People awaiting repatriation queue to board a bus headed to Zimbabwe in Musina, South Africa, on July 9. Thousands of foreign nationals clamoured to leave the country after fringe groups began demanding all illegal migrants leave by June 30, in a campaign that saw violent protests and clashes.EMMANUEL CROSET/AFP/Getty Images
Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation.
South Africa has been experiencing a spasm of destructive and deathly xenophobia. Anti-immigration protests have led to violence and intimidation, with participants accusing migrants of “taking” South Africans’ jobs, increasing crime rates and straining public services. The government has responded by removing more than 53,000 foreign nationals in the last five weeks. Another 160,000 have reportedly fled over the last two months.
But this hatred is not novel or sudden. The continent’s most advanced economy is intensely attractive to fellow Africans from farther north - but it is also dangerously underperforming for its least educated citizens, making it harder for them to compete in the market.
South Africa, both during and after apartheid, has done a mediocre job educating the least privileged of its 65 million citizens. Too many South Africans lack the skills to keep up with their immediate peers, much less newcomers. At the end of each high school year, legions of South African youth take a special school-leaving examination; just 57 per cent of those who began Grade 1 in 2014 passed that exam this year, and about 38 per cent of those who took the exam received scores high enough to be admitted to university. The non-qualifiers are thrown prematurely into a saturated job market. It’s little surprise that the formal unemployment rate in South Africa is at least 32 per cent – and 60 per cent, for those aged 15-24.
As a result, many of the newcomers crossing the border illegally are often better educated than their local competitors for South African jobs. Their English is generally more idiomatic, too, compensating a little for their inability to speak South Africa’s main indigenous languages.
In an upscale restaurant near Cape Town, the unusually polished and well-spoken waiters told me they had been schoolteachers in rural Zimbabwe (in dictator Robert Mugabe’s home district, in fact) and had fled the country’s harsh and increasingly authoritarian conditions for better opportunities and much better pay. In a sense, they had indeed “taken” South African jobs. But the restaurant’s proprietor (and thousands like him) said that there are simply too few locals who can perform at the level of better trained Zimbabweans.
Likewise, the 40,000 or so Malawians who were expelled from South Africa – representing nearly three-quarters of those deported – doubtless “took” jobs from South Africans. But many did so because they had better vocational skills and better English expression; as immigrants seeking a better life, many have simply hustled harder. Malawi, which is dependent on exports of flue-cured tobacco to China, has always been a labour exporter, and will continue to be, despite the deportations.
The foreign nationals who were removed from South Africa will return to intensely poor countries with few earning possibilities. In Zimbabwe, formal sector unemployment is around 20 per cent, though that does not reflect the fact that informal work – unregistered, untaxed and unprotected by the government – represents about 80 per cent of all employment in the country. While South Africa’s GDP per capita is US$6,597, Zimbabwe’s is US$3,021 – and Malawi’s, a minuscule US$671.
Protesters march against illegal immigration, in Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 30.Themba Hadebe/The Associated Press
For South Africa’s own birthright citizens, what looks like comparative prosperity masks a vast inequality between the upper class (both old and white, and young and Black) and everyone else. The Gini coefficient rankings of economic inequality show how most South Africans fail to share in its status as a wealthy developing country. In those measures, 0 represents absolute equality, and 100 represents absolute inequality; South Africa registers at 63, the highest in the world. (Canada checks in at 29.9, and the U.S. at 41.8.)
Ousting immigrants may provide a short-term stimulus for jobs to pass from outsiders to native South Africans, but this recent spasm of xenophobia is unlikely to advance the country as a whole. After all, like all countries, it needs outside talent to grow wealthier and more successful.
Immigration has been vital for South Africa just as immigration from Mexico and the rest of Latin America has been intrinsic to the growth and economic strength of the U.S. since the 1940s. As the demographer Lyman Stone recently wrote in the New York Times, the U.S.’s population may be shrinking dangerously, and faster than we realize, because of record-low fertility rates and the Trump administration’s pernicious work in shutting down immigration. A similar approach in South Africa would be a recipe for disaster there, too.
Few countries can function at high levels without the skills and sheer hands that outsiders contribute. Frustration is understandable, and xenophobia is one consequence of this rage. But it seriously undermines the advance of growing societies.