Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- A Torn Narrative of Violence
- I Did Not Expect Such a Thing to Happen
- (Dis)connections: Elite and Popular ‘Common Sense’ on the Matter of ‘Foreigners’
- Xenophobia in Alexandra
- Behind Xenophobia in South Africa – Poverty or Inequality?
- Relative Deprivation, Social Instability and Cultures of Entitlement
- Violence, Condemnation, and the Meaning of Living in South Africa
- Crossing Borders
- Policing Xenophobia – Xenophobic Policing: A Clash of Legitimacy
- Housing Delivery, the Urban Crisis and Xenophobia
- Two Newspapers, Two Nations? The Media and the Xenophobic Violence
- Beyond Citizenship: Human Rights and Democracy
- We Are Not All Like That: Race, Class and Nation after Apartheid
- Brutal Inheritances: Echoes, Negrophobia and Masculinist Violence
- Constructing the ‘Other’: Learning from the Ivorian Example
- End Notes
- Author Biographies
Crossing Borders
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 June 2019
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- A Torn Narrative of Violence
- I Did Not Expect Such a Thing to Happen
- (Dis)connections: Elite and Popular ‘Common Sense’ on the Matter of ‘Foreigners’
- Xenophobia in Alexandra
- Behind Xenophobia in South Africa – Poverty or Inequality?
- Relative Deprivation, Social Instability and Cultures of Entitlement
- Violence, Condemnation, and the Meaning of Living in South Africa
- Crossing Borders
- Policing Xenophobia – Xenophobic Policing: A Clash of Legitimacy
- Housing Delivery, the Urban Crisis and Xenophobia
- Two Newspapers, Two Nations? The Media and the Xenophobic Violence
- Beyond Citizenship: Human Rights and Democracy
- We Are Not All Like That: Race, Class and Nation after Apartheid
- Brutal Inheritances: Echoes, Negrophobia and Masculinist Violence
- Constructing the ‘Other’: Learning from the Ivorian Example
- End Notes
- Author Biographies
Summary
Interviewed in the Sunday Independent (Johannesburg) of 25 May 2008 about the recent attacks on foreign nationals, an unknown ‘student’ who had participated in the attacks on African immigrants is
… adamant that all the problems started at South Africa's borders. They are too porous, are not properly policed and border posts are manned by corrupt officials who let anybody in … The government must work hard to secure our borders. Home Affairs must be sorted out. We're helping the government, now, to send them back.
While some may wish to argue that we are somehow ‘all Africans together’, the political facts on the ground are that South Africa, like any other sovereign national state, has the right to decide which foreign citizens should or should not be admitted at its borders, and under what conditions. The South African government also has the right to pick and choose among applicants for entry or residence on the basis of its own interests, priorities and policies. All countries do this, and some observers, like migration expert Dr Wilmot James, say that South Africa has a responsibility to control its borders as an obligation to the Constitution and the rule of law. Certainly South Africa is not required to accept any number of people either from Africa or anywhere else simply because they are destitute or see better opportunities for themselves here than elsewhere.
An exception to this would be genuine refugees fleeing the immediate threat of violence or imprisonment at home, but the South African government has not shown much enthusiasm for differentiating between economic and political refugees, or for granting legal residence to either category of ‘forced migrant’. This confusion has had additional ill effects due to government denials that there are any crises in other African countries or that there is a real category of ‘genuine’ African political refugees.
The government of South Africa shows little enthusiasm in practice for investing in the effective physical monitoring and control of its land borders. What the student said in the Sunday Independent is, by most reports, close to the mark: South African identity is for sale.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Go Home or Die HereViolence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa, pp. 119 - 132Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2008