Border policy sparks fears of scapegoating ‘the other’

As seems to be the case throughout the world right now, questions regarding South Africa’s border and immigration policy have taken on a new urgency. Particularly pressing is the question of South Africa’s policy of open — or at least porous — borders for migrants from across Africa to enter our country. However noble the intentions, there is a real debate to be had about whether such a policy actually serves the interests of South Africans. And, indeed, whether it serves the migrants themselves. What’s crucial, though, is that these legitimate questions are not an excuse for xenophobia.

Legitimate concerns vs antimigrant bigotry

There is an argument for relatively open borders, though more rigorous border control is necessary to prevent criminal elements from entering the country and to ensure local systems are not overwhelmed. The wider global debate about whether countries should be allowed to limit immigration to preserve their historical and cultural identities (or at least to require all perspective immigrants to assimilate into the broader culture) may be less applicable to South Africa.

These are tough, controversial and sensitive questions around which the political reality of a country is formed and have frequently become the focal point in democratic elections worldwide.

While far-right parties have gained political footholds with their calls for anti-immigration reform, the far-left has reacted by framing their policies around the eradication of all borders. This leaves everyone else caught in the middle to sort out their own feelings on the topic while holding onto the compassion and the nuance necessary to prevent them from falling prey to either of these extremes.

But these debates can be grounded in real concerns and that they have been embraced by the political extremes points to something more troubling. As seen over the past few months, these legitimate concerns can be twisted into a justification for all sorts of scapegoating, dehumanisation, xenophobia and anti-immigrant violence.

Frustrations about South Africa’s sky-high unemployment levels, record-breaking crime rates and institutional failures are real and justified. This frustration may point to a system that can’t cope with the extra burden placed on it, and the government should be expected to change its border and immigration policies accordingly.

But there’s a world of difference between the need for border reform and blaming everything that’s wrong in our country and in our lives on “foreigners”. The former can lead to improvements in running the country; the latter is an ancient moral trap that harms innocents whose only crime is wanting a better future for themselves and their kids and can lead to the eventual destruction of the society in which it occurs.

A tragic case study

This is clear to me as a South African, and even more so as a Jew.

The evil of xenophobia is in many ways the story of the Jewish people. Across thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of miles, the story was always the same: no matter how well diaspora Jews were integrated into the societies in which they found themselves, once those societies started to fail, it was the Jew, that “eternal foreigner”, that was blamed, exiled, enslaved and murdered. From Ancient Egypt and Rome to medieval Spain and England to Nazi Germany and the USSR, Jews were singled out as the root cause of everything that was wrong in the society and “punished” accordingly.

But no matter how harsh the “punishment” — exiles, pogroms, the Holocaust — those societies and civilisations still fell. And they fell precisely because these acts of xenophobia and bigotry did nothing but reveal the true rot at the heart of these civilisations.

I wish I could say this was a thing of the past, but as the Jewish state of Israel has increasingly become the Jew among the nations — the enemy of all that is good and the cause of all that is bad — and anti-Semitism worldwide has reached levels unseen for decades.

For the far-left, Israel represents all of the West’s past crimes made manifest: colonialism, apartheid, genocide.

The far-right reserves its hatred less for the Jewish state than for those evil liberal Jews who have been working behind the scenes to replace “white, Christian culture” with “nonwhite”, “non-Christian” minorities.

Bringing it back home

It is, therefore, ironic when individual Jews engage in racism and xenophobia — especially when these individuals present themselves as “religious” and “observant”, let alone when they are part of the Israeli government. But it’s even more ironic when we see certain ANC officials blaming Israel, without evidence, for stoking the antimigrant protests in June.

“The Jews are behind it all” is not the lesson to be learnt from the increase in xenophobia in South Africa. Not just because it is morally reprehensible and contradicted by Jewish organisations and individuals helping refugees and migrants, but because South Africa can learn an invaluable lesson from thousands of years of hard-lived Jewish experience.

No matter how real your pain and grievances may be, projecting the blame for them on “the other” will make everything worse — for the “other”, you and the social fabric that holds a society together.

This is a lesson South Africa cannot afford to ignore.

Business Day