The African Border as an Instrument of Imperialist Extraction and Class Rule
Updated: Sep 18
I. Introduction
In present-day South Africa, xenophobic waves keep making their reactionary and tragic appearances. In the run-up to and since the most recent upsurge that peaked on 30 June 2026, a vivid focus was placed on 'illegal' or undocumented migrants from other African countries as a cause of (or major contributor to) South Africa's profound economic and social crises. This must be seen for what it is – a device to try to hide xenophobia behind the pretence of legality. This focus drew a direct line from the xenophobic organisations and leaders on the one hand, to the ANC-led government, the Tripartite Alliance and the SACP-convened Conference of the Left on the other. They all point fingers at these workers as a 'serious' problem and in need of special enforcement attention.[1] United in how they see this category of workers, they differ on methods of solving the 'problem'. For their part, the growing anti-xenophobia movement does not accept that anybody inside South Africa is illegal, they unapologetically lay the cause of South Africa's crises at the feet of the capitalists and the ANC-led government, and they fight for working class solidarity and are building a new social movement.
Almost a century-and-a-half ago it was the invasion of Africa by imperialist armies that gave rise to the system of borders that still exists today, policed by so-called independent governments. Africa's machinery for filtering human beings at the border post, was installed for reasons that had little to do with sovereignty and everything to do with imperialist plunder and the movement, control and discipline of labour – which continues to this day. As proven around the world, no border enforcement system can stop desperate job-seekers, what they are successful at is to create a ready pool of cheap 'illegal' workers – an illegality that is manufactured by the border-control and enforcement system.
The current xenophobic upsurge in South Africa has revisited the horrors of the past in which foreign workers were stripped of possessions, shelter, jobs and life itself. The most vulnerable of the vulnerable — migrant women and children — are denied their most basic human rights by the mob and abandoned by the state. That this atrocity unfolds under the ANC-led Government of National Unity (GNU) with the acquiescence of the trade union federations, is a disgrace of epic proportions. The federations' failure to take a principled stand against the pogroms is a betrayal of every worker they claim to represent.
The borders in Africa are not a neutral fact of geography but an instrument of class rule, and the key slogan the working-class movement should raise against it is: Freedom of migration with equal wages and conditions. Freedom of migration solves the problem of so-called illegality, but without equality it produces the cheapness of migrant labour. South Africa and the region have had enough of cheap black labour. The difference in pay and conditions generates competition and competition pits worker against worker. The beneficiary remains the same, those whose profits soar on cheap labour and the division of the working class. This key slogan disarms the border of its key class function and is the basis for working class solidarity across frontiers.
II. Borders for Africa
In precolonial Africa, authority was exercised over people, not over territory.[2] Tribute, allegiance and the control of trade routes and cattle mattered; the precise point at which one kingdom's (or tribe's) soil became another's did not, because sovereignty was a relation between rulers and subjects rather than a claim to every square mile within a perimeter. Populations moved – pastoralists along seasonal routes, cultivators onto new land, traders along age-old networks, whole communities in flight from drought, war or political pressure. As such, movement was a normal condition of African social life, not an exception, and no authority possessed either the administrative apparatus or the interest to convert a frontier zone into a policed line.
The modern map of Africa was drawn in Europe, at the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885, convened by the notorious Bismarck, at which the European powers agreed the rules by which they would divide the continent among themselves for plunder without stepping on each other's toes.[3] No African was present. The lines they drew on their papers were based on the needs of Europe's imperialist powers and their interest to plant the balance of power existing between them, into African soil. The rights, human needs or geography of the peoples whose lands were being carved up, were not even an afterthought.
The consequences are visible on the map to this day. Roughly a third of Africa's borders run along straight lines of latitude and longitude with no relation to anything on the ground. Peoples were cut in two or more – the Somali distributed across five jurisdictions, the Yoruba split between British and French spheres, the Bakongo across three, the Ewe across two – while historic enemies and unrelated communities were sealed into single administrative units that would later be handed over as independent 'nations'.[4]
These borders served the imperialist nations well as they shipped the wealth from the continent with unceasing dashes across ocean and sea, while stealing the very land from underneath its inhabitants to set up settler farming communities. The borders continue to serve them today, the ships are still moving at full throttle, the settlers pass the land on from generation to generation, but something more lucrative has been added, gigantic parasitic interest payments on loans that cross Africa's borders at the click of a mouse, year in and year out, draining the continent of its life blood, country by country.
The predatory and parasitic nature and scope of this form of extraction can be seen from a 2025 UNDP report.[5] According to the report, at least 22 African countries are in 'debt distress' or at risk of it. In 2024, Africa's external debt stood at over $1 trillion, a doubling since 2020. This comes to more than $645 per African person based on the 2025 UN estimate of a population of almost 1.55 billion. More than 30 countries have crossed the 50% debt to GDP ratio. Debt-service payments (principal+interest) have more than doubled over the past fifteen years. Africa was set to pay debt-service of $163 billion in 2024 alone, up from $61 billion in 2010. This comes to $105 per African person per year! The report states that, "On average, low-income countries (mostly African) are likely to allocate more than twice as much funding to paying net interest as they do to social assistance, and 1.4 times more than to healthcare, while debt servicing accounts for 60 percent of education expenditures in these nations". These numbers are a wake-up call; this robbery is legalised and supervised by the so-called independent governments of Africa, while the continent languishes in poverty.
The tragedy of the African border is not that it was drawn in the wrong place – but that it was drawn by foreign plunderers for their nefarious purposes, and kept intact by subservient governments after independence.
III. The border as labour machine – Southern Africa
Nowhere has the border's true function as an instrument of capital been clearer than in Southern Africa. Historically, the border was not primarily a barrier to keep people out. It was a valve, engineered to regulate the flow of African labour to South Africa's mines and the farms of its settlers on terms that guaranteed its cheapness.
