Throughout history, the immigrant has always been the scapegoat. Modern racism began with the persecution and expulsion of Jews and Muslims in Spain in 1492. The word “race” has its etymological origins in the word “razza”, which meant species. Their expulsion created a crisis of illegal immigration in Europe.
With the rising social pressures, ethnic and racial groups began to look to foreigners as the cause of their misery. According to Steven Lukes, “Those excluded from the bonds and networks of social solidarity are not only the individually marginalised but also those who, because they are alien, are treated as subjects, not citizens.” Turks in Germany, North Africans in France, Asians and West Indians in Britain are treated differently because of their collective identities. During the “gold rush” in the US, Chinese workers were expelled and barred from entering the country. They were described as animals and degraded as “rice-eating“ people.
The first wave of globalisation that started in the 1870s created crises of unemployment throughout Europe. Governments enacted economic policies purportedly to protect their own nationals. When the US barred Italians from entering the country during World War 1, Benito Mussolini rallied his “people” behind the flag of fascism, which Adolf Hitler adapted to Germany and termed Nazism. Hitler was responding to the impact of the reparations that Germany was forced to pay after World War 1 and the Great Depression.
It might be asked why this history is important. Racism, fascism and xenophobia have often emerged as responses to economic and social pressures that governments have failed to address. In South Africa, our government failed to stand up to Robert Mugabe as he dismembered Zimbabwe. Mugabe, just like Mussolini, mobilised his supporters behind a fake policy of land grabs that did nothing to benefit ordinary and poor Zimbabweans.
Instead, 4-million poor and ordinary Zimbabweans fled to South Africa to find better economic prospects. They found a country in which almost half the adult population was unemployed because of an economic policy that produced jobless growth and a BEE policy that created a billionaire class amid grinding poverty. This was a toxic mix and disaster in the making as the refugees and locals competed for nonexistent jobs. Indeed, the difference between Jacob Zuma’s corruption and the one that existed under his predecessor Thabo Mbeki is that the latter was more sophisticated. One need only think about the arms deal and all the stakes Mbeki’s acolytes held in some of this country’s largest corporations. Those self-enrichment policies did nothing to empower black small businesses, again creating competition between refugees and immigrants and local black small businesses.
And our people have been moving and moving and moving and moving all the time, refugees running away all the time. And a lot of so-called tribes in Africa are groups of refugees
— Julius Nyerere
During the day of the marches, I was driving down Oxford Street in East London/KuGompo. The city was deserted, and almost all the shops were closed. To be sure, some of those businesses belong to South Africans who feared they might be looted. The effect, though, is the same. It is not only immigrants who are affected, but the entire economy of a city and a country shuts down. A friend was telling me that in Johannesburg you could have sworn it was the middle of December when everyone has left the city. It is also ironic that the marchers are blaming foreigners for taking away their jobs when they are in fact employed by those immigrants.
Immigrants have always played a critical role in the development of economies on both the lower and higher ends of the labour market. In the US, immigrants pick up the food on the farms that feed America. They tend to the wine farms, clean the hotels, and wash the dishes in the restaurants. These are the “menial” jobs that many Americans would rather not take up but would not survive without. On the higher end of the labour market, America’s and the world’s technology hub, Silicon Valley, rides on the genius of immigrants, especially from India. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, was Syrian; some of the leading figures in the computer industry and AI are of foreign origin.
Many years ago, I hosted the Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere at a conference. He noted that migration has been the story of Africa: “My tribe came to where we are now as a result of the refugee movements which were caused by the wars of slavery. The wars which took black Americans to the West covered this whole continent and disturbed the whole blessed continent. And our people have been moving and moving and moving and moving all the time, refugees running away all the time. And a lot of so-called tribes in Africa are groups of refugees.”
By the way, this is the reason why Africa, the oldest and largest continent, has the most varied mitochondrial DNA. Over a period of 200,000 years Africans have been moving to different parts of the continent and thereby adapting to different geographic and climatic conditions.
A common trope is that the migrants are here illegally and are criminals. I do not dispute that many of them are here illegally and are involved in criminal activities. If we had an effective police force, those criminals would be easily tracked down, arrested and deported. But some of our own police at the highest levels are mired in their own corruption with those foreign syndicates. If the evidence that has been revealed by the Madlanga commission is anything to go by, immigrants are no more criminal than our own criminal underworld.
However, it is wrong to paint everyone with one brush. As Africans we pride ourselves on the cultural principle of ubuntu. We would do well to apply that to others, if only because they are human. If we did, we might be not just the only country that defeated a government founded on racism but one that broke with the 500 years of immigrant baiting that we inherited from Europe.
We might do well to heed the advice of Julius Nyerere. Surely the people who own the shops in Oxford Street would not be owning those businesses without proper permits. And even if they obtained them corruptly, that could not explain every migrant-owned business.
The immigrant is often the scapegoat, especially when governments have failed their citizens.
- Mangcu is professor of sociology and history at The George Washington University
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