Playing with fire: How SA’s immigration debate feeds on misinformation

In politics, especially in an election year, numbers rarely speak for themselves. Leaders and ordinary citizens must frame and interpret numbers. Opportunists often weaponise numbers.

In SA’s increasingly toxic debate over asylum and migration, the question is not just how many undocumented asylum seekers and migrants arrive and remain in the country each year under government watch. It is what many public commentators make those numbers represent in an economically depressed, crime and corruption-infested country – and why several polls suggest a large proportion of the public now believes things that are simply untrue. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s unveiling of the government’s new hardline strategy to tackle the escalating illegal immigration crisis, a plan which includes the establishment of dedicated courts to expedite deportation, has staked his political credibility on restoring a sense of grip over the immigration system: introducing an intensified enforcement drive that includes setting up dedicated courts to deal with immigration to speedily support the deportation of undocumented migrants, acknowledging the growing public anxiety over border security, job losses, and buckling public services, and admitting ‘these concerns are real’.

In balancing operational realism with symbolic reassurance, Ramaphosa walks a knife-edge between policy and perception. Many question whether the timing of last week’s cabinet adoption of a Comprehensive Approach for Migration Management – endorsed by the President’s Co-ordinating Council, which includes premiers and MECs, representatives of local government and representatives of the National House of Traditional and Khoi-San Leaders – is a response to the public demonstrations targeting undocumented foreign nationals. Ramaphosa’s tone notably underscored the volatility of the situation when he warned against vigilantism and anti-foreigner sentiment saying: “I must make it clear that only the authorised government officials may act against violations of the law, including violations of our immigration laws.

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We will and must not allow groups to use the legitimate concerns of South Africans to destabilise our country through inciting lawlessness and violence.” The influx of immigrants over the years in communities near and far from the borders and how that negatively impacts the government’s ability to provide social services are no longer just about shortcomings. They are a cultural firestorm – and one increasingly fuelled not by facts, but by misinformation. That is why the public debate will continue to shine a spotlight on government progress in implementing measures such as relocation of refugee reception centres to border posts to process asylum applications at the point of entry, discontinuation of green barcoded ID books heavily compromised by criminal syndicates and replacing them with a biometric-backed Digital ID system, introduction of new regulations within three months to end the abuse of Traffic Registration Numbers by foreign nationals using them as illicit identification.

That gap between belief and reality is not accidental. It is the outcome of years of distortion by some individuals and interest groups who conflate asylum, illegality and criminality. Ramaphosa’s strategy to confront this with better data and a functioning system is, on paper, entirely rational.

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