The discovery of diamonds in South Africa created a demand for unskilled foreign labour, but the later discovery of gold made that demand, almost overnight, insatiable. The local population would not and could not satisfy it. Capital's answer was a cross-border recruitment system of remarkable coherence (note that the diamond mines did not require such a systematic recruitment system). The Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) and the Native Recruiting Corporation (NRC), later consolidated as The Employment Bureau of Africa (TEBA), reached across the region and beyond (Sub-Saharan Africa) to recruit men on fixed-term contracts, moved them under strict control to the single-sex compounds that were not conducive to human living, worked them for the duration, and returned them whence they came. Diamond mining never had a huge demand for labour, but it institutionalised the single-sex compound system that became widespread in the mining industry as a whole.
A form of the migrant labour system was also applied internally to African (dark-skinned) South Africans, who were forced to migrate between homes in reserves (Bantustans) and their places of work – they were also referred to as migrant labourers.
The greatest rip-off of the system was that it externalised the cost of reproducing the labour force onto the country of origin and in the case of South Africans, the Bantustans. The mine paid a wage calculated to support a single man for the duration of his contract, not a family. This is the source of cheap black labour, which led to super profits.
The border between colonies, and the internal border of the Bantustan and the dompas (internal passport), were the mechanisms that held this arrangement in place.[6] These mechanisms ensured the worker could be summoned (generation after generation) when needed and expelled when not. He was present as a unit of labour and absent as a human being with a family and a claim on the society he served. The pass laws and the Stallard doctrine of the 1920s – that the African was to be in the town only to minister to the needs of the white man, and to depart when he was no longer needed – were the domestic face of the same logic that the recruiting organisations operated across the international line. When this recruitment system crashed, starting in the seventies, it threw communities across the region into socio-economic turmoil that ultimately led to an upsurge in the present-day undocumented migrant phenomenon in South Africa. The dismantling of the recruitment system occurred over decades.
The overwhelming number of foreign migrants worked on the gold mines, therefore the case of gold mining sketches a clear picture of the impact of migrancy on South Africa and the region. At its height by 1973, this system recruited 80% of the gold mining labour force from the region. But the system rapidly declined afterwards. Malawi stopped the recruitment of their nationals from 1974, and Mozambique from 1976 after winning their independence. Malawi was a major supplier of migrant workers and together with Mozambique they provided 70%. The mine bosses decided to recruit more local labour and had to increase wages to achieve it. In a few years, migrant workers dropped to around 40% of the unskilled workforce in the gold mines, never to go beyond that again.[7] The gold industry itself suffered a major crisis in the late 1980s, leading to the loss of over 300 000 jobs by the turn of the century, estimated conservatively;[8] the steep decline and job losses continue to this day.[9] Between 2011 and 2023, the gold mines shed a total of 51 200 to settle at a total workforce of 93 600.[10]
At the local political level, the apartheid influx control system was abolished in 1986 and after the dawn of post-Apartheid South Africa, the exploitative contracts offered to migrants have been improved to some extent. South Africa gave permanent residence status to about 175 000 long-term migrants in 1995 and 1996, of whom just over 50 000 were miners;[11] the rest were not migrant labourers, but refugees from the region. The old recruitment system of foreign migrant workers was replaced by a sub-contracting system, "... a process that classifies them as temporary workers and exempts them from union wage agreements, death and benefit schemes, and retirement saving schemes".[12] Migrants working in the mining industry as a whole in the 1990s, were 10% of the industry labour force of 450 000,[13] updated to 477 000 in 2023.
The wages played no small role in the economies of neighbouring countries as they greatly propped up many. The most insane case being that of Lesotho, where the remittances from wages in 1987 equalled 236% of the country's GDP, according to World Bank data cited in the Stoddard article (see footnote 9). This huge amount has now dropped to 20%! Stoddard quotes Duncan Money to show that countries in the region were actually dependent on the wages of migrant workers.
So far we elaborated on the experience of documented migrant workers, but from the very beginning, the bosses in other sectors did not want to lose out on this lucrative labour market and resorted to the use of undocumented migrants (men and women) who slipped into the country clandestinely.[14] The precarious wages and working conditions in South Africa were attractive due to economic hardships in regional countries, economic stability and opportunities in South Africa, drought in various countries, and the destabilisation of regional countries by the Apartheid state.
What has changed is not the presence of the foreign worker but the utter collapse of the system that once called and channelled him. If we consider that one worker supported a family, then this collapse left large communities across the region without what was a reliable income for generations. The old migrant-labour empire has imploded, with hundreds of thousands thrown onto the heap of despair with their families. As the official recruitment system buckled, and especially since the end of Apartheid, desperate times led to desperate measures and the unofficial, underground migration channels, where border posts and officials are side-stepped, swelled. South Africa has been a meaningful part of the living experience of migrants from many countries and many believed that they would be welcomed after Apartheid as they returned to their second home. None were prepared for the horrors awaiting them.
The labour machine has broken, and its human material left without legal recourse, scapegoated as if they are the true cause of the economic and social crises in the receiving country. Their profound contribution to the South African economy for over a century, the risking of their lives in the dangerous mines, and the total lack of end-of-service financial responsibility the mine bosses displayed towards them generation after generation, are all conveniently forgotten by those who seek to divert attention from the real culprits of South Africa's problems – the capitalist class and the ANC-led GNU.
IV. Independence, Regional developments and the AfCFTA
The moment of decolonisation posed the border question with full force. Logically, the independence generation could have repudiated the colonial partition entirely and redrawn the continent according to some other principle.
