A Pattern, Not an Anomaly: Xenophobia in South Africa and Beyond

What is unfolding in South Africa in 2026 is not new in regard to immigration issues. It is not an aberration, and it is not confined to one country. It is a pattern, one that has played out across continents, across decades, and across political systems that otherwise have little in common. But in South Africa, it carries a particular weight. Because South Africa, more than almost any other nation, built its freedom on the argument that human dignity is universal. What is happening now is a test of whether that argument was meant.

1. What Is Happening Now

What is being witnessed in South Africa in 2026 is not an anomaly. It is the latest chapter of a documented pattern. According to Xenowatch, a monitoring platform developed by the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, xenophobic discrimination in South Africa is not a series of isolated incidents; it is a regular, ongoing reality. Between 2022 and 2025, 406 verified incidents were recorded, averaging 103 per year. In 2025 alone, that number rose to 151. The violence is not confined to one corner of the country; it has been recorded across all nine provinces, with Gauteng, Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape bearing the heaviest toll. KwaZulu-Natal has overtaken Gauteng as the most affected province in recent years.

What has intensified in 2026 is the visibility and organisation of this hostility. In cities like Durban, Pretoria, and Johannesburg, citizen-led movements have taken to the streets demanding stricter immigration enforcement, particularly targeting undocumented migrants. These protests have not remained peaceful. Their consequences have been violent and in some cases fatal, with migrants blocked from accessing healthcare facilities and educational structures, their lives suspended not by law, but by the force of organised exclusion.

2. The Legal Gap

The frustration of South African citizens is not without basis. The calls for a functional, rigorous legal framework are legitimate. A state that fails to deliver security, employment, and healthcare to its own people creates the conditions in which migrants become convenient scapegoats for systemic failures that long predate their arrival. The problem, however, is misplaced blame. When public services collapse, when unemployment persists, when healthcare is inaccessible, these are failures of governance, not consequences of migration. A system that works for its citizens will, by design, also work for those living within its borders. Fixing the state is not an alternative to protecting migrants. It is the same task.

What the law already says is instructive. In June 2025, the International Commission of Jurists intervened as amicus curiae in a South African High Court case, urging the court to apply international law protecting migrants and refugees from discrimination, specifically in the context of vigilante groups conducting forced evictions, harassment, and denial of access to schools and hospitals. Legal analysts have further identified the failure to harmonise South Africa’s Immigration Act with labour law as a structural gap that renders migrant workers legally invisible, exposed to exploitation with no meaningful recourse. South Africa’s Constitution and its international commitments are unambiguous: the right to health applies to all persons regardless of migration status.

Yet recent developments on the ground suggest a troubling shift from principle to practice. Groups such as Operation Dudula have increasingly mobilised ordinary residents to demand identity documents from suspected foreign nationals, carry out informal “checks,” and pressure individuals out of public spaces. This form of street-level enforcement effectively blurs the line between civic action and state authority, despite the fact that under section 41 of the Immigration Act, powers of identification, questioning, and enforcement are reserved for designated immigration officers, not private citizens. In practice, this creates a parallel system where informal actors assume quasi-law-enforcement roles, raising serious concerns about legality, discrimination, and the erosion of constitutional protections.

3. This Is Not Only South Africa

South Africa is one case of this pattern, but it is not the only one. The same dynamic surfaces across continents, in countries with very different histories and political systems.

For instance, in Tunisia President Kais Saied’s 2023 speech claiming sub-Saharan migrants were part of a plot to change Tunisia’s demographic composition triggered a wave of racist attacks, forced displacements, and mass arrests that has not stopped since. Between January and April 2025 alone, Tunisian authorities expelled at least 12,000 people, including unaccompanied children. The African Union condemned his remarks as hate speech. The pattern here is not citizens mobilising against migrants; it is a government using migrants as a political tool while dismantling the legal structures that might protect them.

