Can SA’s ever live in harmony with migrants?
- Marcia Moyana
Xenophobia is not an accident of poverty or frustration. It’s political and rooted in distrust of economic and political systems.
Between 2022 and 2025, there were 406 verified incidents of xenophobic discrimination recorded in South Africa. On average, at least 103 incidents are reported in a year, but, in 2025 alone, 151 were reported in all provinces – with Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape and the Eastern Cape recording the highest number.
This is according to researchers from the Xenowatch project, a platform developed by the µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø , to monitor all forms of xenophobic discrimination in the country.
The ACMS describes acts of xenophobic discrimination as violence, denied access to public services, eviction, extortion, harassment, selective enforcement of by-laws, threats, unlawful arrests and detentions, verbal abuse, hate speech and intimidation.
While the data show a South Africa in which South Africans and migrants cannot seem to get along, researchers at the ACMS paint a different picture.
“South Africans live with an enormous amount of diversity and fluidity in their lives. This spans various dimensions like religion, language, ethnicity, race, sexuality and of course, nationality. All of these are sources of tensions but most people, most days, just accept that this is what it means to live in South Africa,” says Professor Loren Landau, the South African Research Chair in Mobility and the Politics of Difference.
Xenowatch echoes this sentiment, stating that xenophobic discrimination is not a failure of neighbourliness but a spontaneous predictable outcome of decades of scapegoating, weak governance, and impunity.
“When leaders blame migrants for unemployment or crime, they are not describing reality – they are promoting discrimination, sometimes violent discrimination,” says Jaclyn Modise, Xenowatch Project Research Assistant and a Master’s student in Migration and Displacement at ACMS.
Suspicion and scapegoating
While the assumption can be made that distrust is a central driver of these incidents of xenophobic discrimination, Landau and the Xenowatch researchers suggest that the issue is nuanced – the more damaging distrust runs vertically, not horizontally.
Modise explains that migrants become a convenient scapegoat when communities lose trust in the police, local councillors and formal conflict resolution mechanisms:
“With the belief that the state will not protect them or deliver services, they turn to informal leaders, vigilantism and scapegoating. With no viable avenue to hold leaders accountable for their shortcomings, citizens take their frustrations out on the foreign nationals in their communities. So, the most concerning distrust is the distrust in leaders and institutions of authority.”
Landau adds that people losing faith in their ever being able to lead a successful life, after getting a degree, or through hard work, adds to the frustrations that result in the need to reinforce boundaries.
Adding to these frustrations is the high unemployment rate that now sits at almost 33% and the fact that more than 23 million South Africans are living below the poverty line, which increases the sense of threat.
The migration myth
The prevailing narrative is that South Africa has a large number of immigrants coming into the country and that they are burdening already strained health, education, economic and other systems.
However, in February 2026, Statistics South Africa reported that there were approximately three million international immigrants in the country, representing 5.1% of the total population. Almost 64% of these were immigrants from the Southern African Development Community.
“There has not been any substantial increase in immigration into South Africa. As a percentage of the population, non-nationals have only increased slowly over the last 20-30 years,” says Landau. “The real migration surge is happening internally with South Africans moving to urban centres, overwhelming systems that were never designed to absorb them,” he adds.
The Xenowatch team reinforces this assertion, adding that conflict is caused by a perception that is often manufactured by political rhetoric - that migrants are responsible for unemployment and service delivery failures.
“In reality, unemployment rates do not correspond closely to immigrant presence. The rural Eastern Cape has almost no jobs and almost no immigrants,” says Reabetswe Maputla, a Xenowatch Project Research Assistant.
Our own back yard?
Rampant xenophobia in our country begs the question: is it a South African problem or a global one?
Xenowatch focuses its data collection on South Africa but researchers are careful not to suggest uniqueness.
Ghana saw widespread animosity towards foreign nationals when economic strain drove up unemployment. In Kenya, Somali migrants faced violence as terrorism fears were mapped broadly onto their community.
What makes South Africa distinctive is a particular combination of deep inequality, weak state capacity and a political culture that has normalised anti-migrant rhetoric over time.
Do protesters have a valid argument?
The recent mobilisation against foreign nationals has seen South African communities at odds with one another, with some calling out violent attacks and intimidation which are largely on migrants from the African continent.
Landau believes that most people who are angry at foreign nationals are not thugs but simply South Africans who feel cheated by history and systems that have failed them.
“Are South Africans right to dislike people who come and sell drugs in their communities? Absolutely. Are they right to be frustrated that the state was ‘captured’ by the immigrants who ran the Saxonwold shebeen? Certainly. Where they’re wrong is in suggesting that ridding the country of immigrants, documented or undocumented will put a serious dent in unemployment, crime or disease.”
Modise adds that while peaceful protests and freedom of speech are constitutional rights in South Africa, the argument that foreigners are responsible for South Africa's unemployment, crime or housing crisis is not supported by evidence.
Love, not lynch, thy neighbour
“South Africa is a fragmented country,” says Landau. “Leaving aside immigrants, there remain open wounds around race, class, language, religion and ethnicity.”
Immigration is one more dimension in an already complicated puzzle and in a country as dynamic as South Africa, one new problem tends to emerge, just as another gets resolved.
For Xenowatch, the answer lies in recognising that working-class South Africans and migrants face many of the same hardships.
Modise says, “Social cohesion requires accountable leadership, consistent rule of law, community dialogue and economic inclusion practising the ubuntu that South Africa has been preaching for 30 years.”
A cautionary tale
"Anti-immigrant sentiment, Afrophobia and xenophobia have unfortunately been part of South Africa’s history for decades, and are symptoms of the unfinished project of political, economic and social transformation", says Deputy Vice-Chancellor: People Development and Culture, Professor Garth Stevens.
"These symptoms are however the thin end of the wedge. We should be reminded from history that the rise of totalitarianism occurs precisely when populations are mobilised amidst the ruins of an atomised, isolated and alienated population, through the crude and simplified scapegoating ideologies of anti-immigrant, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism, and so forth.
This is why it is so emotionally seductive and not open to rational alteration – it creates a false sense of a collective purpose to replace individual alienation, it provides an explanation for one’s plight of being marginalised, but also provides an apparent solution to being included in the polity once more, often through violence against the Other. But this comes at a price for us all - it leads to reciprocal dehumanisation, a legitimisation of lawlessness, the erasure of social conscience, and the entrenchment of terror as the mode of social relating and control. This is the thick end of the wedge, and a longer term metastatic possibility if we do not excise this social cancer".
- Marcia Moyana is a freelance writer.
- This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
- Read more in the 21st issue, themed #Trust — the invisible glue binding society, science and technology.