Instead, at the first ordinary session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity, held in Cairo in July 1964, the independent states resolved, in Resolution AHG/Res.16(I), to respect the borders existing on national independence.[15] The lines drawn in Berlin became the permanent frontiers of the sovereign African state, blessed by the first independent leaders of Africa; revealing just how independent the new African ruling classes really were. After independence the imperialist powers have continued to extract wealth from within the borders they themselves had set for Africa, this time policed by locals under their watchful eye.
Against borders frozen in time by the new African ruling classes, there have been counter-initiatives – good on paper but half-hearted in implementation – in operation for half a century as attempts to reconstitute freedom of movement on a regional basis progressed. The ECOWAS Protocol of 1979 established the right of West African citizens to enter, reside and establish themselves across member states; visa-free entry (Phase I) and the right to residence (Phase II) were implemented and a common passport followed in 2000,[16] whereas the right to establishment (Phase III) is still outstanding. However, the visa-free entry is only for 90 days, which restricts employment efforts and phase two has only been partially implemented due to national barriers, forty years later.[17]
The East African Community's Common Market Protocol of 2009 went much further on paper, providing for the free movement of persons, labour, services and capital together as a single agreement, not phased.[18] Visa-free travel is for 180 days, but like in ECOWAS, whereas everything looks good on paper, domestic barriers work against employment, residence and establishment.
The Southern African Development Community, by contrast, has been the graveyard of free migration. Its bolder free movement of persons draft of 1995 was watered down, and even the diluted version languishes unratified – blocked, above all, by the state whose capital most dominates the region and where xenophobic outbreaks are a regular recurrence.[19] South Africa does have visa-free entry for regional countries, but these are either for 30 days or 90 days, certainly not conducive for work, for which work visas are required.[20]
These regional initiatives tend to be driven by countries who normally send migrants, but the receiving countries push back very hard, hence lack of ratification, restrictions or half-hearted implementation. This pattern has been replicated at the continental level, leading to a major contradiction within the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) framework. The major African economies, especially South Africa, require the freer movement of capital, but not of labour, as can be seen from the agreements and results. The freedom of capital was built with haste. An Investment Protocol, adopted in less than two years by February 2023, furnished an investor-protection regime with its own dispute-resolution machinery. African investors, particularly South African capital, are best placed to benefit from it.[21] This is the migrant-labour empire in a new costume, the ANC-led government opening doors for its white monopoly capital to secure a continental charter for its freer movement across borders that it insists must stay shut to the masterless worker.
On the other hand, the AU's Protocol on the Free Movement of Persons, opened for signature in 2018, is dying of neglect. It would grant continentally what ECOWAS grants on paper regionally. It has been signed by thirty-two states and ratified by four – Rwanda, Niger, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Mali – against the fifteen required. South Africa has not even signed it,[22] nor have the other two big economies, Nigeria and Egypt. The founding trade agreement, by contrast, is signed by fifty-four and ratified by forty-seven.[23] The rulers open the border to the commodity and the investor with top speed and bar it to the worker with equal and opposite energy. The border is not closed to protect the worker; it is closed to divide him/her from the class brothers and sisters across the line, while capital and interest payments move freely over their heads. None of these initiatives are coupled with the need for the equality in wages and conditions, making them instruments for the creation of cheaper migrant labour and for divisions amongst workers, if and when they are implemented. But these initiatives push the door slightly open and they must be built upon and extended.
V. Apartheid at the border
Foreign capital entered the continent at the barrel of a gun, and blew away any obstacle in its way. It was always free to cross borders, and as we saw from the various protocols discussed, its freedom is continuously being improved.
When upwards of fifteen million Africans were exported across continents as slaves to build the settler colonial economies in the Americas and the economies of Europe, borders were not an issue. During the colonial period settlers and capitalists needed to supplement local labour from the surrounding countries, and so they did; borders were not an issue then and it is not an issue now for anybody but the worker without a master. Company officials move to where the company sends them. Citizens of the imperialist countries generally have lax visa-free travel. Those with R5 million to invest in South Africa are free to invade. Blessed be the skilled worker with the right skill-sets, for he/she is welcomed and courted, the affluent retiree is welcomed nearly everywhere to settle. Special programs (golden visas/residencies) exist for the rich to hop across borders with even greater ease. Yes, for those with the resources to exploit it, the world's borders welcome them with open arms.
And let us not forget, in Apartheid South Africa, white people were invited to come from anywhere to take up permanent residency, fully subsidized,[24] and they came in droves, many with nothing to their names, only to be later reinvented as members of the stinking rich.
It is the unskilled who do not get enough of an opportunity to look for a better life. Even though they can legally cross the border to South Africa for short stays, we are not discussing people who have money for holidaying, and special work visas are required for employment purposes, and they no longer exist for unskilled labour. Desperation makes people determined everywhere, so they find their own ways across borders and oceans, many times at risk of life and limb, even if it means to pay traffickers and smugglers to get them on the right track. And those who survive the journey, they are hunted and persecuted as 'illegals', a condition that greatly cheapens their labour power.
VI. The legal and the 'illegal'
As Nicholas De Genova argued in his study of the question, what immigration regimes produce is precisely the "legal production of migrant 'illegality'".[25] This is the only logical conclusion if that is the chief product, a product that is benefitting the bosses. A worker who can be deported at any moment is a worker who cannot go to the police, cannot join a union without inviting a raid, and cannot refuse the wage offered. 'Illegality' is not the failure of the system to control migration. It is the system's method of producing a cheap labour force it can terrorise. In the aftermath of 30 June in South Africa, various commentators pointed to bosses – with praise, we might add – who defended employing undocumented workers. A lone voice amongst the chorus, asked the simple question: If these bosses are so wonderful, why did they not help their workers to get the necessary paperwork instead of super exploiting them? The answer is simple – it was not the migrants they preferred, it was the rotten wages they paid them coupled with precarious conditions and zero pension.
