In many modern democracies, migration is one of the most complicated issues, one that takes a high emotional toll on the entire society.
This is because of “othering”, a feeling among voters that they are “us” and migrants are “them”. In most democracies, more older people vote than younger people — and immigrants are the change that most of them oppose.
It also helps anti-immigrant forces that the politics of migration is often not rooted in fact, in South Africa and many other places.
Many people here believe that those who were not born here should be “sent home” and that no other people should be allowed to settle here.
This is despite the fact that if their situations were reversed, if it was South Africans who were fleeing oppression or economic desperation and going to Zimbabwe, they would have a very different view.
It is usually impossible to force people to “go home”. This is because they have made their home in the country they have moved to.
Worst prejudices
This makes a fact-based, rational political debate almost impossible. As a result, politicians use migration as the simplest of point-scoring mechanisms, while pandering to the worst prejudices in our society.
Unfortunately, as Jakkie Cilliers pointed out last week in Daily Maverick, this will only get worse. More people will move more often in the near future, driven by climate change and other emergencies.
In South Africa, the issue of migration may become even more heated and there will be more calls to “send them home”.
At the same time, there are reasons to believe this may not be as intense as the migration crisis in other countries.
This is mainly because many of the people coming into our country are from southern Africa. This is continuing a trend which has been under way for centuries (and reversing a trend that started probably millions of years ago, when human beings evolved here and then moved to the rest of the world).
This could reduce the cultural differences between South African people and migrants.
Violent disputes between immigrants and people who have lived in a country for longer are often sparked by cultural differences, especially when coupled with religious differences.
Think of the recent riots in the UK, which appear to have been driven by the wrong belief that a person who committed a crime was an undocumented immigrant of the Islamic faith. There have been many other such cases in Europe, too.
Such incidents are less likely to occur here, particularly when so many of the countries in southern Africa share languages, political cultures (Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique are all governed by former liberation movements; at one point SA’s national anthem was the anthem of several countries in the region) and histories.
Immigration reforms
Additionally, the sheer diversity of our society means that there can be greater differences between two South Africans than between a person from South Africa and one from Zimbabwe.
The current political situation provides a brief window to introduce some immigration reforms.
This is because most of SA’s political parties are represented in Parliament in the Cabinet, and none can be individually held responsible for a policy that enables or allows immigration.
And while the Patriotic Alliance (PA) has come to define itself on its opposition to immigration (it was largely the PA that created the furore over Chidimma Adetshina’s involvement in the Miss SA contest), there may be scope to encourage it to accept an agreement.
The first reform would involve a path to full citizenship for those who already live in South Africa.
Many have built lives here and have families and community networks. It would be an act of cruelty to force mass deportation.
Unfortunately, because of our broken politics, groups which work with migrants do not get an opportunity to make this point often enough and to highlight the lived experiences of those who have been here for many years.
It is a mystery why there are so few reports about, for example, a Zimbabwean teacher who changed the lives of their learners, or a doctor from the DRC who performed a life-saving operation on a newborn South African baby. It is not difficult to rectify this.
The next hard reality for any government to accept is that for as long as South Africa has the biggest economy in the region and for as long as our neighbours have such high levels of youth unemployment, people will come here. Like gravity, this has to be accepted as part of life.
This should be the basis for any rational discussion about changing immigration laws — talk of “hard borders” or “border fences” will not solve any problems. Proper, solid and well-accepted policy will.
The other reason this is a moment to make a change is that the opposition is so weak and divided on the issue.
While the biggest opposition party, MK, has said it wants to “strengthen border control by assigning border control to the military” it has not made explicit statements about foreign nationals.
The other main opposition party, the EFF, has a long-running policy of pan-Africanism, meaning that it does not believe foreign nationals from our continent should be kept out.
There are indeed groups, often loosely organised, which strongly oppose migrants. Some have used or incited violence against people from other countries. They would certainly try to oppose any reforms.
But these groups frequently break the law and police action can deal with them.
Unfortunately, any real migration reform will require what change always requires: bravery and strong political will.
Considering how much is going on in our politics at the moment, and the fact that President Cyril Ramaphosa might well have used all of his political capital on forming the coalition government, making a change to migration policy might just be a step too far, with debates around migration getting more intense and violent.
No matter what happens, the immigration problem will not go away and we cannot ignore it. Unless treated fairly and seriously, the issue of immigration can cause massive problems — much bigger and more fundamental than just threatening South Africa’s reputation globally. DM