Blaming immigrants for our problems is a fool’s game
Lives will not be improved by vigilante action, mass deportations and expressions of hatred
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A man is attacked with a sjambok at an anti-immigrant March and March protest in Jeppestown last month. Photos: Ihsaan Haffejee.
Anti-immigration group March and March has held protests in Durban, Pretoria and Johannesburg over the past month. Protesters have come armed with traditional weapons, people perceived to be immigrants have been assaulted, and shops and businesses have closed to avoid violence. While the group claims to only be aiming at undocumented immigrants, its behaviour has been indiscriminate.
Several political parties promote the idea that immigrants are to blame for South Africa’s woes. The Patriotic Alliance is especially brazen, threatening mass deportations and to “build a wall to protect citizens against illegal foreigners”.
It’s hard to calculate the number of non-citizens living in South Africa but Stats SA estimates that it is close to three-million. Over the past three years over 110,000 undocumented people have been deported.
Racism has become less fashionable, yet xenophobia is in vogue across the world. Immigrants are blamed for crime in the Western world, despite violent crime consistently falling over the past decades in Europe and the US. Much of the local xenophobic rhetoric is imported from overseas.
Immigrants are an easy target for opportunists. They can’t vote, so alienating them doesn’t matter to politicians seeking election. They often look different and have different cultural ways, and so stand out.
But most research shows that immigrants, documented or not, are usually a net positive for a country. They bring new ideas, create jobs, establish trade routes and are likely to be hard working because they are enterprising and have left their countries of origin specifically to find more opportunities. These are generalisations of course; among three-million people you will find saints and sinners, philanthropists and thieves, protectors and murderers, hard-workers and freeloaders, healers and drug-dealers.
With massive unemployment, sky-high crime rates and millions of people battling to make ends meet, it’s tempting to choose an easy target and easy solution. Yet if every immigrant, or every undocumented immigrant, were deported today, the root causes of South Africa’s problems would remain unaddressed. Life would likely not improve one iota for those supporting deportations; on the contrary, jobs would be lost and, considering the number of spaza shops and corner cafes run by immigrants, goods would be harder to obtain.
The alarming level of xenophobia, coupled with indifference to it by most politicians, is also undermining South Africa’s leadership in Africa, with Ghana lobbying the African Union to investigate anti-immigrant violence.
Ironically, the centre of the past month’s protests has been KZN. It would not have been far for protestors to go to Nkandla, the location of a man more responsible for looting the country and destroying jobs than any immigrant.
It is hypocritical to accuse the newly arrived of being uninvited. Unless you can trace your roots back to pure Khoi or San ancestry (i.e. almost no one), your ancestors were also immigrants to South Africa.
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Letters
Dear Editor
The article is too quick to label legitimate concerns about illegal immigration as “xenophobia.” There is a fundamental difference between attacking people because they are foreign and demanding that South Africa enforce its immigration laws, secure its borders and remove people who have no legal right to remain in the country.
South Africans are entitled to raise concerns about crime, undocumented immigration, pressure on public services, illegal businesses and the exploitation of both foreign and local workers through slave wages and the circumvention of labour laws. These concerns cannot simply be dismissed because research suggests that immigrants, on average, make a positive economic contribution.
People experience these issues in their communities every day, and serious incidents involving foreign nationals shape that lived experience. Acknowledging these realities does not mean saying that all immigrants are criminals, just as condemning xenophobic violence does not mean ignoring legitimate public concerns.
The article also fails to confront the deeper question of governance in countries from which people are fleeing. South Africa can offer refuge and opportunity, but it cannot be expected to solve unemployment, corruption, weak institutions and political failures in other countries while its own citizens struggle with poverty, unemployment and crime.
The answer should not be violence against foreigners, but neither should it be to gaslight communities by suggesting that their fears and experiences are merely xenophobia. South Africans have lived alongside immigrants for years, and many recognise the difference between lawful, productive migration and illegal activity. The debate should be about enforcing the law fairly, protecting everyone
© 2026 GroundUp. This article is published under the GroundUp Republication Licence Version 1.0. Email [email protected] to request permission to republish.