People are suffering – and change has to happen
Everybody wants, and has the right to, decent work, dignified public services, food, shelter, and safety. Poor and working-class communities are too often denied these. Too many watch their children grow up without opportunities, queue for healthcare in under-resourced clinics, and live on unsurvivable incomes. The Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) decries these conditions, the decades of economic and policy failure that have led to them, and those powerful interests who continue to benefit from them. The anger people feel towards these unacceptable conditions is understandable and needs to be addressed. The IEJ also rejects such conditions being used to justify violence against vulnerable groups, in South Africa and in countries across the globe.
The IEJ stands unequivocally against anti-migrant hate and vigilante violence
We are an organisation made up of South African citizens and non-citizens, firmly committed to fighting economic injustice and improving the lives of all in this country. We condemn the anti-migrant rhetoric, violence, and killings that have swept across South Africa in recent months, and we stand in solidarity with our migrant colleagues, brothers, and sisters from the continent and around the world. Families who have endured hardships, struggled, and strived alongside their South African neighbours have been terrorised, displaced, and devastated.
Groups, such as March and March and Operation Dudula, acting in concert with political parties including the MKP, have mobilised across the country. They have incited attacks on foreign-owned businesses, driven migrant and refugee families from their homes, denied them access to hospitals, schools, and clinics, and, in some cases, instigated violence with the most tragic consequences. Hate and violence have targeted African migrants regardless of their legal status. Asylum-seekers with valid papers, long-term residents, refugees, documented workers, and even some South Africans from minority ethnic groups have been targeted and attacked.
In Estcourt, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), a mayor reportedly confiscated the keys of Ghanaian shopkeepers and handed their businesses to South African nationals. In Pietermaritzburg, community violence has deprived a four-year-old child of her father. Across KZN, thousands of migrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, were herded onto buses by law enforcement under the guise of ‘verification’. An arbitrary deadline, 30 June 2026, has been issued by extra-legal vigilante formations demanding that migrants “leave” South Africa, with the implicit, and sometimes explicit, threat of more violence to come. Some of their leaders have been recorded saying that all foreign migrants, including documented immigrants, must leave the country by 30 June.
This is not law enforcement; it is an orchestrated attempt to manipulate and channel the anguish of impoverished communities for political gain, and to destabilise the country. In doing so, the provocateurs betray the struggle of the people they purport to represent. Their actions also stand in violation of the South African Constitution, laws governing the Republic, and of South Africa’s international human rights obligations, which guarantee the dignity, equality, and security of every person within its borders, not only citizens.
Decades of national and regional policy failures create fertile ground
The IEJ has spent years documenting South Africa’s profound economic crisis. Years of deindustrialisation and disinvestment in productive socioeconomic infrastructure has resulted in disastrous levels of unemployment, poverty, and inequality. The expanded unemployment rate in South Africa stands at a staggering 44%, with youth unemployment approaching 70%. The social grants system, while vital, is grossly inadequate: the Social Relief of Distress and Child Support Grants remain well below the food poverty line. Public healthcare and education have been hollowed out by more than a decade of austerity, around 150,000 vacancies in the public service remain unfilled, many in frontline service delivery posts.
Conditions are also dire in many countries across the African continent. Nearly 56 million people in the SADC region suffer from acute or chronic food insecurity. In countries like Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique, up to 50% of the population is chronically undernourished. Nearly two-thirds of the SADC population lacks access to a safe supply of drinking water, and half lack access to electricity. Women in particular face systemic economic exclusion and disproportionate care responsibilities. Extreme levels of inequality persist. This is the product of colonialism, extractivism, deliberate underdevelopment, corruption, and mismanagement.
For many across the region, despite South Africa’s social and economic challenges, migrating to South Africa offers the possibility of a better life. Such migration, including by undocumented migrants, did not appear by accident. South African employers from the agricultural sector to construction, from mining to domestic work, have long benefitted from access to workers whose precarious status makes it nearly impossible for them to assert their rights. As even President Ramaphosa has acknowledged, migrants, including undocumented migrants, are employed precisely because their conditions prevent them from demanding a living wage, safe conditions, or legal protections. Inadequate protections for one group of workers makes all workers more vulnerable. A dysfunctional, underfunded, and at times corrupt immigration system has maintained this pool of ultra-vulnerable labour. This has allowed employers, owners of capital, and the wealthy to take advantage of migrants and precarious regional and national labour market conditions.
