Migration Regimes and the Politics of Difference in Contemporary Southern Africa

Abstract

The issue of migration and in particular the increase in irregular or undocumented migration has become highly politicised in Southern Africa. This has involved a rise in social intolerance towards migrant populations and outright xenophobia in many countries. This brief article examines the dynamics and complexities of migration in current-day Southern Africa and contextualises it in relation to the most salient issues, discourses and practices that characterise migration governance at the international level. The article highlights that predominant approaches to the governance of migration in the region reflect some of the dynamics which have marked migration discourse and praxis in the international sphere, but that they also carry some distinct characteristics. Trends of securitisation and related exclusionary practices of citizenship, which have become more pronounced in the international sphere, are emulated in Southern Africa. State and societal processes and reactions to higher levels of regional migration have created a context in which social polarisation and the entrenchment of difference prevails. This has meant that prime questions about how to ameliorate the socio-economic and political circumstances which evoke migrant flows in the first instance, and on how to deal with the inefficiencies in Southern Africa's current migration policies, have remained largely unasked by the region's rulers. Overall, Southern Africa's migration regime evidences two contradictory thrusts, one which seeks to encourage closer regional and specifically economic integration, and the other which resists the assumed threats posed to national sovereignty by increased migrant flows and which leads to a fractious regional governance system.

Key Words:

• migration
• Southern Africa
• xenophobia
• migration regime
• citizenship
• governance
• border surveillance
• cross-border flows
• colonialism
• Southern African Development Community

Notes

1. This article draws on research conducted on transnationalism and migration funded by South Africa's National Research Foundation. It is a reworking of an earlier chapter on reterritorialisation in Southern Africa (see Cornelissen, 2007).

2. Apparently flaring up spontaneously and occurring mainly in black townships across the country, violent attacks against foreign African nationals took place over a month-long period in South Africa. More than 60 people were killed in the nationwide attacks. This violence was the culmination of an extended and drawn-out campaign of aggression by South Africans against immigrants from other African countries, the start of which dates back to the early 1990s (Crush and Pendleton, 2007).

3. Migrant populations are generally more vulnerable to changing conditions of security in the region, having less recourse for instance to protect themselves against environmental threats or food security risks. In recent years evidence has been found that HIV infection rates are higher in migrant populations, in part because mobile groups can be more exposed to risky sexual behaviour, either through engaging in prostitution as a way of earning a livelihood or through sexual assault (see e.g. De Waal and Whiteside, 2003; Graham and Poku, 2000).

4. See Faist (2009) and Parker and Brassett (2005) for discussions of the normative and conceptual underpinnings—and contradictions—of migrant rights in a transnational context.

5. Libya for instance deported more than 2,000 migrants to Mali between 2003 and 2008, while in 2007 Mauritania expelled more than 3,000 illegal entrees to neighbouring Senegal and Mali (Africa Research Bulletin, 2008b, p. 17947B).