In South America, the Venezuelan displacement crisis, the largest in Latin America’s recent history, with over 7.9 million people having left since 2014, has produced a quieter but no less damaging form of xenophobia. Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Ecuador have all tightened restrictions, intensified deportations, and failed to provide access to formal employment, healthcare, or education. Nearly three quarters of Venezuelan migrants surveyed in Peru reported experiencing discrimination based on nationality alone. Here, xenophobia does not always look like riots. It looks like a closed door, a blocked job application, a deportation order. The denial of dignity is the same.

In Asia, the situation of the Rohingya represents an extreme form of this pattern, one where it is not irregular migration but statelessness itself that is weaponised. Denied citizenship in Myanmar for decades, over a million Rohingya are now displaced across Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, and India. In 2025, India, Malaysia and other governments implemented increasingly hostile policies toward Rohingya, including detentions and deportations, against a people who have no country to return to. This is not a failure to manage migration. It is the deliberate and sustained destruction of a people’s right to exist anywhere.

In Belfast just days ago, the pattern took yet another form, reactive, violent, and built on collective punishment. On June 8, 2026, a man was brutally stabbed on a city street. The suspect, a Sudanese asylum seeker, was charged with attempted murder, the law was applied, and the individual was held accountable. The victim, 44-year-old Stephen Ogilvie, suffered life-changing injuries and reportedly lost an eye. He deserved to be the centre of this story. Instead, within hours, masked men were setting fire to homes believed to house immigrants, torching a bus, and pelting police with firebombs. A Sudanese community that had nothing to do with the attack found itself under siege. His own family called for peace and said they did not want violence waged in their name.

This is where the distinction matters most. Blame, when it is warranted, must be applied precisely, individually, and through legitimate legal process. The man who committed that attack faces charges. That is correct. That is how accountability works. What is not correct is the transfer of that blame onto an entire community, onto families in their homes, onto business owners who happened to share a nationality or a background with a person they have never met. Collective punishment is not justice. It is a second crime committed in the name of the first, and it leaves the actual victim more forgotten with every building that burns.

Similarly, identifying irregular migration as a systemic problem is not the same as identifying migrants as a problem. One is a policy observation. The other is a dehumanisation. The confusion ( often deliberate ) between the two is precisely what allows political actors to mobilise legitimate grievances toward illegitimate ends. The system can be broken without the people navigating it being to blame for its failures.

4.The Right to Act, and the Obligation to Do So Humanely

None of this is to say that the concerns of South African citizens are without merit. Undocumented migration does not create the structural problems South Africa faces, but it can amplify them. When public services are already strained, when unemployment is already high, when housing is already scarce, the arrival of people in precarious situations makes those existing failures more visible and more acute. The people who migrate irregularly are not the authors of those failures. They arrive into them, often fleeing conditions no less desperate than the ones they find. Citizens have every right to demand that their government address those structural problems, to call for a functional immigration system, and to expect the state to manage its borders through accountable legal processes. Regularisation of those already present, and orderly deportation where legally warranted, are both legitimate instruments of that system. What is not legitimate is the outsourcing of that responsibility to vigilante groups, or the treatment of another person’s irregular status as grounds to deny them healthcare, education, or basic safety.

The question is not whether the state should act. It is whether it acts with law, with process, and with humanity.

What is at stake is not a migration statistic. It is whether the threshold of human dignity holds, whether it can be suspended at a border, or revoked by a vigilante group. The answer that international human rights law gives is unambiguous. The answer that several governments are currently giving in practice is something else entirely.

South Africa has the constitutional and legal framework to address its real challenges while upholding that threshold. So do most of the countries where these scenes are playing out. What is missing is not the law. What is missing is the political will to enforce it with equal humanity, regardless of where someone was born.

Additional source:

• Human Rights Watch. (2025, August 28). India: Scores of Rohingya refugees expelled.https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/08/28/india-scores-of-rohingya-refugees-expelled
  

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