Successive failures by governments across the region have also maintained this pattern of migrancy and exploitation. National policy failures, corrupt political elites, and policy conditionality imposed by International Financial Institutions and Western governments have trapped African countries in patterns of underdevelopment and limited their economic activity to natural resource extraction. Collusion with regional despots by South Africa’s political elite has made matters worse.
Now, actors seeking to consolidate their own political support in the run-up to the local government elections are stoking anti-migrant attitudes and actions, redirecting the fight for economic justice away from those in power and sowing social chaos. South Africa’s anti-migrant machinery has evolved into a well-orchestrated, coordinated infrastructure. The line between anti-migrant street movements and formal electoral politics has become dangerously porous – a trend also witnessed in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Ethno-nationalist, racist, antisemitic, and Islamophobic movements across these countries have used the same playbook of grievance and scapegoating to undermine democratic institutions, attack human rights, and concentrate power in the hands of political elites. As in those countries, opportunistic political elites and political entrepreneurs in South Africa have increasingly embraced and validated anti-migrant views and actions, deflecting attention away from their own failings.
We have seen this before, and we know who pays the price
South Africa has experienced waves of xenophobic violence before. In 2008, 62 people were killed, 21 of them South African citizens, and over 150,000 people were displaced. The violence destroyed businesses and livelihoods, not only of migrants, but of the surrounding communities that depended on those economic networks. The perpetrators faced barely any accountability. The July 2021 unrest left over 350 people dead, destroyed or damaged an estimated 3,000 stores and 161 malls, put 150,000 jobs at risk, and caused economic damage estimated at over R100 billion.
The people who bore the brunt of these previous cycles of violence were working-class and deprived communities.
Beyond the economic damage, the 2021 unrest revealed how quickly incited violence can travel and mutate. In Phoenix, KZN, for example we saw how manipulated fear, combined with the vacuum left by the collapse of state protection, fanned pre-existing tensions between Black and Indian communities into something far more hideous. Thirty-six people were reportedly killed in the violence that ensued.
This is the ominous trajectory unfolding.
African solidarity is not an abstraction – it is our history and our future
African ambassadors are boycotting South Africa’s Africa Day celebrations and calling for debates at the African Union. Ghana has been forced to repatriate its citizens from South Africa. Nigeria’s foreign minister has formally protested, a large number of Malawians are being deported, and Mozambique has confirmed the deaths of its nationals. This should be a source of national shame.
South Africa’s liberation from apartheid was achieved through African solidarity. The democracy and liberties South Africans enjoy were made possible by the material, political, and moral support of the African continent, from the frontline states that bore enormous costs for hosting the freedom fighters and political organisations in exile, to the mass mobilisation of African peoples who made South Africa a centrepiece of the global anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle. Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and many others stood in solidarity with South African liberation, offering their territory, their resources, and in many cases, the lives of their people. The Pan-Africanist tradition and the ideals of Ubuntu – the vision of shared African dignity and solidarity across national borders, associated with leaders from Kwame Nkrumah to Oliver Tambo – was the organising principle that sustained the liberation movement through its darkest years and laid the foundations for a democratic South Africa. This foundation is under attack.
These are also our regional partners in the economic liberation we seek today. South Africa cannot thrive as an island, in part, because our economy is too small, our market too limited, and our resources insufficient. Regional integration, not isolation, is vital to any truly transformative economic revival in South Africa and the broader region. Regional trade, shared infrastructure, and the coordinated leveraging of our natural endowments are the means through which African countries can prosper in a fragmenting global economy. This crisis could seriously undermine or even threaten South Africa’s role in the African Continental Free Trade Agreement. We need regional integration and well-managed migration for thriving national and regional economies and all forms of social life.
We call for urgent and decisive action
The state’s response to this crisis has enabled it. The decision to convene a high-level meeting at the Union Buildings with the leadership of March and March and similar formations on 25 May 2026 was a profound miscalculation. It lent legitimacy to extra-legal vigilante organisations, amplified their ultimatums, and signalled to communities that violent mobilisation produces political access. The government is responsible for upholding the rule of law and guaranteeing the safety of all in South Africa. But guaranteeing the rule of law, while critical, is not enough. The anger in communities is real and understandable. It is being appropriated. But it will not disappear irrespective of what actions are taken on immigration policy. It needs to be addressed through real, meaningful, and lasting social and economic transformation. We therefore call on our leaders to take the following urgent steps:
Lawful conduct
- Protect the safety and rights of all persons within South Africa’s borders. Law enforcement must be deployed proactively to prevent, arrest, and prosecute vigilante violence or harassment, hate speech, incitement, expulsion of people from their homes, and the unlawful exclusion of migrants from public services and spaces. The state is the sole arbiter of law. This commitment must be translated from presidential speeches into field-level operational instructions to the South African Police Service, who have been absent or passive in areas where anti-migrant terror is unfolding.
- Ensure that immigration enforcement is constitutional and lawful. Lawfully securing borders is a legitimate function of government, and must receive the necessary investment as part of holistic policy implementation. However, random operations targeting persons based on perceived nationality, conducted without individualised legal grounds, and without access to legal representation, are unconstitutional. They cannot be permitted regardless of political pressure and must be prohibited and sanctioned if they do occur.
- Enforce all labour protections. Labour inspectors should be equally concerned with wage theft, violation of minimum wage laws, health and safety hazards, and other exploitative practices that undermine all workers. This means acting against employers who abuse the vulnerability of citizens and migrant workers alike.
Address the social and economic conditions that underlie community despair
- Ramp up public employment and social security. The government must immediately and substantially scale up the public employment and social protection programmes, which, although inadequate, have proven their ability to deliver decent public employment opportunities and income security to sections of the unemployed majority. The Social Relief of Distress grant must be made permanent and increased to a level that provides genuine relief. The Presidential Employment Stimulus must be expanded, and the teachers’ assistants programme reactivated and directly funded by the fiscus.
- Properly resource and capacitate public services. Consistent underfunding of public services must be reversed. Critical frontline posts must be urgently filled to allow our clinics, hospitals, schools, and police stations to function effectively and serve everyone. Governance reform to improve service delivery capacity and capabilities must be accelerated. Austerity must be abandoned. The fiscal space to do this is available. What is required is principled leadership.
- Implement a pro-employment economic package. The government should take immediate steps towards: an employment-promoting macroeconomic strategy that shapes and scales up public investment to promote employment, combined with monetary policy loosening to facilitate investment; protecting and rescuing employment in crisis-hit industries; and implementing well-resourced industrial policy interventions to promote diversification in South Africa and the region.
- Rebuild the criminal justice system. The impunity that has attended every previous wave of xenophobic violence is rooted in the systematic hollowing out of the criminal justice system through corruption, under-resourcing, and political interference. The 2025 Commission of Inquiry into corruption and political interference within the SAPS must be accelerated and its recommendations implemented. The instigators and orchestrators of xenophobic violence and vigilantism must be held to account.
Look beyond border enforcement to develop sustainable immigration policy
- Engage with regional partners. Engage with other countries in the region on the harmonisation of migration in the region, including joint enforcement processes and investments in immigration management.
- Initiate a multi-stakeholder process to explore regularisation pathways for undocumented migrants. The April 2026 Revised White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection (CIRP) is a step towards rationalising South Africa’s fragmented immigration framework. However, it does not adequately address one of the central drivers of migrant vulnerability: the absence of pathways for long-standing undocumented migrants to regularise their status. The IEJ calls for a multi-stakeholder process to design and implement such pathways, supplementing border enforcement with a credible, rights-compliant route to regularisation where appropriate.
Action beyond government
We further call for:
- Greater coordination amongst civil society formations to publicly reject Afrophobia while campaigning to address the material realities that sustain it. Civil society, the academy, political parties, unions, and faith-based and cultural organisations must play a more active role in nation building, economic transformation, social cohesion, regional stability, and peacebuilding.
- The media should not amplify, legitimise, or normalise the narratives of anti-migrant formations. Too many media houses are uncritically giving a platform to xenophobes to profile hateful rhetoric. Factual and contextualised reporting, including on the structural causes of inequality, rather than reflexive ‘both sides’ framing of community anger and migrant presence, is essential to preventing the further entrenchment of Afrophobic attitudes. We urge the media not to uncritically amplify the voices of organisations that promote hatred, violence, and unconstitutional behaviour.
Conclusion: Solidarity is the only answer
Poverty and unemployment will not be solved by driving Somalian shopkeepers from their stores. Hospitals will not be better resourced by turning away Malawian mothers from maternity wards. Jobs will not be created by burning down the enterprises of Ghanaian traders. Migrants struggle alongside South Africans, not at our expense. The economic transformation that South Africa so desperately needs will only be won through solidarity, the solidarity of workers across national lines, of communities demanding accountability from those who actually hold economic power, and of a civil society that refuses to let the suffering of the majority be weaponised in the service of reactionary politics.
Progressive politics must offer a vision of hope, of pathways towards economic prosperity that are inclusive and just. IEJ commits to continuing to work with partners across the country and the region in this endeavour.