In recent weeks, groups marching against “illegal immigration” have moved through Joburg and Durban demanding action against foreign nationals they accuse of taking jobs, committing crimes and overwhelming public services.
At the same time, Joburg officials have led bylaw enforcement operations — removing illegal structures, inspecting businesses, checking documents and speaking about restoring order to the CBD.
Although the marches and these operations are not the same, they are becoming harder to separate in Joburg’s current political climate. What began as a distinction between street-level anger at migrants and official efforts to enforce bylaws is blurring on the pavements of the inner city, where illegal trading, unsafe buildings, unemployment, crime and undocumented migration are increasingly folded into a single argument about who belongs in Joburg and who is blamed for its decline.
Earlier this month, Joburg intensified its CBD clean-up campaign, demolishing illegal trading structures as part of a mayor-led push to reclaim public spaces around the inner city, including the Marble Towers precinct and surrounding streets. Mayor Dada Morero also said he would ask the defence minister for South African National Defence Force support ahead of further demolitions.
For rights groups, the concern is not bylaw enforcement itself. Johannesburg has real problems: unsafe buildings, overcrowding, illegal electricity connections, blocked pavements, unmanaged trading, poor waste removal, crime and extortion.
The concern is what happens when those problems are collapsed into a single narrative in which migration, poverty and informality become almost indistinguishable from disorder.
Mike Ndlovu from Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia says the rise of vigilante groups reflects the deepening normalisation of xenophobia and scapegoating in South Africa.
“These groups present themselves as community movements concerned about unemployment, crime, housing or service delivery, but in practice their actions often target migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and anyone perceived to be ‘foreign’, regardless of their legal status,” he says. “We have also seen locals being harassed.”
What concerns him most, he says, is that some public officials and political actors have echoed or legitimised this rhetoric instead of clearly condemning it. “That creates an environment where people feel empowered to discriminate or act outside the law.”
That distinction matters in Joburg, where “illegal immigration” is often used less as a legal category and more as a public accusation. It can attach itself to street traders, shopkeepers, tenants, informal workers and people whose accent, surname, language or appearance marks them as outsiders.
Prof Loren Landau, co-director of the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab, says the city’s current operations are not the same as the marches. But in the present climate, they are easily absorbed into the same politics.
“There is an odd confluence of ‘urban regeneration’ initiatives and anti-immigrant vigilantism. For decades, Joburg — like cities across the country — has struggled to accept or embrace informality and the repurposing of buildings for business and accommodation,” he says.
“This has resulted in evictions, arrests and harassment of the city’s poorest and most vulnerable for decades. Often these are migrants — South African and foreign. The popular link between poverty, informality and immigration makes such people even juicier targets. Getting rid of immigrants now comes to look like urban regeneration.”
Landau says cities such as Joburg flourish precisely because they attract ambitious and entrepreneurial people from across the continent, and because people continue to move into, through and out of them. That movement, he says, is part of what has allowed Joburg to remain one of the region’s most important trading centres.
This is echoed by the latest Stats SA migration data, which shows that Gauteng’s migration story is much bigger than cross-border migration. Stats SA’s latest migration report — based on Census 2022 and other data sources — found that 9.1-million lifetime migrants had crossed provincial boundaries in South Africa, with Gauteng attracting the largest share at 4.5-million people. Employment was the main reason people moved, with 28.1% relocating in search of paid work.
In other words, Gauteng is not only where foreign migrants go. It is where South Africans go. Census 2022 counted about 2.4-million people born outside South Africa, making up roughly 3.9% of the South African population. That share has risen from about 2.1% in 1996, though it declined slightly from about 4.2% in 2011.
Sharon Ekambaram, who heads the refugee and migrant rights programme at Lawyers for Human Rights, says the danger is that urban management and immigration enforcement become a form of social policing directed at the poor.
“Ironically, it is not all immigrants who are being hunted down, beaten and treated in a humiliating, degrading manner,” she says. “These vigilante groups like March and March — and the political parties including ATM, ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance — are targeting black people, predominantly from the African continent or broadly the Global South, with the same prejudice the apartheid regime directed at black South Africans. Wealth buys you dignity and respect in South Africa.”
Ekambaram argues that the city’s approach cannot be separated from a wider politics of gentrification and capitalism, in which poor people are treated as obstacles to inner-city renewal. She says this affects migrants, but also many South Africans who have moved to Gauteng in search of work, shelter and a means to survive.
For her, the issue is not only urban management, but the constitutional promise of dignity and human rights for all who live in South Africa.
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