If the government did what all serious governments do, including securing our borders and eradicating corruption in home affairs and elsewhere, would we have the disruptive spectacle of citizen marches against illegal immigration, the latest being in the Johannesburg city centre this week?
Despite the sanctimonious condemnation of groups such as March and March and Dudula by the elites and the privileged who don’t have to compete for resources and public services with outsiders, resentment against foreigners (particularly from our own continent, but also from Asia) has deepened over the years.
Rather than focus on the government’s long-standing failure to deal with the problem of uncontrolled immigration, the elites condemn anyone who asks questions about the uncontrolled influx of migrants into South Africa as a backward chauvinist.
Those who complain too loudly or march in the streets about the free-for-all status quo are cast as unreconstructed Neanderthals who have no clue how to live peaceably and tolerantly with others in a democracy or a globalised world.
It is true that it is an undesirable state of affairs that private citizens should take upon themselves the task of regulating migration. After all, how, by crude profiling based on the target’s accent or skin colour, will a private citizen know which foreigner is here illegally and which is not?
Yet, would we be dealing with the phenomenon if the state did its job of enforcing the relevant laws and firmly dealing with illegal migrants as well as citizens who break the law in protest?
The writers of the constitution, as well as the authors of the similarly abused Freedom Charter, did not mean to say that South Africa belonged not just to its citizens but also to any Tom, Dick or Harry who managed to sneak across our notoriously porous borders.
No doubt socioeconomic factors, such as unemployment and our notoriously deep inequality, play a crucial role in fuelling hostility towards foreigners. If people were employed, would they have the time on a weekday to march against folks they have never even met?
Beyond that, unregulated immigration poses a threat to every citizen and the country itself. Many of us have to be disabused of the naïve assumption that everyone who comes to South Africa does so with good intentions or purely to find succour from their murderous rulers back home. Who’s to say that some of the arrivals do not come here as agents of hostile countries or functionaries of criminal cartels?
In the 30 years since South Africa became a more open society, attracting seekers of a better life from far and wide, apologists for a failing immigration regime have not been short of excuses.
First, it was that South Africa was obliged to show understanding towards migrants from elsewhere on the continent because their countries sheltered South African exiles during the struggle against apartheid. Not said was that exiled South Africans did not act in ways that threatened either the stability of host countries or the safety of their citizens.
Then there was the perversion of the noble concept of Pan-Africanism, where it was implied rather foolishly that of all African countries, South Africa alone bore the duty to throw open its borders and make itself home to all who fancied living or working here. No questions asked. While other African countries did the sensible thing of securing their borders and prioritising their own citizens’ welfare. They also insist on obedience to their laws. In that harebrained borderless scenario, South Africa’s already strained capacity to care for and provide for its own citizens was clearly deemed an irrelevancy.
Even the constitution was not spared in defence of our failure to properly address immigration. Our supreme founding legislation, we were told disingenuously, concedes that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it”. While the text was correctly quoted, the meaning was deliberately distorted.
In truth, the writers of the constitution, as well as the authors of the similarly abused Freedom Charter, did not mean to say that South Africa belonged not just to its citizens but also to any Tom, Dick and Harry who managed to sneak across our notoriously porous borders. The phrase was meant to be a riposte to colonial and apartheid governments that sought to deny blacks land ownership and citizenship, instead forcibly confining them to bantustans and glorified labour dormitories called townships.
How can you claim to govern a country if you cannot account for all its residents? If you don’t know precisely how many residents you have, how many are genuine citizens and how many are legal foreigners?
The ray of light in all of this is the looming amendments to the country’s immigration policy framework. But as with all brave pronouncements by our government, the proof of the pudding will be, as the saying goes, in the eating.
We should by now have woken up to the folly of passing off the issue of immigration, border security and enforcement as having been dreamt up by Backward hordes who, presumably, are driven by nothing but xenophobic instinct.
After all, how can you claim to govern a country if you cannot account for all its residents? If you don’t know precisely how many residents you have, how many are genuine citizens and how many are legal foreigners? And then you have the undocumented people whose numbers or whereabouts you cannot ascertain.
The absence of effective border control and security impacts not only the job aspirations of the poor but also the country’s capacity to fight crime, which affects all citizens, by hindering the police’s ability to track down perpetrators.
In addition to the scourge of human trafficking, it enables the ingress of counterfeit goods, which severely harms businesses. Contraband trade, involving local and international crime syndicates, also negatively affects the country’s much-needed tax revenues.
While critics of the likes of Dudula and March and March vainly resort to name-calling to silence the groups, the organisations’ supporters are misguided to blame illegal foreigners for their plight, which arises from the government’s policy failures. Both sides are barking up the wrong tree.
The solution lies in the government doing what decisive governments everywhere do — get a handle on the immigration question. Plain common sense. Isn’t it?
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