Spazas, Foreigners, and Crime – It’s More Complicated than That
In May 2008, the world watched in shock as xenophobic violence raged across South Africa. Nationals violently attacked foreign nationals, displacing tens of thousands of migrants and brutally killing over 60. Migrants’ properties and businesses were destroyed in great numbers, with over 550 foreign-owned shops looted or burned to the ground. This storm of attacks ushered in a decade of rising awareness of xenophobic violence among South Africans, and it has become widely assumed that this violence and accompanying xenophobic...
Voluntary repatriation as a durable solution or reshape the notions of return?
Angola is just a picture in my mind Voluntary repatriation can be accompanied by a whole range of practical, identity and post-conflict related problems. Sergio Carciotto, the associate director of the Scalabrini Institute for Human Mobility in Africa (SIHMA) , gives us insight into the process of voluntary repatriation in South Africa after Angolan refugees had their refugee status ceased in 2013. This came to be known as the ‘Angolan Cessation’. The findings of his article, “Angolan...
The Cape Town RRO in Comparative Perspective: Accessing Rights and Cities
So far, the Cape Town Refugee Reception Office (RRO) has failed to comply with final court orders to accept all new asylum applicants by the end of March 2018 and in response, civil society organizations have staged public protests to put pressure on the Department of Home Affairs to fully open the office. This incident around the RRO in Cape Town is only the most recent example of restricting access to asylum in South African...
The Regularization of Zimbabwean Migrants: a Case of Permanent Temporariness
In an article titled Back to the future? Can Europe meet its labor needs through temporary, migration? Stephen Castles inquires whether temporary worker schemes introduced in Europe in the 2000s would resemble past guest worker programs which provided employers with young unskilled workers who were unmarried or had left their families at home and worked, on a “rotation basis” (Rotationsprinzip), in agriculture, construction, mining, and manufacturing. His answer to the question is no. However, he argues that “some current approaches...
EU-Africa Relations on Migration: What future?
Over the past ten years, broadly under the auspices of the Joint Africa-EU Strategy (JAES), regional migration dialogues between the EU and the AU have intensified for the purposes of improving cooperation and making a well-managed migration a tool for development. However, the EU has pursued an agenda driven mainly by an interest in reducing irregular movements and transferring control over the governance of migration policies to European states. Intra-regional migration dialogues and regional consultative migration processes led by groups...
