Daily life in South Africa and indeed across the world shows an ever increasing tendency towards demonising foreigners and strengthening policies of exclusion. One increasingly popular method of criminalising and controlling migrants is through the use of the process of deportation.

One example of the tendency of exclusion in South Africa has been the recent explicit instruction by the Minister of Sport, Art and Culture for a thorough investigation into any foreign nationals employed in any of the agencies in his department, the process by which they were thus employed, and who signed off on their employment. He has also purported to decree a strict requirement that such jobs must go to South Africans. He does not differentiate between documented and undocumented foreigners; he threatens to fire anyone hiring foreign nationals; and he is a strong defender of deportation, pioneering the slogan ‘abahambe’ (let them go’).

Paper by the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference Parliamentary Liaison Office