This article was first published by News24 / CityPress on 1 March 2026
Immigration, to quote a former colleague of mine, “…is the human rights issue of our time”. Moving across borders is something that has been natural to humans for all our history. We cross borders to escape wars, climate devastation, tyranny, disease, and yes, to seek better economic opportunities. A consistent pattern in the arguments of those who oppose immigration is that they make values and scarcity arguments, but they almost always propose closed border policies.
Sentiments against immigration have grown over time, and they have grown everywhere. Whether it’s Europe, America, or South Africa, there has been a growth in political support for restricting immigration. It is what has propelled the AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage in the UK, Trump in America and Gayton Mckenzie and ActionSA in South Africa. This is perhaps the most important global grassroots movement of our time.
This does not mean that this movement is desirable or good by any means, but it is real and it is winning important victories. In France, Marine Le Pen now regularly contests for the Presidency against the centrist Macron. In the UK, Nigel Farage successfully campaigned for Brexit and now runs the largest party in that country, Reform UK. Trump is a second term US President and the Patriotic Alliance is part of the national governing coalition while ActionSA is part of the coalition governments in some of our biggest cities.
This growth in anti-immigration sentiment will harm millions, if not billions of hardworking poor people and unnecessarily so because the values and scarcity concerns can be addressed without resorting to the anti-ubuntu (anti-human) closed border policies. To start with, the values argument typically goes: Migrants come from elsewhere, they bring a culture that is different from our own, and this culture is often destructive. Sometimes (depending on the country) crime will be brought up as part of this, that immigrants are more violent and more likely to commit other crimes like theft.
Part of this argument has merit depending on context: yes, some immigrants will bring negative cultures like allowing adults to marry children (i.e. child rape or paedophilia), female genital mutilation, sharia law etc. And some immigrants will just be criminals. But of course, these negative traits can never be said to apply to everyone from a particular country or region.
It continues to surprise me that South Africans are quick to lump in all African immigrants using such arguments as when apartheid operated on a similar logic: apartheid architects like Verwoerd argued that since black South Africans had a different culture (a culture that is very similar to many African cultures since we share similar Bantu origins) the government needed to control borders between these black people and white South Africans through laws like the Group Areas Act.
And it is often argued that such arguments can’t be used against black South Africans since this is our country, but in what sense is this true? Did black South Africans create the union of South Africa? If I am born in KZN, what right do I have to live and work in Johannesburg? If I am born in Newcastle, what right do I have to live and work in Durban?
The answers to these questions are almost always arbitrary and subjective, meaning the question is not really answered. Any argument that only works one way and not in the opposite direction is not a good argument. What right do we have to stop a decent, hardworking Zimbabwean (who does not support Zanu-PF) from crossing the border into South Africa? Of course, that Zimbabwean will not be allowed to enter your private property without permission, but other than that, on what basis can you claim ownership of the entire country?
It also surprises me that right-wingers in the West will simultaneously take up the cause of white Zimbabweans or white Afrikaners while also supporting mass deportations in their own countries. It seems supporters of closed border policies have a tendency towards being hypocritical.
Yes, we can filter people based on values and we should do this; that’s why anyone who disagrees with our constitution should not be allowed into our country, no matter if that person is an asylum seeker or not. I would also add that South Africa is a country founded on Christian values with a majority Christian population, therefore it makes sense to prioritise immigrants from Christian states (most of Sub-Saharan Africa) over other states. This does not mean we would not process immigrants from majority Muslim countries, it just means priority would be given to those from Christian states; of course, all asylum seekers would have the same priority.
Anyone with a criminal record should not be allowed into our country; that is partly why we need greater African integration, so we can work towards developing a common African criminal database. We would need to make sure this database has integrity and African states don’t just put their political opponents into the database. It should only apply to specific crimes like theft, rape, murder, robbery etc., namely, the crimes that the vast majority of societies would criminalise. The database should also undergo regular independent audits.
While more can be said about the values arguments, the 2nd category of argument should be addressed – the scarcity argument. This argument usually has two parts, the first part goes: “since immigrants to our country are usually poor people, they come here and take jobs from poor people in our country”. This is nothing more than a fallacy called the fixed economic pie fallacy, it assumes that jobs, businesses, resources etc. are fixed in an economy.
But it’s well established among economists of all ideological stripes that jobs create value; if a business has a job available and the business can maximise their profits by giving the job to me, this means that the business can then reinvest those profits elsewhere in the economy. As a matter of fact, poor immigrants usually take up the jobs the locals don’t want. South Africans generally do prefer working with fellow South Africans, it’s just easier, so to give a job to a non-South African usually means no suitable South African could be found.
This applies to business ownership too. One of the rallying cries of the anti-immigration crowd in South Africa is the “township economy”, especially the spaza shops. These people believe that we must reverse the phenomenon of township spaza shops being owned by immigrants, usually Somali, Ethiopian, and Pakistani immigrants. One wonders if these people were around the township when these spaza shops transitioned to immigrant ownership.
The spaza shops were mostly owned by South Africans, but over time through a variety of factors: lack of investment in the shop (consuming all profits), the entrepreneur who started the shop dying and leaving it to their children who did not have the skills or care to run it properly, lack of good customer service, the spaza shops collapsed. There was a period when spaza shops became a rare phenomenon and most people would do their shopping at big retailers in town (keeping in mind that due to apartheid social engineering, CBDs were far from most townships).
The immigrants came in, saw an opportunity and made deals with the property owners who had these abandoned spaza shops on their property, to rent the abandoned spaza shops. Overnight, what had been a dead asset (these were often one room cramped shops), started generating an income and township residents could do their shopping locally. This even led to major retailers like Spa, Shoprite, and Pick’n’Pay to finally start building their stores in the township to compete with these spaza shops, which in turn led to more jobs for locals, saving money through having more choices and saving money in transport costs.
This produced a wonderful win-win scenario. The immigrants gave much more than what they took and they did so by just trying to make money for themselves. Those of us who live in KZN saw the importance of these spaza shops after the July 2021 looting when most township businesses were closed, suddenly we had the old inconvenience of having to buy everything in town. Most of us had forgotten how easy things had become with no longer being forced to buy everything you need once a month in town – everything was within walking distance. Luckily the spaza shops were soon re-opened.
The last argument on scarcity is the easiest to address, namely that immigrants compete for welfare (education, health and grants) with locals. This is mostly true, especially for health and education as it applies to refugees. South Africa should not provide any welfare to immigrants – this is a no-brainer – if this means we must exit some treaties, so be it.
And the argument that since immigrants are taxed, they’re entitled to the welfare does not hold muster because the people who provide the welfare by paying their taxes are never the ones who get to use the welfare. I am a South African and all my children go to private schools, I pay for my own medical aid and never use public hospitals, in fact I get very little of what I theoretically pay for even as direct services like water and sanitation (we now buy drinking water from Checkers because municipal water made us sick). So, tax paying immigrants can just live with this unfairness like the rest of us, and no politician should campaign against these hardworking people who pay for the salaries of the politicians.
My dream is for South Africa to become a land of hope for Africa’s poor, a place where anyone can work hard and escape poverty regardless of their starting point. I know this will take nothing away from me as a South African who loves this country as my only home and plans to die here. Immigrants with good values (peaceful, law abiding, hard-working) and who are willing to earn their way add to everything that makes South Africa good… We don’t just need to tolerate them, we must welcome such immigrants with open arms and we will be better off for it.
