Surveillance actions, mass deportations and expressions of hatred will not improve lives

The anti-immigration group March and March has held protests in Durban, Pretoria and Johannesburg in the past month. Protesters have come armed with traditional weapons, people believed to be immigrants have been attacked and shops and businesses have been closed to avoid violence. While the group claims it targets only undocumented immigrants, its behavior has been indiscriminate.

Many political parties promote the idea that immigrants are to blame for South Africa's problems. The Patriotic Coalition is particularly brazen, threatening mass deportations and “building a wall to protect citizens against illegal aliens.”

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The number of non-citizens living in South Africa is difficult to calculate but Stats SA estimates it to be closer to three million. in the last three years over 110,000 undocumented people Has been exiled.

Racism has become less fashionable, yet xenophobia remains prevalent throughout the world. Despite steady declines in violent crime over the past decades in Europe and the United States, immigrants continue to be blamed for crime in the Western world. Much of the local xenophobic rhetoric is imported from abroad.

Immigrants are easy targets for opportunists. They can't vote, so alienating them makes no sense for election-seeking politicians. They often look different and have different cultural ways, and therefore stand out.

But most of Research This suggests that immigrants, whether documented or not, are generally a net positive for a country. They bring new ideas, create jobs, establish trade routes and are likely to work hard because they are entrepreneurial and have typically left their countries of origin to find more opportunities. Of course these are generalizations; Among three million people you will find saints and sinners, philanthropists and thieves, protectors and murderers, hard workers and freeloaders, healers and drug dealers.

With massive unemployment, skyrocketing crime rates and millions of people struggling to make ends meet, it is tempting to choose an easy target and an easy solution. Yet if every immigrant today, or every undocumented immigrant, were deported, the root causes of South Africa's problems would not be addressed. The lives of those who support deportation will not improve one iota; On the contrary, jobs will be lost and goods will become harder to get, given the number of spa shops and corner cafes run by immigrants.

Alarming levels of xenophobia, coupled with indifference towards it by most politicians, is undermining Ghana as well as South Africa's leadership in Africa. lobbying African Union will investigate anti-immigrant violence.

Ironically, KZN has been the epicenter of last month's protests. It is not far for protesters to go to Nkandla, the site of a man more responsible for looting the country and destroying jobs than any immigrant.