South Africa's migrant exodus threatens economic stability as regional tensions escalate

South Africa’s anti-migrant violence is now generating measurable economic and diplomatic costs, arriving at a moment when the country can least afford either.

More than 25,000 migrants departed South Africa in recent weeks ahead of an arbitrary Tuesday deadline set by campaign groups. Several countries have evacuated their nationals. Mozambique reports five of its citizens killed in May violence; Ghana says one was killed Monday, though South African officials dispute these accounts. The scale of displacement reflects genuine fear, with migrant communities reporting systematic exclusion from health services and other public resources by vigilante movements including Operation Dudula and March & March.

The underlying economic grievances are real. Unemployment exceeds 40%. Inequality, crime and overstretched public services have left poorer South Africans searching for explanations, and many have settled on foreign nationals as the cause, despite migrants constituting less than 5% of the population. The logic does not hold economically. Migrants include skilled workers whose departure deepens, rather than resolves, the unemployment and service shortages driving the violence in the first place.

Researchers Jean Pierre Misago and Loren Landau, who founded the Xenowatch monitoring platform, identify a more complex mechanism at work. Anti-migrant mobilisation operates as “a political enterprise co-produced by vigilante groups and the state through acts of commission and omission,” including inadequate government censure of violence. With municipal elections scheduled for November, the political incentives behind the current wave merit scrutiny. Opposition party ActionSA has called for action against illegal migration. Associates of former president Jacob Zuma, with politicians from his uMkhonto we Sizwe party attending its events, maintain active links to the March & March movement.

Meanwhile, President Cyril Ramaphosa has attempted to balance competing pressures by launching enforcement against illegal migration while publicly opposing “fear, anger, hatred or violence.” The government has largely reframed xenophobic violence as a law-and-order problem, sidestepping its political and moral dimensions.

The fallout extends well beyond South Africa’s borders. The anti-apartheid struggle drew broad continental and international support, a legacy that current xenophobic campaigns are rapidly eroding. Politicians and publics across Africa are angered, and that anger translates directly into deteriorating diplomatic standing, with consequences for tourism, trade and investment inflows the country urgently needs. Forced expulsions will compound the very problems motivating South Africans’ anger, not remedy them.

The open question is whether, as November’s elections approach, any political actor will find it more profitable to defuse the violence than to exploit it.