Once the manufactured nature of this category of migrant worker is realised, it is easy to see that the solution lies in equal wages and conditions, and working class solidarity. The unemployment, the collapsing clinic, the housing shortage, the wage that will not stretch: all of these originate in the organisation of capital and a state that serves capital and not the majority. But the 'illegal' scapegoat offers a nearer and more defenceless target. It is far easier to blame the Zimbabwean at the spaza shop than the mining house or the landlord, and far safer for those who own the country that the anger should fall on the former. Xenophobia is not a spontaneous eruption of the poor against the poor; it is manufactured anger, deliberately misdirected, and the legal-'illegal' dichotomy has become the instrument of that misdirection.
If the concern was truly about legality – truly a matter of papers and permits – then the documented migrant, the asylum-seeker with a valid permit, the naturalised citizen would all be safe. They were not on 30 June and they are not today. When Operation Dudula plants itself at the doors of public clinics and demands identity documents before it will let a pregnant woman pass, it does not pause to examine the validity of anyone's status; it turns away everyone it has decided looks foreign. Its members have blockaded access to more than fifty clinics across the country at one point and stormed a maternity ward;[26] they stood between a Malawian mother and the Alexandra clinic where her one-year-old child then tragically died.[27] Terror does not sort the legal from the 'illegal' and no migrant worker feels safe. It falls on all migrants alike, and then it falls wider still. According to Claassen, in the pogroms of 2008 that began in Alexandra and killed sixty-two people, roughly a third of the dead were themselves South Africans – people mistaken for foreigners, or punished for refusing to join in.[28] Claassen continued, citing Hall, that between those attacks and the ones in 2015, some three hundred and fifty people were killed on account of their perceived national origin – perceived, not proven. The Gauteng High Court, restraining Dudula in 2025, described its targets as 'foreign nationals and those who are perceived to be foreign'.[29] That phrase is the whole truth of the matter. The category that leads to the killing of innocent people is not the 'illegal' but foreign-looking, and 'foreign-looking' in South Africa means poor, dark-skinned, a speaker of the wrong language – never the white European or American, who is received not as a foreigner at all but as a tourist. This exposes the fact that the distinction made between legal and 'illegal' is meaningless to the crazed mob, and a cover for them to target all black migrants.
This distinction is an insult to the dignity, human rights, and constitutional rights[30] of our brothers and sisters from beyond and must be condemned without reservation. It is to be condemned because it produces a rightless underclass for capital to super exploit; it shatters the solidarity on which the achievement of many gains of the working class have depended; and it licenses a terror that, once loosed in the name of the 'illegal', spirals out of control.
There are no illegal workers. There are only workers – and the line drawn between them is drawn by their enemies. The task is not to police that line more humanely as requested by the trade union federations and the Conference of the Left, but to organise against the anti-worker apartheid it stands for.
VII. The charge of chaos and invasion
When the issue of freedom of migration comes up, the image of hordes flocking across borders are inevitably called up by the media to provoke hysterical reactions amongst all and sundry. Incidentally, this image is one of the seeds for xenophobia and will sprout under the right conditions. The concern is not of the moneyed classes, who they actually cannot get enough of to visit, it is about the poor who have nothing to spend except their labour power.
It is the migration of the poorest of the poor, the crossing of the one without a master, that summons the cry of invasion from the deepest pits of fear, while the genuine mass movements of history – the fifteen million slaves dragged across the Atlantic, the millions led deep into the unsafe mines – provoked no such alarm, because they served capital and arrived under master's whip.
It is widely agreed that both legal and undocumented migration into South Africa increased dramatically since the end of Apartheid,[31] but this is understandable for all the reasons mentioned in this article plus the fact that the horrid Apartheid regime was now removed as an obstacle.
The South African panic rests on a number that does not exist. When a national survey asked South Africans in 2021 how many immigrants lived among them, almost half placed the figure between seventeen and forty million.[32] Let us create as full a picture as possible of the verifiable totals.
In a StatsSA media statement dated 26 June 2026, the estimate is given of 2.4 million migrants in South Africa, based on the last census of 2022, which was just below 4% of the population.[33] In a statement dated 5 August 2021, StatsSA gave the following totals for immigrants:[34]
Census 1996 – 958 188
Census 2001 – 1.03 Million
Census 2011 – 2.2 Million
Estimate for 2021 – 3.95 million (the actual figure came in much lower)
These figures include migrants from all over the world as well as undocumented migrants. If we compare these figures with the 2026 estimate, two things stand out. Firstly, that the overall total undocumented migrants is only a fraction of the 17 to 40 million phantom numbers (March and March has been cited as giving totals of between 15 and 30 million[35]). And secondly, that after increasing, the numbers started to decline.
By the United Nations' own calculations, the density of the foreign-born in South Africa is around the global average of 3.6%, and far below that of North America or Western Europe.[36] Thus, the undocumented category is only a fraction of this. The so-called invasion by the undocumented, that fills the airwaves and riles up the mob, is a phantom – instigators conjured up a siege by a migrant population that they have magnified more than thirty-fold in order to foment mass hysteria.
In the case of migration, there are push and pull factors which tend to generally limit migration in the sense that the problem does not just keep growing. This is why the mentioned global norm is quite low and why South Africa's undocumented migrant population is very small. Comrade Lehulere and the Simunye Workers Forum, basing themselves on historical experiences where migration was free, explain this clearly.[37] The salient points they make are that no countries have been depopulated as a result of migration, this happens inside countries as well as poorer provinces do not get emptied of people as they move to the wealthier areas, migration is a two-way street, and generally, a small minority migrates whether across borders or inside countries.
