When grievance becomes scapegoating: South Africa’s xenophobia crisis is a warning about our democracy

South Africa is once again confronting the ugly politics of xenophobia. Recent anti-migrant protests and attacks have been framed by some as a response to undocumented migration, crime, unemployment and pressure on public services. But this framing hides a more dangerous truth: migrants are being made to carry the anger produced by South Africa’s deeper failures.

The country’s grievances are real. Unemployment is devastating, poverty is grinding, and crime remains a daily fear for many communities. At the same time, clinics are overcrowded, schools are stretched, municipalities are failing, and corruption has hollowed out trust in the state. South Africans are not wrong to be angry. The problem is that they are increasingly being encouraged to direct that anger at the wrong target.

Migrants did not create South Africa’s unemployment crisis, nor did they design an economy that excludes millions from work. They did not collapse municipal services, weaken policing, or preside over corruption. Yet foreign nationals are increasingly cast as the visible face of these failures: the foreign shopkeeper, the migrant worker, the patient at the clinic, or the child at the school. This is how scapegoating works; it takes complex structural problems and gives them a human target.

The latest Afrobarometer and South African Reconciliation Barometer data show that anti-migrant sentiment in South Africa is not only erupting in the streets but is also deepening in everyday attitudes. In Afrobarometer Round 8, conducted in 2021, 28.2% of South Africans said they disliked having immigrants or foreign workers as neighbours. By Round 10 in 2025, this had risen to 48.6%, while the share who liked having immigrants or foreign workers as neighbours declined from 26.2% to just 16.0%.

This is not a minor shift; it is a warning sign. The findings on refugees are even more alarming. In Afrobarometer Round 10, 54.8% of South Africans said they disliked having refugees fleeing persecution as neighbours, while only 17.1% said they liked having them as neighbours. The implication is troubling: even vulnerability does not soften public hostility. People fleeing persecution are not being viewed primarily through a humanitarian lens but increasingly through a politics of exclusion.

The South African Reconciliation Barometer 2025 tells a similar story. Levels of distrust are highest toward foreign nationals, with 56.2% of respondents reporting low trust in foreign nationals from outside Africa and 55.3% reporting low trust in foreign nationals from other African countries. These figures exceed levels of distrust toward other race groups, language groups, religious groups, neighbours or even relatives.

In other words, foreign nationals increasingly sit at the edge of South Africa’s trust circle.

This matters because violence rarely begins with physical violence. Rather, it begins with distance; when people are seen as outsiders to the moral community, when their pain matters less, when their exclusion becomes thinkable, and when their rights are treated as conditional rather than universal.

The economic dimension of these attitudes is equally stark. In Afrobarometer Round 10, 83.9% of respondents preferred fewer or no foreign job seekers to be admitted into South Africa, while 85.8% preferred fewer or no refugees to be admitted. Similarly, in Round 9, 73.4% agreed that employers should prioritise South Africans over immigrants when jobs are scarce.

These figures should not simply be dismissed as expressions of hatred. Rather, they tell us something important about the social temperature of the country. South Africans are experiencing deep economic and social insecurity amid rising unemployment, persistent poverty, high levels of crime, failing public services, and widening inequality, and these pressures are increasingly being moralised: jobs are for citizens, services are for citizens, protection is for citizens, and dignity is for citizens.

Yet the leap from insecurity to exclusion is where politics enters the picture. The question is not whether South Africans are under pressure, they clearly are. The more important question is why anti-migration sentiment has become such an effective language for expressing that pressure. Why are migrants blamed for poverty, crime and unemployment instead of the structural failures that drive them?

The uncomfortable answer is that scapegoating works when people feel abandoned. When communities experience joblessness, poor policing, overcrowded clinics, failing schools and weak local government, they naturally search for explanations. If formal politics does not provide credible answers, informal politics will. If the state does not visibly solve problems, vigilante actors will claim to do so. And if leaders fail to speak with moral clarity, opportunists will inevitably fill the silence.

This is why xenophobia is not only a migration issue; it is also a social cohesion issue, a governance issue and, ultimately, a democratic issue. Recent protests and intimidation campaigns demonstrate how quickly legitimate community grievances can be redirected into exclusion. Groups mobilising against migrants often speak the language of “putting South Africans first”, a powerful phrase because it appears to acknowledge and affirm the pain of citizens. In practice, however, it often converts genuine hardship into hostility toward people who are themselves poor and vulnerable.

