Scores of unemployed South Africans marched to the Department of Home Affairs offices in Pretoria yesterday morning, demanding the government urgently hire 10,000 new immigration officers to combat illegal migration and address soaring joblessness.
The demonstrators, led by the Impact Forum NPC, are calling on the government to act decisively on border control and migration enforcement, arguing that porous borders and undocumented workers exacerbate the country’s unemployment crisis.
However, the protests have drawn sharp criticism from Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia. Speaking on the matter, Dr. Dale McKinley said the growing tensions reflect deep-seated government failures rather than any threat posed by foreign nationals.
“It’s sad from our perspective that these things are happening because we believe fundamentally that the wrong target is being chosen,” McKinley said. “We understand completely the frustrations of people – the low employment rate, the general bad socioeconomic conditions – but much of the blame lies at the seat of government, at the seat of those that have failed to deliver basic services, failed to deliver jobs, failed to support local economies.”
McKinley argued that the immigration issue is being “weaponized” by political parties and politicians using social media and misinformation to make political capital, particularly ahead of local government elections.
Regarding claims that undocumented migrants accept lower wages and undercut local workers, McKinley acknowledged real problems with corruption and dysfunction at Home Affairs, but said statistics show foreign nationals are not the primary cause of unemployment. He noted that in the construction sector – where foreign employment is most significant – the figure stands at about 16 percent.
“For every migrant who owns a shop or owns a business, they create two or three jobs,” McKinley said. “The net effect of legal and productive migration is positive for our economy. It’s not negative.”
He added that many migrants become undocumented “through no fault of their own” due to departmental dysfunction, and that skilled professionals including doctors from West Africa are unable to work because they cannot obtain proper documentation.
McKinley also pointed to what he called an irony in South Africa’s approach: “You reserve the most lowest-skilled, low-paying jobs for our own citizens, while allowing skilled positions to be taken by people not usually of color but from Europe and the United States – and they never have any problems.”
The protest comes amid rising public frustration over unemployment, with young South Africans increasingly vocal about job scarcity and border control failures.