Migrants in for cold welcome in SA amid poor tolerance and behaviour

A FROSTY welcome looms for Africa’s migrants

Human migration is perhaps the biggest issue of the 21st century and across the globe it’s driving a slew of governing parties to hasty policy about-turns.

The movement of masses of people across national borders has become politically unsustainable to the destination countries. The electoral cost of compassion has caused a massive backlash that has seen powerful establishment parties crumble in the face of populist anti-immigration upstarts.

The issue of mass migration has fuelled the rise of far-right nationalist parties across Europe. In the US, it was a major factor in Donald Trump’s presidential victory.

But it is not only a right wing phenomenon. In Britain, the anti-immigration sentiments that delivered the referendum vote for Brexit are as prevalent among Labour’s working-class voters as they are among the Tory Little Englanders.

In South Africa, it’s an issue on which the DA and the ANC are not far apart in policy. Both talk of encouraging skilled, legal immigration while tightening controls to stop illegal flows. Both parties have been criticised for being xenophobic and isolationist.

Recently, Herman Mashaba, the DA mayor of Johannesburg, had to publicly apologise for a tweet in which he boasted of arresting, because it was a disease risk, a man who was transporting cow heads on an open trolley. Mashaba wrote: “We are (not) going to sit back and allow people like you to bring us Ebola in the name of small business… Our health facilities are already stretched to the limit.”

The Institute of Race Relations’ (IRR) Gareth van Onselen said this fuelled prejudice and hatred of “immigrants or informal traders, often regarded as one and the same”.

The Human Rights Commission (HRC) instituted an inquiry and virtually every political grouping from the EFF to Cosatu got on the shaming bandwagon.

Interestingly, there was considerably less reaction to Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, who expressed far stronger sentiments in the very same week as the Mashaba incident. Speaking at a healthcare workers union summit, Motsoaledi said that the “burden of foreign nationals” had nothing to do with xenophobia, but “was a reality”.

“Our hospitals are full, we can’t control them. When more and more come, you can’t say the hospital is full now go away… they have to be admitted, we have got no option. And when they get admitted in large numbers, they cause overcrowding, infection control starts failing.”

This earned Motsoaledi a rebuke only from Deputy Public Protector Kevin Malunga who, being born in Zimbabwe, is no doubt sensitive to xenophobia, chided him for trying to deflect blame from the Health Department’s own managerial failures. The IRR and HRC, Cosatu and the EFF, were silent.

Leaders’ scapegoating of minorities – be they foreign, gay, white, Muslim, or all of the above – is inarguably reprehensible.

But, when it chimes with the deepseated prejudices of those whose support you are dependent on, it’s pretty much irresistible.

Unfortunately, also, this is a behaviour pattern that is not particularly susceptible to being countered by reason. It doesn’t much help to defuse xenophobia by pointing out that there are probably no more than three million illegal immigrants in SA and statistically it is highly unlikely that they, collectively, are responsible for you, specifically, being unemployed. Nor will any number of academic studies proving that immigrants add more to the economic pie than they take out.

Prejudice goes hand in hand with exclusion. The less-skilled and less well-off in Budapest and Johannesburg are susceptible to populism, be it from the right or the left, for the same reason: they believe that they are being deprived of the privileges of citizenship by pushy, undeserving outsiders.

The ANC is very attuned to this, hence the growing anti-immigrant tenor, with Motsoaledi’s words just the most recent manifestation. As it has shown by embracing the EFF’s position on land expropriation without compensation, the ANC has no intention of allowing another party to outflank it on populist issues.

In the near future, migrants, whether they are Somalis seeking succour or Zimbabweans offering skills, are likely to encounter a far chillier welcome.