Expletives were insufficient when progressive thinkers I met on a recent trip to Europe tried to describe their frustration with how their politicians were handling migration — legal or illegal.
“The European population is getting older; able-bodied, young people are unwilling to do the work that migrants do, and yet they don’t want migrants to come to their countries”, was how one researcher captured it.
At the same time, they were curious to know how South Africans justified the regular flare-up of xenophobic attacks — especially given the progressive, pan-Africanist perspectives of the liberation movements.
Notwithstanding the short history of an enlightened constitutional order in SA, there can be no excuse for the bigotry of those who argue that migrants are taking jobs and creating unemployment. The wildly exaggerated and baseless rhetoric of past home affairs ministers is testimony to the sad, insecure and insular state some South Africans have retreated into.
In 1997 the late Mangosuthu Buthelezi argued that the surge in crime at the time was due to the 2.5-million to 5-million illegal foreigners in SA. ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula described illegal migrants as a ticking time-bomb, who “put a heavy strain on the fiscus with adverse effects on service delivery, the overstretched health sector, high unemployment and poverty”. Little or no evidence has been offered to support either of these statements.
Earlier this year then home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi vowed to remove illegal immigrants and get rid of the “crocodiles” — displaying his and other leaders’ amnesia and forgetting that the Tutsis in Rwanda were repeatedly called “cockroaches” before the 1994 genocidal attack.
Political analyst Ralph Mathekga has described the increasingly worrying utterances by leaders as “a great escape route for government to distance itself from the problem it caused” through not having a clear migration policy framework. In doing so it has succumbed to the tactics of ActionSA, the Patriotic Alliance and the African Transformation Movement. Meanwhile, Operation Dudula activists were engaging in street protests and direct actions against migrants — legal or illegal. It is this bigotry that provides the rationale for the vicious attacks on migrants and their property.
A recent conference hosted by the National Planning Commission, with the International Organisation for Migration and UN Development Programme, served to highlight the various perspectives through which we must see migration in Southern African: as a driver of human development, generating significant benefits for migrants, their families and countries of origin in the form of financial and social remittances as well as an important skills boost for the receiving country, increasing labour supply in sectors and occupations that have a shortage of workers.
Delegates pointed out that South Africans also benefited from migrating to other countries where they were providing the skills backbone of, for example, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) health, construction and education system, and the UK’s National Health Service.
Furthermore, in the Southern African Development Community region we are not alone in receiving migrants: “Angola, Zambia, Mauritius and Seychelles have attracted migrants from within and outside the region, due to their economic growth, political stability and labour demand”.
The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection’s (Mistra) research report into this issue, “Migration in SA: Conflicts & Identities”, to be launched today, dispels the myths of migrant danger, unproductivity and widespread hostility between locals and migrants, calling for regional integration and development.
It calls for the completion of migration governance reforms, especially the white paper on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection, providing guidance for government departments dealing with migrants — be they in the security, economic, governance or social protection clusters.
I have no doubt that when President Cyril Ramaphosa gave the DA’s Leon Schreiber the home affairs portfolio he wasn’t simply handing over a poisoned chalice: he was wanting a fresh approach to this thorny issue.
Schreiber should put up a plaque in his offices with the following words of former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon: “Migration is an expression of the human aspiration for dignity, safety and a better future. It is part of the social fabric, part of our very makeup as a human family”.
• Abba Omar is director of operations at Mistra.
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.