Cities of hope and promise for poor
In-migrants shouldn’t be seen as threat but embraced as they add to diversity and come to work
CAPE Town’s recent water management crisis has again ignited anxious talks about population pressure from in-migrants on the city and Western Cape’s resources. In times of crisis, internal migration is often framed as a “them versus us” issue, a sleight of hand that diverts attention from management crises and focuses it undeservedly on South Africans who have as much right to move within our borders as any other South African.
As late as 2012, children born in the Eastern Cape who purportedly moved to the Western Cape for better education, were unapologetically labelled as “Eastern Cape refugees” by a prominent public official. At that stage 21 years had passed since the repeal of the last apartheid law governing the movement and settlement of the country’s black population, but in many minds, the porosity of the internal borders was still cause for consternation.
That consternation is not entirely unjustified. Between 1996 and 2011, the Western Cape population had grown 49%. Over the same period, its population share had grown from 9.7% to 11.2%, while its biggest sending migrant province, the Eastern Cape, had experienced a decline in its population share from 15.1% to 12.7%.
The numbers, when considering only the bookends of a 15-year period, are staggering. However, not so prominently cited, is the fact that population growth doesn’t happen once every 15 years. It’s a continuous process, one that is captured annually at the provincial level by Statistics SA in their mid-year population estimates.
Although some of the nuances of internal migration are not captured fully by census questions, it is possible using that data set and others to discern roughly what in-migration rates are and focus policy in such a way as to manage those in-flows. Beyond internal migration volumes, we can also now confidently say that internal migration mostly follows the same geographic exclusion-to-inclusion paths that were forged in the late 19th century mining boom and endured under apartheid.
Data can also tell us why people migrate. Working-aged adults move primarily for jobs. The 2001-02 Migration Survey of the Human Sciences Research Council reveals that the most common reason was to take up a new job or to find one.
The second most common reason relates to differences in access to services, particularly access to education and housing.
The relative attractiveness of the Western Cape and Gauteng as migration destinations are without question. Municipalities in both provinces provide their citizens with unparalleled access to basic services. Both provinces also have higher aggregate economic activity, lower expanded unemployment and poverty rates than anywhere else in South Africa. In contrast, municipalities located in the former homelands are characterised by high expanded unemployment rates, poor access to services and low aggregate economic activity.
In a paper co-authored with Dieter von Fintel, we show that these regional disparities in economic opportunity and service provision manifest themselves in the form of migration paths now indelibly etched into the South African landscape since the late 19th century, with the vast majority of internal migrants converging on Gauteng and Western Cape municipalities.
Internal migration is extremely age-selective, with the bulk of inter-municipal migrants being young adults aged 20 to 39. In 2011, the biggest net receiving provinces of Gauteng and the Western Cape had median ages of 28. In contrast, Limpopo and the Eastern Cape (the biggest sending provinces) had median ages of 22 and 23, respectively.
Age distribution pyramids reveal 36% of the Western Cape and 41% of the Gauteng population is aged 20 to 39, while the same age group in Limpopo and the Eastern Cape comprise 30% and 28% of their respective populations. The total dependency ratios (the number of children under 14 and elderly over 65) were 66% in the Eastern Cape and 67% in Limpopo in 2011.
For Gauteng, the dependency ratio was 39% while the Western Cape ratio was 45%.
These large regional disparities in productive potential (simply from an age perspective) because of continued out-migration of the young and educated have dire implications for provinces that are predominantly located within former homeland borders – weak labour markets, declining remittances and continued net out-migration are likely to lead to a perpetuation of weak economic activity and increasing dependence on government, which, in turn, would lead to more out-migration of working-aged individuals.
Age and education selectivity of internal migration also present a two-edged sword for net receiving municipalities: on the one hand, reasonably absorptive labour markets can capitalise on the productive capacities of young adults. On the other hand, weak economic growth and skills mismatches can lead to weak labour market outcomes and the migration of vulnerability from rural to urban areas.
A working paper by Umakrishan Kollamparambil from University of the Witwatersrand lends some credence to the latter scenario being possible. She finds that sustained in-migration leads to increasing informalisation of the labour market in receiving regions.
While migration theory has traditionally been accepting of migrants “waiting in the wings” for formal sector jobs, a real danger exists of that waiting period being too long because of weak economic growth and skills mismatches. Too much time spent in marginal, precarious employment or unemployment could erode skills or make them less relevant, with each passing year diminishing the chances of absorption into the formal sector.
A relatively young urban labour force that is increasingly excluded from formal economic activity, despite investing in migration, is an indictment of a number of systems that simply cannot continue doing business as usual. Unrealised investments in education and migration are likely to be extremely damaging psychologically at individual and family levels, and destabilising politically and economically for society at large. Migrants are here to work. Let’s work together in a focused way on our basic education quality and higher education fronts to make that happen.
MUNICIPALITIES LOCATED IN FORMER HOMELANDS ARE CHARACTERISED BY HIGH EMPLOYMENT, POOR ACCESS TO SERVICES AND LOW ECONOMIC ACTIVITY