South Africa has deported or repatriated more than 53,000 African immigrants in a single month, Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi said Sunday, closing out a crackdown that ran alongside weeks of anti-migrant protest [1]. More than 80% of those sent home were Malawian. The government did not say how many of the 53,000 were forced out and how many accepted offers of voluntary repatriation.
That gap is the story. A person deported for lacking papers and a person who boarded a chartered bus home under threat of mob violence both land in the same total, and Kubayi's ministry has not separated them. AP reports the government "did not give a breakdown of how many were deported and how many took up offers of voluntary repatriation" [1]. On the timeline the 53,000 reads as a clean enforcement win; in Durban it counts a Malawian fleeing a mob the same as anyone marched to the border.
The bloc pushing the campaign attributes South Africa's unemployment and crime to migrants without evidence, and set its own June 30 deadline for undocumented people to leave. The government rejected the deadline; thousands of Malawians still massed at a temporary immigration site in Durban seeking repatriation, and more than 20,000 people were processed through a second center in the border town of Musina [1]. Malawians, Zimbabweans and Mozambicans made up most of those removed, alongside Nigerians, Ugandans and Kenyans.
The coercion the gross figure hides shows up in the arrest count. Police have arrested 350 people over public violence, intimidation and unauthorized document checks — civilian groups stopping people on the street to demand proof of legal status [1]. Three migrants are dead, two Mozambican and one Malawian, their killings under police investigation. Nigeria says two of its citizens were killed in the protests; South African authorities deny the deaths were linked. President Cyril Ramaphosa, who last month announced tighter border enforcement, warned South Africans against taking the law into their own hands.
The precedent is grim. In 2008, more than 60 people died in xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Sabina Tadera of the Southern Africa Network for Immigrants and Refugees told AP that some Malawians seeking to leave were in the country legally but feared attack: "There is a misconception that all people on the move are undocumented" [1]. Laura Freeman, a migration consultant, said the violence is shifting the country's reputation, "with South Africa increasingly being seen as unfriendly" [1]. Home governments have criticized what they call a climate of xenophobia, and the diplomatic cost is now part of the ledger the single number does not show.
-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem