Thousands of anti-migrant protesters marched across South African cities in what organisers called a final deadline for the government to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. The demonstrations, which drew heavy police presence in Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town, were organised largely by the Operation Dudula movement and associated groups who have argued for years that undocumented migrants — predominantly from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, and further afield — are taking jobs, driving up crime, and overwhelming public services. The ANC government, navigating a coalition with the Democratic Alliance after last year’s elections, has conspicuously struggled to respond coherently: too hawkish a line alienates its pan-Africanist base, too soft a line hands ammunition to the populist right and to the newly potent uMkhonto we Sizwe party. Al Jazeera’s coverage captured the visceral anger on the streets alongside the government’s defensive posture.
The received wisdom
The liberal-internationalist framing treats Operation Dudula and its allies as a straightforward xenophobic movement, drawing uncomfortable comparisons to far-right nativist politics in Europe and the United States. The argument proceeds roughly as follows: South Africa’s economic woes — 33 percent unemployment, crumbling public infrastructure, an energy grid that took years to stabilise after load-shedding — are the product of ANC misgovernance, not immigration. Scapegoating Zimbabweans or Mozambicans for problems created by corruption and state capture is morally wrong and analytically lazy. The academic consensus, echoed by the World Bank and the ILO, holds that immigration is broadly economically beneficial, that migrants typically take jobs that citizens do not want, and that deportation campaigns are both expensive and ineffective. Human rights organisations have documented genuine cases of violence against migrants attributed to Operation Dudula-adjacent groups, and the movement’s rhetoric has at times shaded into explicit ethnic hostility.
This framing has moral seriousness and empirical backing. It should not be dismissed.
A different read
And yet. The received wisdom, however correct in its macroeconomics, has a consistent failure mode: it tells people experiencing acute local stress that their perceptions are the problem. South Africa has somewhere between two and five million undocumented migrants — the range reflects the difficulty of measurement, not a minor rounding error. The country’s unemployment rate sits above 32 percent by the official narrow measure, and above 40 percent on the expanded measure that includes discouraged workers. In that environment, the competition for low-wage informal work is fierce and zero-sum at the individual level, even if it is not zero-sum in aggregate.
The left-wing reading that this is simply misdirected anger about ANC mismanagement contains an implicit paternalism: it assumes that the protesters cannot simultaneously be right that the government has failed and right that unmanaged immigration imposes real costs on the poorest South Africans. Both things can be true. A township resident who has watched the queue at the public clinic grow, who has seen rents in the informal settlement rise, who competes for the same casual-labour contracts as recently arrived Zimbabweans, is not hallucinating when he identifies a connection between those pressures and population influx. He may be wrong about the causal weighting, but he is not wrong that the pressures are real.
The more interesting political question is what responsible governance looks like here. South Africa is a constitutional democracy with enforceable treaty obligations including the 1951 Refugee Convention, the AU’s Kampala Convention on internal displacement, and bilateral agreements with its neighbours. Mass deportation campaigns of the kind Operation Dudula demands would be practically impossible, legally fraught, and diplomatically catastrophic for a country whose foreign policy has always been premised on African solidarity. The ANC government’s paralysis is not simply cowardice — it reflects genuine constitutional and diplomatic constraints.
But paralysis is not the only alternative to mass deportation. A serious immigration management agenda would include: accelerated processing of asylum claims to reduce the grey zone in which undocumented migrants and genuine refugees are indistinguishable; bilateral labour agreements with Zimbabwe and Mozambique that create legal pathways for migrant workers; investment in the public services — clinics, schools, policing — in the areas most affected by population pressure; and honest communication from government about both the benefits and the costs of immigration rather than the current oscillation between denial and inflammatory rhetoric.
What is striking is how little of this agenda the governing coalition has pursued, and how the vacuum has been filled by a movement whose rhetoric is genuinely dangerous. The lesson is familiar from Europe: when mainstream politics refuses to engage seriously with immigration management, the field is left to those who will.
What to watch
- ANC coalition stability: The Democratic Alliance has pushed for firmer border enforcement; whether that pressure produces real policy or merely rhetoric will define the coalition’s character going into next year’s local elections.
- Operation Dudula electoral strategy: The movement has flirted with formal party formation; watch whether it contests the 2026 municipal by-elections as a political party rather than a pressure group.
- SADC diplomatic fallout: Zimbabwe’s government has been notably silent; a formal bilateral row over deportees would test Pretoria’s regional relationships.
— J