By Anjorin Fehintola Stella
As South Africa approaches June 30, the date set by certain anti-immigrant groups as deadline for undocumented migrants to leave the country, tensions surrounding immigration have once again captured national and international attention. These groups have argued forcefully and publicly that foreigners are responsible for rising unemployment, escalating crime, and increasing pressure on already overstretched public services such as hospitals, schools, and housing. The debate has sparked strong and deeply divided reactions across the continent, raising urgent concerns about xenophobia, social cohesion, human rights, and the future of African unity at a time when continental cooperation has never been more necessary.
Yet beneath the headlines and the heated rhetoric lies a deeper and more unsettling question; Why do immigrants so often become targets during periods of economic and social uncertainty? And what does the persistence of this pattern tell us about how societies respond when the gap between expectation and reality becomes too painful to confront honestly?
The current tensions in South Africa are not simply about immigration. They reflect broader and far more complex struggles over identity, opportunity, belonging, and the distribution of scarce resources in a society still grappling with the deep and unresolved legacies of apartheid and structural inequality. To reduce the debate to a question of who should or should not be in the country is to miss what is truly at stake, both for South Africa and for the wider African continent.
Throughout history, societies facing economic hardship have repeatedly searched for visible and identifiable groups to blame for problems that are in reality deeply structural and systemic. This is not a uniquely South African phenomenon. It is a recurring pattern in human social behaviour that has appeared across cultures, continents, and centuries. In post-World War One Germany, economic devastation and national humiliation were channelled into blame directed at Jewish communities, with catastrophic consequences. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, rising unemployment across parts of Europe fuelled hostility toward immigrant communities in countries including Greece, Hungary, and the United Kingdom. In the United States, periods of economic contraction have historically coincided with surges in anti-immigrant sentiment directed at whichever group happened to be most recently arrived and most visibly different from the majority. The pattern is consistent, when jobs become scarce, living costs rise, and opportunities diminish, frustration seeks an outlet, and that outlet is rarely the complex institutional and policy failures that actually caused the hardship.
This phenomenon is commonly and usefully referred to as scapegoating. Rather than confronting the structural causes of social and economic challenges, which are difficult to understand, slow to change, and rarely produce a satisfying emotional response, public frustration is redirected toward groups that are politically vulnerable, socially distinct, and easy to identify. Immigrants fit this profile in almost every society where they are present in significant numbers. They look different, speak differently, worship differently, and occupy a social position that makes them easy to portray as outsiders who do not belong and therefore do not deserve the resources they are perceived to be consuming.
South Africa’s situation reflects many of these dynamics with particular intensity, shaped by a history that makes its current crisis both understandable and deeply tragic.
Despite being one of Africa’s most industrialized and developed economies, South Africa continues to experience some of the highest levels of unemployment on the continent and indeed in the world. Official unemployment figures have consistently exceeded thirty percent in recent years, with youth unemployment reaching even more alarming levels. Economic inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, remains among the highest of any country on earth. Millions of South African citizens continue to live in poverty, in informal settlements without adequate sanitation or electricity, with limited access to quality healthcare, education, and economic opportunity. These are not new problems. They are the accumulated product of centuries of colonial exploitation and decades of apartheid, a system that was specifically designed to concentrate wealth, land, and opportunity in the hands of a small racial minority while deliberately excluding the majority from the formal economy.
For many South Africans, the promise of economic transformation that accompanied the end of apartheid in 1994 and the dawn of democracy remains painfully and visibly unfulfilled. While political freedom was achieved, and while the legal architecture of racial discrimination was dismantled, economic inclusion has proven far more difficult and far slower to realize. Land remains heavily concentrated. Corporate ownership remains skewed. Access to capital, education, and professional networks continues to reflect the inequalities of the past. This disconnect between the political promises of liberation and the economic realities of daily life has contributed to growing frustration and disillusionment, particularly among younger South Africans who were born after apartheid ended and who cannot understand why freedom has not yet translated into opportunity.
In such an environment, immigrants often become symbols of broader anxieties that have little to do with immigration itself. Many foreign nationals living in South Africa come from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia, and other parts of the continent. They operate small businesses in townships and urban centers, work in informal sectors, provide services, and seek economic opportunities that are unavailable or severely constrained in their home countries. Their presence within local communities creates visibility. And that visibility, in a context of scarcity and frustration, can generate the perception that they are taking jobs, occupying business spaces, or accessing services that rightfully belong to citizens.
This perception, however, frequently diverges significantly from the evidence. Research on the economic impact of immigration in South Africa and elsewhere consistently shows that immigrants do not simply take jobs from citizens. They also create jobs, start businesses that employ local workers, fill skills gaps in sectors where domestic supply is insufficient, and contribute to local economies through their spending, taxation, and economic activity. A Nigerian shopkeeper in a township is not stealing an opportunity from a South African. In many cases, that shopkeeper has created a service, employed assistants, and provided affordable goods in a community that was previously underserved. The relationship between immigration and unemployment is complex, contested among economists, and cannot be reduced to the simple arithmetic of more people competing for fewer jobs.
Consider, for example, the experience of a Zimbabwean trader who crossed into South Africa after Zimbabwe’s economic collapse in the late 2000s. Having lost his savings and his livelihood to hyperinflation and political instability, he arrived with little more than skills and determination. Over years of persistent effort, he built a small clothing stall, then a shop, then a small enterprise employing three South African workers. He pays rent to a South African landlord, buys stock from South African suppliers, and contributes to the local economy in ways that are invisible in anti-immigrant rhetoric but very real in the daily life of his community. His story is not exceptional. It is representative of countless immigrants whose contributions are routinely overlooked in debates that reduce their presence to a threat.
