Integration and the migrant migraine

The goal of Southern African regional integration is being set back by the outflow of Zimbabwean migrants to neighbouring countries, according to researchers.

An estimated three million Zimbabweans have emigrated as a result of the county's economic and political crisis, many of them heading to neighbouring South Africa and Botswana. Their arrival has triggered a rise in xenophobia as locals complain about competition for jobs and rising crime rates.

Ayesha Kajee, programme director of the International Human Rights Exchange at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa, noted that "the influx of both political and economic migrants has been unprecedented" and regional integration efforts "have since been pushed to the sidelines".

An integral part of the 14-member Southern African Development Community's (SADC) goal of regional integration is the principal of "free movement of people". In 1995, the SADC secretariat prepared an initial Draft Protocol on Free Movement of Persons that would underlie the right to entry, residence and establishment, eventually leading to the abolishment of controls. South Africa, Namibia and Botswana rejected the proposal.

After much deliberation, a watered-down version was accepted in 2005, in which "removal of controls" was replaced by "progressive minimisation of control". "SADC has agreed vaguely at a policy level on integration and the free movement of people, but implementation on a domestic level into legal frameworks has been poor," said Kajee.

"The movement of Zimbabweans - not only into South Africa but into Botswana and elsewhere - has effectively, if temporarily, removed the issue of free movement from the table," Loren Landau, Director of the Forced Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand, told IRIN.

Photo: Shervorn Monaghan/IRIN

Click here to listen to Peter, a “transporter” helping Zimbabwean migrants across the border

For Zimbabweans looking for a better life, its wealthy neighbour, South Africa, has acted as a magnet, attracting skilled, unskilled and undocumented migrants. Peter Ncube* smuggles people across the no-man's land between Zimbabwe's southern town of Beitbridge and the South African border post of Musina. He says the people who pay the US$50 for his services are desperate.

"The people are scared but there is no [other] solution. Grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, fathers and children, they [want] to come to South Africa to look for a job ... so they can support their families," he told IRIN.

"Migration of people between Zimbabwe and South Africa has been a regional pattern throughout history. As social and economic relationships change, people will always migrate to pools of stability," noted Peter Vale, Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics at South Africa's Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, Eastern Province.

However, while the flow is popularly seen in South Africa as strictly one way, in reality it is seasonal and complex. Analysts have found that Zimbabweans often enter South Africa to trade or pick up odd jobs, and then return home.

The Lindela detention and repatriation centre at Krugersdorp, about 120km from Johannesburg, is evidence of the South African government's determination to crack down on undocumented migrants. Those held here awaiting deportation have been picked up in regular police raids targeting "illegal aliens".

Photo: Shervorn Monaghan/IRIN Click here to listen to Police Commissioner Maggy Mathebula

According to the International Organisation of Migration, 177,514 Zimbabweans deported from South Africa passed through their reception centre in Beitbridge since it opened in May 2006.

Superintendent Maggy Mathebula, the police chief in Musina, does not accept that the daily detention of Zimbabweans caught crossing illegally into the country is pointless. "It is true that they keep on coming back. If we deport a truck in the morning, in the afternoon half of the people who were deported in the morning are re-arrested again. But it's our duty, we have to do it, again and again."

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