South Africa’s Migrant Crisis Echoes Europe’s Strife

South Africa’s 1996 constitution is among the world’s most progressive, a document crafted in the post-apartheid environment of hope and aspiration which guarantees an unusually broad and vaguely worded swathe of human rights and protections designed to make the rainbow nation the most egalitarian and equal on earth.

Words, however, cannot trump economic reality, and thus, as with many such documents, the constitution which promised equality for all South Africans has singularly failed to achieve its aims. Thirty years after the end of white minority rule, the Republic of South Africa remains plagued by inequality, poverty, crime and racial discord.

One area where the constitution has had a major impact, however, is in the field of immigration. In a tale that will be recognizable to citizens of European democracies, South Africa’s immigration system has become an unwieldy morass of rights and counter-rights which render enforcement almost impossible.

Up until last month, migrants denied asylum had the functional right to enter endless new claims when their original application was denied, effectively making deportation and removals impossible. In 2019, for example, the South African Supreme Court ruled that a deportation could not take place if an asylum application was lodged, even if that application was lodged only after the deportation order was made. This meant that in many cases, removals of persons from South Africa became almost a legal impossibility.

This very relaxed immigration regime, combined with South Africa’s relative stability and prosperity compared to the rest of the continent – notwithstanding real GDP per capita falling and stubbornly high poverty – has led to an unprecedented surge of migration into the country. Over the past 10 years, immigration has accounted for a population rise – according to official figures – of nearly three million people.

But those official figures are widely disputed, and now South Africa finds itself engulfed in domestic political turmoil over the rate of immigration.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), World Bank World Development Indicators

Escalation

By early June, the warning had traveled faster than any official notice: undocumented foreign nationals, some anti-immigration activists said, had until 30 June to leave South Africa. In townships, clinics, taxi ranks and WhatsApp groups, the date became a kind of deadline and a threat. For activists deeply concerned about immigration, the ultimatum is a moment of confrontation with the government that has been years in the making.

Put simply, anti-immigration activists dispute the government figures, which insist that net inward migration over the last decade is in the low-single-digit millions. These groups – the most prominent of which are March for March and a much more militant organization called Operation Dudula (Dudula translates as “force out”) – claim that the true figure is in the tens of millions, and that the government is simply not recording the numbers and has lost control of the system.

The system is not all that the government has lost control over. In the first quarter of this year, official South African figures placed unemployment at a staggering 32%, excluding the millions of South Africans not counted in that number because they are not “actively seeking work”. Immigration has become a proxy for deeper frustrations: unemployment, poor public services, collapsing municipal systems, crime and the feeling, especially in poorer communities, that the state is absent until anger spills into the open.

Amidst this, a certain ugliness has crept in. Operation Dudula has been blamed for vigilante-style migration policing, with activists stopping suspected migrants on the streets and asking for their papers. Worse still, violence has taken hold: at the end of May, Mozambique said five of its citizens were killed in “xenophobic attacks” at Mossel Bay on the South Coast. South African police said two Mozambicans and one South African had died. Two weeks ago, in the Western Cape, local officials recorded an explosion in anti-migrant violence, with immigrants in Overberg “fleeing to the mountains and hills” to escape angry crowds.

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Fleeing South, Not North

So what is causing the immigration issues in South Africa? Predominantly, the answer seems to be that despite its crippling economic issues, the Republic is still a vastly wealthier country than many neighbors.

Mozambique, from which a disproportionate number of migrants originate, is plagued, like many African states, with an ISIS-style Islamic insurgency in the north of the country and extreme poverty. South Africa is simply closer than any European states, and therefore bears much of the brunt of the crisis. Similarly, Zimbabwe’s economic collapse has driven many of its citizens south, making it the number one place of origin for refugees and migrants in the Republic.

Source: Statistics South Africa, Census 2022

Remigration and Political Response

As in Europe, more extreme activists in South Africa are now calling for a program of expulsions and “remigrations”, designed to pressure the government to act. For its part, the ANC-led coalition, which remains firmly of the left, is acknowledging the problem without proposing any concrete measures.

President Cyril Ramaphosa attempted to calm the country during a televised address on 7 June, seeking in a way many Europeans will recognize to straddle the line between political reality and the imperatives of ideology. In his speech he acknowledged that many South Africans were asking “difficult but legitimate questions” about jobs, services, crime and borders. He admitted “weaknesses” in migration management, enforcement and corruption control. But he also warned that “the responsibility for enforcing immigration laws rests with the state and the state alone”, and that no private group may stop people in the street and demand proof of nationality.

He also said – controversially – that the Border Management Authority had stopped more than 450,000 people attempting to enter illegally in the past year. But activists in South Africa pointed to the numbers as evidence that official figures are nonsensical: the government records only a few million migrants as having entered the country over a decade, yet claims to have prevented almost half a million from entering in one year. This, activists claimed, makes little sense if the official figures are correct.

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Healthcare Becomes a Flashpoint

As in Europe, one of the primary causes for concern with immigration is pressure on public services. In South Africa, this is more extreme, given the already strained nature of the South African state.

Associated Press reporting from late 2025 described Operation Dudula members blocking foreign nationals from public clinics, demanding identity documents and turning away pregnant women and sick patients. The Johannesburg High Court ruled such conduct unlawful, and the government has said healthcare is available under law to everyone, including foreigners. But the images of clinic gates being policed by activists have proved politically potent because public hospitals and clinics are genuinely overcrowded, under-resourced and often badly managed.

As for the 30 June deadline, nobody seems to be entirely clear what it actually means. Migrant groups fear it is a deadline after which vigilante attacks on individual migrants will step up. Meanwhile, Ramaphosa’s government insists that it is tightening the border, without much confidence among South Africans that this is actually happening.

All of it bears an uncanny – if more extreme – similarity to the immigration debates in Europe. On one side stands a well-intentioned and naive state that for years assumed the population’s stated preferences at the ballot box for “solidarity” and “human rights” meant that unending inward migration would be tolerated. That state now, like so many in Europe, seems paralyzed and almost disbelieving at the attitude of its own citizens, casting many of them as extremists and villains while simultaneously acknowledging the legitimacy of their concerns.

On the other side is a South African population increasingly disillusioned with the post-apartheid political settlement which has seen the ANC dominate the country for three decades while incomes stagnate and unemployment soars.

Just as in Europe, radicals on both sides wait in the wings, picking over the scraps of a center-left political consensus that no longer seems able to contain the anger of its own voters.

Where this ends, nobody seems to know. But one thing is for sure: in South Africa, nobody is able to claim that opposition to immigration has a racist, anti-African tinge. There, it is all about resources. Just as it is in Europe, despite what some politicians like to claim.

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