Casey[38] supports the above characterisation and provides context and additional explanations regarding the impact of freeing up borders. According to him, based on the experiences of free migration to richer countries, the following can be confirmed. Spikes in numbers are temporary and soon drop off, spikes are counterbalanced by established migrants returning home because it becomes easier to do so, net immigration is reduced by emigration, migrants will circulate between countries of origin and destination, and migration is the exception and not the rule as most people prefer to stay with family and friends, as they choose what is familiar such as language and culture.
And the phantom wears a familiar face. More than four in five of the counted migrants come from within the Southern African Development Community, with Mozambique and Zimbabwe the leading sources, as they have been since the first democratic census.[39] These are precisely two of the leading countries that the recruiting empires of the WNLA and TEBA reached into for over a century, as this article has already traced. The foreign worker at today's factory gate is no new intruder but the descendant of the summoned, and the foundation of the economy that now recoils from him/her was built by their ancestors, generation upon generation. What is denounced as an invasion is the return of the same labour along a different route, with the recruiting contract missing.
That the target of the xenophobic mobs is statistically tiny, within global norms, and with deep historical ties to the South African economy, troubles the ignorant mob not at all, because the mob is always handed inflated numbers by those who wish to create a graveyard for worker unity and who direct the mobs away from the true culprits of their problems – the bosses and the government.
The outrageous figures conjured up to justify xenophobic attacks – the fifteen million, seventeen million, the thirty million, and the forty million – belong to the phantom zone where political ambition and brutal reaction sweep up ordinary people into senseless mobs.
VIII. Borders cannot stop desperate people
Who can forget the boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea with bodies packed into every inch of deck space, or the ones who slipped beneath the surface of the waters never to reappear? Such tragedies are the predictable outcome of a policy of strict enforcement against desperate people. It does not matter how much money is thrown at the policing of borders, the desperate will keep coming. We will explore this by looking at the two most significant international examples by scale.
The 2021-27 budget allocation for Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency for policing the EU borders, stands at €5.6 billion, an increase of 194% over the previous budgetary period.[40] This is not a European aberration but the local expression of a global border-industrial complex. The Transnational Institute records that seven of the wealthiest states spent between them some 33 billion dollars a year on border and immigration enforcement in the six years to 2018, against 14 billion dollars on climate finance for the very countries their own emissions are helping to render uninhabitable.[41]
The cost is also counted in bodies, which is a reflection of the sheer desperation behind migration movements. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has recorded more than eighty-two thousand deaths and disappearances on migration routes between 2014 and 2025, and 7 900 deaths recorded in 2025, with another 1 500 missing and presumed dead.[42]
None of this money buys what it claims to buy. It does not – it cannot – stop migration; it merely feeds the border-security industry and the clandestine networks that grow wealthy on a lucrative market, and it kills. The most careful study of the United States–Mexico frontier – Massey, Durand and Pren's analysis – found that the roughly thirty-five billion dollars spent on border enforcement between 1986 and 2010 produced no reduction in undocumented migration whatsoever.[43] What it produced instead was a doubling of the net rate of undocumented population growth.[44] By making the return journey lethal, enforcement did not stop people coming but stopped them going home. This converted a seasonal, circular flow of male workers into a settled, undocumented population of some eleven million spread across all fifty states. Border Patrol's budget rose roughly twenty-fold over the same trajectory while making no difference to the numbers of undocumented migrants.[45]
The border does not function as a wall. It functions as a valve, and its output is a stratum of workers who are working without rights. If you throw everything you got against a problem year after year with no result, and you just keep on doing it over and over, then it must be concluded that the no result is actually the result you want. It is not a malfunction of the system; it is its product. The dangerous crossing is precisely what manufactures the 'illegal' worker – one who sits at the lowest level of the labour market exerting a downward pressure on the wages and conditions of every worker above.
Casey, surveying the same terrain and coming up with the same conclusions, catalogued the costs of closed borders – the direct fiscal burden of detention and deportation; the social cost of debates that inflame racial tension and corrode any attempt at solidarity; and, above all, the human cost, as restriction drives people to ever more desperate measures while organised crime builds corporate structures around a growth industry in trafficking, debt bondage and sexual slavery into the same networks that run drugs and launder money.[46] Every additional pound spent tightening the frontier drives the routes deeper underground and hands a larger market to exactly these networks. Huge budgets for enforcement do not defeat the smuggler, it subsidises him. The smuggler and the border-security industry are two sides of the same coin.
These examples are typical of the global drive against migration. No amount of spending to close borders to the poorest of the poor will work, because determined people will not be stopped by officials, walls, or danger; instead they will continue to be driven into the arms of those who traffic them rightless into the clutches of employers who profit from their misery. The slogan that responds to this reality is not the policing of movement but the freedom of migration; the right to work across borders without the threat of criminalisation, and to work for equal wages and on equal terms with those already there.
IX. Where to with the borders of Southern Africa and Africa?
There is no point in going back to precolonial times, as the world and the continent have moved on quite a lot in the past century and more. Precolonial Africa had to be destroyed to force its farmers off their land and into the arms of imperialist and settler employers as cheap labour. This system destroyed African livelihoods and created institutionalised deep-rooted poverty across the continent. At the same time, imperialism drew Africa irrevocably into the international system of capitalism with its industrial economy, making its labour force part of the international industrial army, the only objectively progressive aspects of the entire tragedy. Undoing all that is impossible and would be reactionary in any case. The only road to take towards progress now, is forward.
