When economic despair has no clear villain, migrants tend to become one. South Africa is showing, once again, how quickly that dynamic turns lethal.
The deadline was blunt: leave by 30 June or be removed. No court had set it. No legislature had voted on it. The ultimatum came from the streets — from a movement called March and March that has spent months marching through Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban, demanding that the state expel undocumented foreigners or step aside while ordinary South Africans do it themselves.
In April and May 2026, March and March organised demonstrations against undocumented migrants in major cities, with violent and sometimes fatal results. At least seven people have reportedly been killed since March as a consequence of attacks linked to the protests, with videos circulating online showing men accused of being undocumented immigrants being assaulted in the street. Several African countries have begun helping their citizens leave.
This is not simply a law-and-order story. It is a portrait of what happens when structural economic failure meets political opportunism — and migrants are left to absorb the consequences of both.
The Movement and Its Methods
March and March is demanding tighter immigration controls, including stricter visa regulations, a review of asylum policies and action against businesses employing undocumented foreign nationals. The movement is led by figures such as Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma and Zandile Dabula, who have staged increasingly bold anti-migrant marches across major cities with, observers note, little pushback from authorities.
Participants in these marches have included members of Operation Dudula — another anti-immigration movement — alongside political parties including ActionSA, the Inkatha Freedom Party and the MK Party, all of whom accuse the government of failing to act decisively against undocumented migration.
The legal picture is, however, more complicated than the marchers suggest. A Gauteng High Court ruling has affirmed that only immigration officers or police may demand someone produce identity documents, and that such demands can only be made in public places — not in homes, schools or workplaces. The court also declared that the state bears a constitutional duty to take active steps to prevent xenophobic harassment and violence. That ruling has done little to slow the marches.
An activist from the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa captured the underlying dynamic plainly: “Vigilante groups feed off the country’s frustrations and socioeconomic rights regression, unemployment, and lack of efforts to address the equity gaps that we have as a country.”
The Economic Pressure Behind the Anger
The grievances animating this movement do not emerge from nothing. South Africa carries one of the heaviest unemployment burdens anywhere in the world.
According to World Bank and ILO data, South Africa’s total unemployment rate stood at 33.17 per cent in 2024 — and that is by the narrower definition. Under the expanded measure, which includes discouraged job-seekers who have stopped looking for work, the figure rises substantially higher, to above 40 per cent by Statistics South Africa’s own Quarterly Labour Force Survey methodology. Youth unemployment for those aged 15 to 24 had reached 62.4 per cent by early 2025, meaning nearly two-thirds of young South Africans old enough to work cannot find employment.
Into that landscape, migration has visibly grown. South Africa’s foreign-born population tripled between 1996 and 2022, reaching approximately 2.4 million — in a country of roughly 62 million, home to more international migrants than any other nation on the African continent.
The arithmetic of blame is seductive in such conditions. Jobs are scarce. Foreigners are visible. The connection, however, is far less straightforward than the marchers contend. Research consistently shows that migrants in South Africa occupy roles in informal trade, domestic work and agriculture that most South Africans do not seek — and that their economic activity generates rather than destroys local employment. That argument, though supported by evidence, struggles to compete with the immediacy of an empty stomach.
Ramaphosa’s Tightrope
The government’s position is a study in political strain. President Cyril Ramaphosa, speaking during his Freedom Day address, called for restraint and warned against xenophobia, reminding South Africans that the country “did not walk alone into freedom.” His government has simultaneously announced the hiring of 10,000 additional labour inspectors to enforce employment compliance — a concession, in effect, to the movement’s core demand that migrant labour be more aggressively scrutinised.
The political calculus sharpens considerably with local government elections scheduled for 4 November 2026. Aspirant parties, in an attempt to maintain or gain power, may seek to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment for electoral advantage — elections providing, in the words of researchers who track the phenomenon, a potential accelerant for xenophobia.
The UN Secretary-General has condemned the violence. Several African governments have lodged formal protests. The African Union has called for the protection of intra-continental migrants. None of it has altered the tempo on the streets.
Why the World Should Not Look Away
South Africa’s crisis is neither isolated nor exceptional. It is, rather, an unusually legible version of a tension playing out across multiple continents simultaneously.
| Country / Region | Trigger | Form of Backlash |
|---|---|---|
| South Africa | Unemployment, informal labour competition | Street violence, expulsion ultimatums |
| United Kingdom | Post-Brexit labour shortages, housing pressure | Political restriction, Channel crossings crisis |
| United States | Border enforcement politics | Mass deportation programmes, sanctuary city conflicts |
| Germany | Energy crisis, integration costs | Far-right electoral surge, deportation policy shifts |
| Gulf States | Kafala system, migrant worker rights | Periodic crackdowns, nationality-based restrictions |
| Kenya, Tanzania | South African precedent, regional mobility | Reciprocal tensions, diplomatic complaints |
What makes South Africa’s case particularly acute is that this is intra-African migration — movement across a continent whose own founding institutions, including the African Union, are formally committed to freer labour mobility and regional integration. When South Africans march against Mozambicans and Zimbabweans, they are marching against neighbours whose countries helped sustain the anti-apartheid movement. That historical irony is not lost on the region, and it complicates the diplomatic fallout considerably.
The Harder Questions
Waves of xenophobic violence — including the 2008 outbreak in which dozens were killed — reflect deeper structural problems in Africa’s most industrialised nation, analysts say. The recurring nature of these episodes suggests that the problem is not a sudden upsurge in hostility but a slow-burning condition that ignites when economic conditions deteriorate sufficiently to make blame-seeking politically profitable.
Three questions now hover over this crisis with no comfortable answers:
First, can a government constitutionally committed to protecting migrants enforce immigration law rigorously enough to defuse street-level anger without capitulating to vigilante pressure — and without violating the rights of the very people those laws are meant to govern?
Second, does the 30 June deadline — set not by the state but by a protest movement — now function as a political fact regardless of its legal irrelevance? If authorities fail to act visibly before that date, does the movement escalate?
Third, and most broadly: what does it mean for African solidarity, for the AU’s integration agenda, and for the continent’s long-term development ambitions, when the region’s largest economy cannot find a way to absorb intra-African migration without periodic episodes of organised violence?
South Africa does not have clean answers. Nor, it is worth noting, does anywhere else.