This politics becomes especially dangerous in the run-up to elections. Anti-migrant sentiment offers political actors a convenient shortcut; it allows them to appear responsive to community anger without confronting the deeper failures that produced it. Blaming migrants is often easier than addressing the structural problems behind unemployment, weak public services and poor state capacity.

The tragedy is that none of this solves the underlying problem. It merely gives suffering a new victim.

South Africa’s official unemployment rate remains above 30%, with youth unemployment far higher. These are precisely the kinds of conditions under which resentment can be easily manipulated. Yet no serious evidence suggests that attacking migrants will create jobs, reduce poverty, fix corruption, improve policing or strengthen public services. If anything, xenophobia weakens communities further by normalising intimidation, undermining the rule of law and diverting attention away from systemic failures.

There is also a deeper moral contradiction at work. South Africa speaks often, and rightly, about justice, peace and human dignity on the global stage. We invoke histories of oppression, occupation, exclusion and solidarity, and we remind the world that human rights are indivisible. Yet that moral voice loses credibility when, at home, foreign nationals are harassed, threatened, blocked from services or treated as disposable.

A country founded on the rejection of identity-based exclusion cannot afford to reproduce exclusion under a different name. This is where a deeper question becomes relevant. Why are South Africans becoming more intolerant at a time when the country is more diverse, connected and democratic than ever before? The answer is unlikely to lie in any single historical legacy. Societies across the world, including those with very different histories, often become more exclusionary when economic insecurity, political frustration and social distrust intensify. In South Africa, rising unemployment, persistent inequality, weak public services and declining confidence in institutions may be creating fertile ground for narratives that divide people into an “us” and a “them”. The categories may differ, but the underlying dynamic is familiar: when communities feel under pressure, vulnerable outsiders can become convenient targets for broader anxieties.

That is why xenophobia is also a reconciliation issue. South Africa’s work on social cohesion is far from complete. A society cannot be genuinely reconciled while some people are pushed outside the circle of concern. Nor can it claim unity while tolerating the politics of disposability, or build democratic trust while vigilante actors decide who may trade, work, learn or receive health care.

None of this means that immigration policy is irrelevant. South Africa needs a credible, fair and properly administered immigration system, and citizens have every right to expect the state to manage borders, documentation and labour regulation effectively. Communities also have the right to raise concerns about crime, exploitation, illegal employment practices and pressure on local services.

But lawful governance is not vigilantism, immigration management is not mob justice, and accountability is not xenophobia. The distinction is crucial and if the state fails to make it clearly, others will blur it deliberately.

What is needed now is not only condemnation after violence erupts but a proactive, early-warning approach to social cohesion. Afrobarometer and the South African Reconciliation Barometer demonstrate that public attitudes can reveal the social pulse long before crisis turns into violence. Rising social distance, low trust, economic grievance and political frustration are not merely survey findings; they are warning signals and political leaders should treat them as such.

The message from the data is clear; anti-migrant sentiment is rising, distrust is high, and economic anxiety is increasingly being channelled into exclusion. The message from the streets is equally clear; these attitudes are no longer abstract. They are being organised, mobilised and weaponised.

The challenge is to respond without denying either side of the truth. The grievances are real, but the scapegoating is wrong. South Africans deserve jobs, safety, functioning services and accountable government, just as migrants deserve dignity, protection and the rule of law. These are not competing moral claims; they are part of the same democratic claim, that no society becomes more just by sacrificing the vulnerable for the failures of the powerful.

If poverty, unemployment, crime and corruption are the real wounds, then xenophobia is the misdirected anger that deepens the injury. It turns neighbour against neighbour while leaving the underlying causes untouched.

The task before South Africa is therefore urgent. We must confront the politics of blame before it becomes the politics of bloodshed, demand better from the state without surrendering our humanity, and insist that the true measure of our democracy is not how loudly we defend dignity abroad but how firmly we protect it at home.

 

By Preston Govindasamy,

Director of Evidence and Learning at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, and Afrobarometer Project Manager for Southern Africa