Ramaphosa walks tightrope on migration crisis
· Citizen
In politics, especially in an election year, numbers rarely speak for themselves.
Visit rocore.sbs for more information.
Leaders and ordinary citizens must frame and interpret numbers. Opportunists often weaponise numbers.
In South Africa’s increasingly toxic debate over asylum and migration, the question is not just how many undocumented asylum seekers and migrants arrive and remain in the country each year; it is what many commentators make those numbers represent in an economically depressed, crime and corruption-infested country.
That’s why several polls suggest a large proportion of the public now believes things that are simply untrue.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s unveiling of the government’s new hardline strategy to tackle the escalating illegal immigration crisis, a plan which includes the establishment of dedicated courts to expedite deportation, has staked his political credibility on restoring a sense of control over the immigration system, while acknowledging the growing public anxiety over border security, job losses, and buckling public services.
Many question whether the timing of last week’s Cabinet adoption of a comprehensive approach for migration management is a response to the public demonstrations targeting undocumented foreign nationals.
Ramaphosa’s tone highlighted the volatility of the situation when he warned against vigilantism and anti-foreigner sentiment saying: “Only the authorised government officials may act against violations of the law, including violations of our immigration laws. We will and must not allow groups to use the legitimate concerns of South Africans to destabilise our country through inciting lawlessness and violence.”
The influx of immigrants over the years and how that negatively impacts the government’s ability to provide social services, is no longer just about shortcomings. They are a cultural firestorm – and one increasingly fuelled not by facts, but by misinformation.
That is why the public debate will continue to shine a spotlight on government progress in implementing measures such as relocation of refugee reception centres to border posts to process asylum applications at the point of entry, discontinuation of green ID books heavily compromised by criminal syndicates and replacing them with a biometric-backed digital ID system, introduction of new regulations within three months to end the abuse of traffic registration numbers by foreign nationals using them as illicit identification.
That gap between belief and reality is not accidental. It is the outcome of years of distortion by some individuals and interest groups who conflate asylum, illegality and criminality.
Ramaphosa’s strategy to confront this with better data and a functioning system is, on paper, entirely rational.
Turning to the volatile informal economy, Ramaphosa validated local frustration regarding foreigner-run spaza shops squeezing South Africans out of their community markets and promised government intervention through proper business registration and support via the Spaza Shop Fund.
But, his warning against vigilantism and anti-foreigner sentiment demonstrated that many of his proposed interventions are top-down and offer few and far between pathways for citizen involvement.
But public announcements and data alone cannot win a cultural war in an age of widespread misinformation.
It is not enough for Ramaphosa to say: “We will not be fooled or influenced by social media campaigns that spread misinformation, fake news and lies about foreign nationals.”
Targeting employers by increasing the penalties – including imprisonment, for employers who violate the Immigration Act, and ensuring that guilty companies would no longer be able to “merely pay a fine” and continue business as usual, even in the name of transparency and closing fragmented legal loopholes – may serve only to reinforce the belief that “foreignness” explains criminality – particularly when the dominant public narrative is so skewed.
This risks positioning the new National Labour Migration Policy and the Employment Services Amendment Bill – aimed at empowering the state to set strict maximum quotas on foreign national employment across specific economic sectors – as a lightning rod for anti-black and discriminatory sentiment in circumstances where an overwhelming number of foreign nationals participate in the unregulated informal economy environment.
The urgent problem is not just the large number of asylum seekers and immigrants. More South Africans see most, if not all, African foreign nationals as a threat to identity and safety.
A significant proportion of the public now supports not just border control, but mass removals of undocumented migrants who have already settled here.
That is a policy with no precedent in mainstream politics since 2010. Worryingly, it is now slithering back into public debate.
The government of national unity inherited a broken immigration system and poisoned political environment. The risk is that by trying to neutralise extremism with incremental reform, datasets, and rehashing of policy and legislation statements, Ramaphosa lends legitimacy to the narrative: that the migrant is, at root, the problem.
The government is playing with fire, not because its systems are failing, but because the public’s trust in those systems has been eroded. That is harder to repair. And far more dangerous to ignore.