uppermost in the debates about immigrants today.
The Nationalists seized on Smuts’s immigration plan as one of their campaign issues for the May 1948 elections, inspired perhaps by Deneys Reitz’s warning during the war that Afrikaners would be “ploughed under” by immigrants when the war ended. Nationalists interpreted Smuts’s plan as “a threat to Afrikanerdom’s identity”. They were also joined by skilled local workers who were concerned about increased competition from immigrants.
Once in power, the Nationalists replaced Smuts’s immigration policy with a version that slowed down the flow of immigrants, especially immediately after the end of the war, when it would have been easier to recruit immigrants because of Europe’s economic devastation.
Eben Donges, the Nationalist interior minister, explained that the Smuts plan had to be changed because of the shortage of housing, the relative slowing down of industrial expansion and unemployment in certain skilled trades. The major factor was what he described as the surplus of unsuccessful applicants for apprenticeships in SA, which meant if the country could train all available applicants it would have enough skilled workers.
Donges’s argument about training locals might find fertile political ground today, but the challenge facing SA is that foreign skills are crucial for getting the economy off the bottom onto a faster and sustained growth path. Faster growth will in turn generate the resources the country needs to train locals (assuming the government gets the framework for skills formation right) and create economic opportunities for them.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity. Some of the material for this column is drawn from the late historian DW Krüger’s book ‘The Making of a Nation: A History of the Union of SA, 1910-1961’.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.