The reality is that unemployment, poverty, and inequality in South Africa cannot be meaningfully explained by immigration. These challenges are the product of historical dispossession, inadequate education infrastructure, insufficient investment in skills development, failures of governance and service delivery, and the structural features of an economy that has not succeeded in creating opportunities fast enough to absorb its growing population. These are the real causes of South Africa’s economic distress. They are difficult to address, require sustained political will, and do not lend themselves to simple solutions or satisfying emotional narratives.
However, complex explanations rarely generate the same emotional response as simple ones. When people experience prolonged hardship, when they watch their children go hungry, when they cannot afford school fees or medical care, when they have applied for jobs repeatedly and been rejected, the desire for immediate and identifiable answers becomes overwhelming. In that state of distress, a narrative that points to a visible group of outsiders as the source of the problem offers something that structural analysis cannot, a clear villain and the emotional relief of righteous anger. This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a very human response to pain. But it is a response that, when translated into policy or action, produces injustice rather than solutions.
The consequences of xenophobic sentiment extend far beyond those who are directly targeted. When anti-immigrant hostility becomes normalized in public discourse, it weakens the social trust upon which functioning communities depend. It creates fear and suspicion where cooperation and mutual support are needed. It divides communities along lines of origin and nationality at precisely the moment when shared challenges require collective response. In South Africa, where the wounds of racial division already run deep, the addition of nationality-based hostility adds another layer of fracture to a society that is still in the long process of healing.
For the immigrants themselves, the impact of this hostility can be devastating and sometimes fatal. South Africa has experienced multiple episodes of deadly xenophobic violence over the past two decades, including the widespread attacks of 2008 in which over sixty people were killed, and subsequent outbreaks in 2015 and beyond. Shops and homes were looted and burned. Families were displaced. People who had built lives over years lost everything in days. Many of those targeted had lived in South Africa for decades, raised children there, built businesses, and considered it home. In moments of mob violence, none of that mattered. What mattered was that they were perceived as foreign.
The South African experience raises uncomfortable but necessary questions about African solidarity and the meaning of continental unity in practice. Africa has a long and rich tradition of intra-continental migration. People have moved across the continent in search of pasture, trade, education, employment, and safety for thousands of years. These movements have contributed to cultural exchange, the spread of knowledge, economic growth, and the complex and vibrant diversity that characterizes African societies today. The idea that Africans should be hostile to other Africans seeking opportunity within the continent sits in painful tension with the values of solidarity and shared humanity that African political and cultural traditions have long celebrated.
As African countries continue to pursue greater economic and political cooperation through frameworks such as the African Continental Free Trade Area, which envisions the free movement of goods, services, and eventually people across the continent, the challenge will be to translate those institutional commitments into genuine cultural and social acceptance at the community level. Trade agreements and policy frameworks matter enormously. But they cannot achieve their full potential in societies where ordinary people view fellow Africans as threats rather than as partners and neighbors.
None of this means that governments should ignore legitimate concerns about border management or the pressures placed on public services by large-scale immigration. Every sovereign nation has both the right and the responsibility to manage its borders and regulate the flow of people entering its territory. Immigration policy is a legitimate area of governance, and there are real and valid questions about how to ensure that public services are adequately funded to serve growing populations, how to manage informal settlements, and how to create pathways to legal status for long-term residents. These are proper subjects for policy debate and democratic deliberation. However, there is a fundamental and morally significant difference between addressing immigration through careful, rights-respecting policy and assigning blame for complex, historically rooted societal problems to people who had nothing to do with creating them.
The current debate in South Africa serves as a sobering reminder that economic hardship tests the strength of social order in ways that prosperity rarely does. It reveals how quickly frustration can be redirected toward those perceived as different, and how easily social divisions can deepen when the competition for scarce resources becomes acute. It also reveals the critical importance of leadership in such moments. When political leaders and public figures validate scapegoating narratives for short-term political gain, they legitimize hostility and make violence more likely. When they speak honestly about structural causes and call for solidarity, they create space for more constructive responses. The role of leadership in shaping how societies respond to economic stress cannot be overstated.
Media also bears significant responsibility in these moments. The way immigration is framed in news coverage, in social media discourse, and in public commentary shapes how ordinary people understand the issue and where they direct their frustration. Reporting that reduces immigrants to numbers and threats, that amplifies the most extreme anti-immigrant voices without context or counter-narrative, and that fails to humanize the people at the center of the debate contributes to the very climate of hostility that makes violence possible. Responsible journalism on migration requires not only accuracy but empathy and context.
Ultimately, the question confronting South Africa is larger than immigration itself. It is about how societies respond when expectations collide painfully with reality, when the promises of the past remain unfulfilled in the present, and when the future looks uncertain. Do they find the political courage and social will to confront the structural challenges that limit opportunity and perpetuate inequality? Or do they retreat into the easier and more emotionally satisfying path of finding groups to blame? History offers a sobering and consistent lesson. When opportunities disappear, someone is almost always held responsible. The real measure of a society’s maturity, its justice, and its humanity lies in whether it has the honesty and the courage to ensure that blame does not become a substitute for solutions. For South Africa, and for many societies navigating similar pressures across the world, the path forward will not be found in the targeting of the vulnerable. It will be found in the difficult, unglamorous, and absolutely necessary work of addressing the deeper inequalities and structural failures that give rise to public frustration in the first place. That work cannot wait, and it cannot be avoided. The people living at the sharp edge of these tensions, both citizens and immigrants alike, deserve nothing less.
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