Ashamed but not stopping: the scapegoating of the migrant worker

A parallel state has emerged in South Africa, and it sets deadlines. March and March - an anti-immigrant activist group with no democratic mandate, no ministry, no law behind it - has twice now announced dates by which "all undocumented foreigners" must leave the country: June 30, and now September 30. The elected government says these dates mean nothing. The terrified do not believe it. More than 160,000 foreign nationals have fled, and the group promises its "second wave" will be "the mother of all protests." When private citizens can issue ultimatums that move hundreds of thousands of people, the state has already ceded the street. President Cyril Ramaphosa says he is "deeply ashamed that people from other countries have suffered ill-treatment." It is worth asking what shame is for, if the machinery of expulsion keeps running on schedule: the 24-hour command centre at Beitbridge, the 50 state buses, the 86,596 foreign nationals processed for deportation and repatriation in two months. Shame that changes nothing is not remorse. It is public relations. The script is an old one, and it is always performed in the same theatre: a struggling economy, a government that cannot create jobs or fix hospitals, and a foreign worker to blame for both. The migrant did not break South Africa's clinics; the treasury did. She did not steal the job; the job was never created. Xenophobia is how a ruling class buys itself an alibi - the poor are taught to hate the poorer, and the powerful are left alone. Notice who is driven out. Not the bosses or the investors, but the builders, gardeners, mechanics, domestic workers and traders - labour that is indispensable, presence that is unforgivable. Chimbuya's story is the economy in miniature: she worked, fed her children, used the clinic - and was raided out of her home for it. There is a particular obscenity in the "deadline" as a political form - the language of the boss and the bank, of power pretending to be procedure. Deadlines make intimidation look official, and a government that will not confront the intimidators lets the fiction stand. The left has an answer, and it is older than any of these groups: the worker has no foreign enemy. The Zimbabwean builder in Durban and the South African builder in Durban are not each other's problem; they are each other's natural ally, robbed by the same bosses and abandoned by the same state. Every politics that turns them against each other is a gift to the people who profit from both. Periyar taught that power always finds a theory for itself - caste, nation, language, and now, paperwork. The demand is never really for documents. It is for someone to look down on. South Africa was built by migrant labour - the mines ran on it. To turn on the migrant now is not to defend the nation; it is to forget how it was built, and let the powerful pick the next scapegoat in peace.