As we have seen, the migrant worker has for more than a hundred years been invited into South Africa and played a massive role in building the country's economy. Not only did they build the economy, they also built the first trade unions. The South African trade union movement was, from its inception, a creation of migrants[47] – a fact that stands as a standing rebuke to the xenophobia now excused by the trade union federations. That same impulse persisted into the modern labour movement with the National Union of Mineworkers, founded in 1982 and a founding pillar of COSATU in 1985, having been built on a workforce drawn as heavily from Lesotho, Mozambique, Botswana and Swaziland as from the South African reserves. To organise the working class in South Africa has always meant, in practice, to organise migrants – and the worker who today denounces the 'foreigner' at the factory gate disavows the very workers who built his/her union. The first unions knew no borders, yet the big union federations want more effective policing of the borders today, against their own class brothers and sisters.
The borders are open for those whom capital wishes to admit, including the heavily restricted worker with papers, but not for the masterless worker, the one outside the discipline and control of the capitalists. The fight is for the freedom of movement that capital has granted itself and its chosen ones, to be extended to the worker, but, on conditions of equality and not as a weapon to divide the working class. No one is illegal.
The fight for freedom of migration means building on the initiatives in the west and east of the continent, whilst exposing their limitations. It means pressuring the governments to amend, ratify and implement the free-movement instruments they have left to die – the AU protocol continentally, the original shelved SADC protocol regionally – indefinite visa-free entry, the right of residence, and the right of establishment. It means the decriminalisation of presence and an end to the raids and deportations. Migration without equality delivers to the employer a cheaper hand that competes with local workers, compounding pressures that weigh against worker unity. Therefore the fight for full equality of wages and conditions – one rate for the job, the same protections and rights for every worker on the soil, regardless of documentation – must be pursued vigorously. Why is the worker the only one in Africa forbidden to cross borders at will? The answer is clear – because the worker does not control the government. This division from class brothers and sisters is the most glaring outcome the border was built to manufacture.
Africa cannot remain scarred by the wounds etched into its skin by the carving knives of European imperialism. One logical way out of this continental tragedy is extending the regional examples explained above. Another example is the confederation of different countries as in the case of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso (the AES countries). By far the greatest ambition is the continent-wide protocol that is being repressed by the ruling elites of most countries. In Southern Africa, the slogan for the Socialist States of Southern Africa is already ingrained in the revolutionary movement, and needs to be raised even more.
The issue of borders in Africa and Southern Africa is a recurring theme in the discourse on the tasks of the working class in the struggle against xenophobia. The issue was first raised by Oupa Lehulere who in 2008 raised Open Borders as a key strategic slogan, by which he means visa-free migration. His position was reaffirmed and supported by the Simunye Workers Forum in particular.[48] Revolutionaries support this position, but we believe that the actual formulation of the slogan deserves more discussion, as it can be misinterpreted and misrepresented and give ammunition to the enemies of the working class.
The struggle against xenophobia and to turn the border into an ally of the working class begins with mobilisation on the factory floor and in the township, coupled with the building of strong and solid organisations. Here it is indispensable to draw attention to the insightful analysis by Comrade Lehulere in the same article mentioned above. He traced how xenophobic views penetrated the leadership layers of the Congress alliance (ANC, SACP, COSATU and SANCO), arguing that the "primary explanation for the growth of these views within the working class lies in the political and organisational demobilisation of the working class that has been underway since 1994, if not since 1990". This demobilisation, he showed, was itself an element of the ANC's hegemony over the working class – one that COSATU actively assisted through its national-chauvinist and xenophobic outlook. Tracing the weakening of the social movements over the preceding decade, he linked the eruption of xenophobic violence to the failure of the new social movements to build grassroots organisation in the townships: "the new movements are both politically and organisationally weak, and were thus unable to act as a counterweight to the organisational and political demobilisation of the working class that has been spearheaded by the Congress alliance". He also showed that the weakness of the left currents in the working class movement contributed to this overall state of affairs. In other words, he correctly identified the serious decline of grassroots working-class organisation in the townships, and showed how that degeneration became fertile ground for reactionary xenophobic views. Today, the picture of social organisations has again changed, with old ones having disappeared and many new ones having emerged, but the weakness on the ground is worse. Left currents in the working class movement have also suffered severe setbacks since then. To counter xenophobia effectively and to take forward all the struggles of the working class, strong and solid grassroots organisations are needed in the townships and other working class communities as well as in every workplace, whether unionised or not. This process is already making strong headway around the country, and the signs are there that progress will continue.
X. Conclusion
The history of Africa's borders is the history of European imperialism in Africa. The lines drawn in Berlin were blueprints for plunder, later retained by post-colonial elites to safeguard capital, exploitation, property and power rather than to liberate the continent's people. Independence was not a break from imperialism but its resubjugation in new forms, dressed in the language of sovereignty and national interest.
The border manufactures the 'illegal' worker, cheapens labour, and sets the poor against the poor while the owners of wealth and those of means move freely across the very same lines. The global evidence is overwhelming, walls and policemen do not stop migration; they only make it deadlier and more profitable for smugglers and employers alike.
The slogan of freedom of migration with equal wages and conditions, dismantles the border's class function, unites workers across nationality, and denies capital its cheapest, most desperate competitor. The regional examples and continental protocol, although restricted or blocked and without the necessary equality provision, show that there is a strong impulse for freedom of migration beating in the heart of Africa. And the working-class movement in Southern Africa already carries the vision of a socialist future without borders. The task is to raise the concrete slogan everywhere, to organise across the lines that divide us, and to refuse the lie that some workers have a legal right to be here and others do not.
The nationwide protest marches organised by Operation Ubuntu on 8 August 2026, was an important step forward by the growing social movement. Bringing over 60 organisations together, the marches protested against xenophobia and for housing and economic justice in the cities of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. Placards drew attention to the need for Africa-wide solidarity and declared that "Ubuntu has no passport". Other powerful messages included, "Africa Unite Reclaim our Wealth for Housing and Health", "South Africa Belongs to Everyone Who Lives in Her" and "No Worker Against Another Worker". Such actions will go a long way to drive the message home that there are no illegal workers and that the lines drawn between workers are drawn by their enemies.
