Across South Africa, a weekly protest movement demanding the removal of undocumented foreigners has hardened into house to house enforcement, sending tens of thousands of Southern African migrants home and raising uncomfortable questions about how the region’s largest economy defines belonging.
In Johannesburg’s Alexandra township on Thursday, groups affiliated with the March and March movement moved from door to door, breaking into homes where they suspected undocumented immigrants were living and escorting occupants, among them a woman with a small child, to waiting police vans. One man detained in the operation told reporters he held a valid Zimbabwean Exemption Permit and was in the country lawfully, a detail that speaks to a recurring criticism of the campaign: that its declared focus on illegal immigration has, in practice, swept up documented residents as well.
The movement’s leader, the former radio presenter Jacinta Ngobese Zuma, has vowed to sustain the marches every Thursday for as long as six months, telling supporters in Durban that the protests would continue “for as long as they haven’t left.” Her organisation, which coordinated demonstrations across all nine provinces on 30 June, an informal deadline it had set for undocumented foreigners to leave the country, argues that unemployment, strained public services and crime are linked to irregular migration. It is demanding tighter border enforcement, mass deportation and priority access to schools and clinics for South African citizens. More than 900 people were arrested during and after the 30 June demonstrations, with police describing most of those detained as undocumented migrants or individuals implicated in looting.
The government’s response has been measured rather than confrontational. President Cyril Ramaphosa has cautioned against scapegoating foreign nationals for deep seated structural problems, while ministers have repeatedly reminded citizens that immigration enforcement remains the exclusive preserve of the state. Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia credited law enforcement with preventing a repeat of the deadly unrest of July 2021, when riots across Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal left over three hundred people dead. Cachalia has also pointed to a political dimension behind the campaign, noting that its weekly cadence runs directly up to South Africa’s local government elections in November, and suggesting that grievances that are genuine in origin may be increasingly harnessed for electoral mobilisation.
The human consequences of the campaign are now visible well beyond South Africa’s borders. Malawi’s government said it had brought home 38,094 citizens between 7 June and 8 July, using more than 570 buses, with six people dying during the journey after being unable to access medication while sheltering in makeshift camps. Zimbabwe’s government reported that nearly 21,300 of its citizens had been repatriated through official channels since late May, with tens of thousands more said to have crossed the border independently. South Africa’s Border Management Authority has recorded more than 46,000 returnees through the Beitbridge crossing alone since early June, alongside smaller but significant movements of Ghanaian, Nigerian, Ugandan, Mozambican and Kenyan nationals. Home Affairs officials have told Parliament that the wider repatriation and deportation figure, drawing on both voluntary and involuntary departures, now exceeds fifty thousand people.
These numbers, striking as they are, describe something more than logistics. They describe extended families separated across the Limpopo, informal traders who have lost their livelihoods overnight, and children pulled from schools with little notice. South Africa’s own history of hosting and being hosted, from the liberation movements sheltered in Zambia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe during apartheid to the generations of migrant labour that built its mines, sits uneasily against a moment in which some of its citizens are now going door to door in search of foreigners. This is not a uniquely South African affliction. Waves of anti migrant sentiment have surfaced periodically across the continent and beyond, often when economic anxiety finds a more visible target than the structural causes of unemployment. What distinguishes the current episode, analysts note, is its scale and organisation, the largest since the xenophobic violence of 2008 that killed sixty two people and displaced more than fifty thousand.
There are, within this difficult moment, signs of a more considered conversation taking shape. Immigration specialists have urged the South African government to open structured dialogue with both documented and undocumented migrant communities, arguing that these communities understand the economic and social pressures driving migration better than any policy paper, and that durable solutions will require addressing the conditions in neighbouring countries that push people to leave in the first place, alongside reform of South Africa’s own immigration processing systems. That framing, rooted in regional interdependence rather than blame, may offer a more sustainable path than enforcement alone, one that recognises Southern Africa’s migrants not as a problem to be expelled but as participants in a shared economic and historical story that predates any single border.