Notes
In mid-June 2026, the trade union federations, COSATU, SAFTU, NACTU and FEDUSA released a joint statement through NEDLAC titled, Organised Labour Statement on Migration and South Africa's Economic Crisis. Instead of helping to alleviate the plight of the undocumented, they state, "…Organised Labour is firmly opposed to the unlawful employment of undocumented migrants". So their solution is to starve them? They also call for better policing of undocumented workers, taking us right back to the days of Apartheid repression. The Conference of the Left met from 29 to 31 May 2026 and adopted a Declaration on its last day. The declaration puts a spotlight on the undocumented migrants and states that "illegal migration is a matter of serious concern" and offers as its remedy "effective border management" and "proper documentation systems". It is silent about deportations and does not call out the organisations behind the xenophobic pogroms. The documents can be accessed here: https://mediadon.co.za/organised-labour-statement-on-migration-and-south-africas-economic-crisis/ and here: https://www.sacp.org.za/content/declaration-conference-left
Jeffrey Herbst. (2000). States and Power in Africa. Princeton University Press.
After WWI some changes were made to reflect the defeat of Germany.
Ieuan Ll. Griffiths. (1995). The African Inheritance. Routledge.
Zafar, A. (2025). Navigating the debt crisis: Reforming the common framework for African countries (UNDP Working Paper Series, Ethiopia No. 6). United Nations Development Programme. Retrieved on 2/08/26 from, https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2025-08/undp-working_paper_series-navigating_the_debt_crisis_7_aug_2025.pdf
The system of internal passes (the dompas), Bantustans, and deportations were only applied to 'African' South Africans and was called the Influx Control System.
All these figures are confirmed in: de Vletter, F. (1987). Foreign labour on the South African gold mines: New insights on an old problem. International Labour Review Vol.126, No.2. March-April 1987. Retrieved on 31/07/26 from, https://webapps.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/P/09602/09602(1987-126-2)199-218.pdf
The total of 300 000 can be found in: Graduate School of Business-UCT. (2000). A Perspective on the South African Mining Industry in the 21st Century. Retrieved on 30/07/26 from, https://static.pmg.org.za/docs/segal.pdf
For the decline in gold mining and miners see: STIAS. (16/08/2024). [Public Lecture]. Retrieved on 1/08/26 from, https://www.stias.ac.za/public-lectures-seminars/losing-the-lustre-the-end-of-gold-in-south-africa/ ; Stoddard, E. (29 June 2026). Decline of migrant labour system for SA mines has sown xenophobic seeds. Daily Maverick. Retrieved on 1/08/26 from, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-06-29-decline-of-migrant-labour-system-for-sa-mines-has-sown-xenophobic-seeds/
Statista. (13 June 2024). Number of people employed by gold mining in South Africa from 2011 to 2023. Retrieved on 8/08/26 from, https://www.statista.com/statistics/981151/people-employed-gold-mining-south-africa/
Human Rights Watch, "Prohibited Persons": Abuse of Undocumented Migrants, Asylum-Seekers, and Refugees in South Africa (1998), for the 50,692 figure — https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/sareport/Adv2c.htm
Human Rights Watch. (1998). Brief history of migration to South Africa. In Prohibited persons: Abuse of undocumented migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees in South Africa. Retrieved on 3/08/26 from, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/sareport/Adv2c.htm
Njini, F. (12/06/2020). Rebooting world's deepest mines sparks massive labour migration. Club of Mozambique. Retrieved on 1/08/26 from, https://clubofmozambique.com/news/south-africa-rebooting-worlds-deepest-mines-sparks-massive-labour-migration-from-mozambique-lesotho-eswatini-and-botswana/
Saunders, R. (1998). Labour migration to South Africa in the 1990s (SAMAT Policy Paper Series No. 4). International Labour Office, Southern Africa Multidisciplinary Advisory Team. Retrieved on 1/08/26, from https://www.ilo.org/media/304306/download; an updated figure of 477 000 mining workers in 2023 can be found at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311309/south-africa-diamond-mining-employment/
OAU. (1964). Border Disputes among African States. [AHG/Res.16(1)]. Retrieved on 4/08/26 from, https://www.peaceau.org/uploads/ahg-res-16-i-en.pdf
Economic Community of West African States. (1979). Protocol A/P.1/5/79 relating to free movement of persons, residence and establishment. ECOWAS Secretariat. Retrieved on 5/08/26 from, https://ecowas.int/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/PROTOCOL-RELATING-TO-FREE-MOVEMENT-OF-PERSONS.pdf
For a detailed discussion of the Protocol and outlining of the difficulties with implementation see: Adepoju, A., Boulton, A., & Levin, M. (2007). Promoting integration through mobility: Free movement under ECOWAS. Policy Development and Evaluation Service, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Retrieved on 5/08/26 from, https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/legacy-pdf/49e479c811.pdf
East African Community. (2009). Protocol on the establishment of the East African Community Common Market. AfricanLII. Retrieved on 5 August 2026 from, https://africanlii.org/en/akn/aa-eac/act/protocol/2009/common-market-protocol/eng@2009-11-20
Southern African Development Community. (2005). Protocol on the facilitation of movement of persons. AfricanLII. Retrieved on 5 August 2026 from, https://africanlii.org/akn/aa-sadc/act/protocol/2005/facilitation-of-movement-of-persons/eng@2005-08-18
Department of Home Affairs. (n.d.). Exempt countries. Republic of South Africa. Retrieved August 2, 2026, from https://www.dha.gov.za/index.php/immigration-services/exempt-countries
AfCFTA Protocol on Investment, adopted February 2023 (not yet in force); on beneficiaries, Harvard International Law Journal (2025) (accessed 31 July 2026).
AU Free Movement Protocol (Addis Ababa, 2018): 32 signatures, 4 ratifications of the 15 required; Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa have not signed (accessed 31 July 2026).
African Union. (2018). Protocol to the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community relating to free movement of persons, right of residence and right of establishment. African Union. Retrieved on 5 August 2026 from, https://opendata.pap.au.int/akn/aa-au/act/protocol/2018/african-economic-community-relating-to-free-movement-of-persons-right-of-residence-and-right-of-establishment
Mentioned in Saunders, see footnote 12.
De Genova, N. P. (2002). Migrant "illegality" and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 419–447. Access can be arranged at, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085432
Mutsila, L. (2025, August 25). Operation Dudula blockades deny migrants access to at least 53 clinics countrywide. Daily Maverick. Retrieved on 1 August 2026 from, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-08-25-operation-dudula-blockades-deny-migrants-access-to-at-least-53-clinics-countrywide/
allAfrica.com. (2025, September 22). South Africa: Gauteng MEC demands end to healthcare blockades – South African news briefs – September 22, 2025. allAfrica. Retrieved on 1 August 2026 from, https://allafrica.com/stories/202509220097.html
Claassen, C. (2017). Explaining South African xenophobia (Working Paper No. 173). Afrobarometer. Retrieved on 5 August 2026 from, https://www.afrobarometer.org/publication/wp173-explaining-south-african-xenophobia/
Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia and Others v Operation Dudula and Others [2025] ZAGPJHC 1102 (4 November 2025). Retrieved on 1/08/26 from, https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZAGPJHC/2025/1102.html
The same court judgement confirmed that all people in South Africa, irrespective of citizenship or status, are protected by the constitution.
Mentioned in Saunders, see footnote 12.
Kaziboni, A., Lancaster, L., Machabaphala, T. and Godfrey Mulaudzi. Scapegoating in South Africa: busting the myths about immigration (September 2022). Institute for Security Studies. Retrieved on 30/07/26 from, https://issafrica.s3.amazonaws.com/site/uploads/sar-53.pdf
StatsSA. (26/06/26). Retrieved on 30/07/26 from, https://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=19670
StatsSA. (5/08/21). Retrieved on 30/07/26 from, https://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=14569
Tilsley, P. (22 July 2026). South Africa's illegal migration backlash mirrors political battles across the West. Fox News. Retrieved on 2/08/26 from, https://www.foxnews.com/world/south-africas-illegal-migration-backlash-mirrors-political-battles-across-west
Mbiyozo, A.-N. (19/06/2026). Anti-migrant myths that have been allowed to fester in South Africa. Institute for Security Studies. Retrieved on 2/08/26 from, https://issafrica.org/iss-today/anti-migrant-myths-that-have-been-allowed-to-fester-in-south-africa
Here are the references for both: Lehulere, O. (2008). The xenophobia outbreak in South Africa: Strategic questions facing the new social movements. LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Retrieved 1/08/26, from https://links.org.au/xenophobia-outbreak-south-africa-strategic-questions-facing-new-social-movements; Phantsi Capitalism! (14/07/26). Down with xenophobia – Part two. Retrieved on 1/08/26, from https://www.cwao.org.za/news-article.asp?ID=723
Casey, J. P. (2010). Open borders: Absurd chimera or inevitable future policy? International Migration, 48(5), 14–62. Retrieved on 29/07/26 from, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2009.00514.x
Statistics South Africa. (26 June 2026). Migration continues to shape South Africa's population landscape, says Statistician-General. Statistics South Africa. Retrieved on 5 August 2026 from, https://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=19670; the four in five total can be read here: https://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=17111
Statewatch. (2025). At What Cost? Funding the EU's Security, Defence, and Border Policies, 2021–2027. Retrieved on 2/08/26 from, https://statewatch.org/publications/reports-and-books/at-what-cost-funding-the-eu-s-security-defence-and-border-policies-2021-2027/
Ivanova, I. (28 October 2021). Rich nations failing poor countries in fight against climate change: Report. CBS News. Retrieved on 30/07/26 from, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-carbon-emitting-countries-border-security/
International Organization for Migration. (21 April 2026). Nearly 8,000 migrant deaths recorded in 2025, new IOM data. Retrieved on 2/08/26 from, https://www.iom.int/news/nearly-8000-migrant-deaths-recorded-2025-new-iom-data and https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/f84086a46e5547f4ba6968ab5ea0623a
Massey, D. S., Durand, J., & Pren, K. A. (2016). Why border enforcement backfired. American Journal of Sociology, 121(5), 1557–1600. Retrieved on 1/08/26 from, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5049707/. The figures were summarised in a press release that can be accessed here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160421171156.htm
Massey et al.
Since 1994 the U.S. Border Patrol's annual budget has risen nearly twenty-fold, from about US$400 million to over US$7.3 billion in FY 2024. See American Immigration Council, 'The Cost of Immigration Enforcement and Border Security' (2025), https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/the-cost-of-immigration-enforcement-and-border-security/ (accessed 1 August 2026).
Casey, J. P. (2010). See footnote 38.
The earliest craft unions of the 1880s and 1890s on the Witwatersrand were organisations of British and Australian miners. The first stirrings of African unionism were the Industrial Workers of Africa, formed in Johannesburg in 1917 under the wing of the International Socialist League, and above all the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU), founded in Cape Town in 1919 by Clements Kadalie, himself a migrant from Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), who organised the Cape Town dockers. Under Kadalie the ICU swelled into the first genuine mass movement of black workers in the sub-continent, its membership running into the tens of thousands and its branches spilling across the countryside and over the borders into Southern Rhodesia and South-West Africa, before its decline started in the late 1920s under the weight of state repression, splits, and financial ruin.
See footnote 37 for references for both.
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