Anti-immigrant: South Africa is a warning

•  LYDIA POLGREEN

When people in the rich world imagine a migrant from the poor world, I suspect the image conjured is that of a desperately impoverished person with no marketable skills who will travel any distance and brave any risk to grab an unearned fistful of Western wealth. But the truth is that a migrant is much more likely to look like a man named Fikre Gebrie Orebo, who I met last year. Growing up in a fertile but deeply impoverished southern region of Ethiopia, he had dreamed of attending university to become an engineer. But he was the firstborn son, and his family depended on him to start working immediately. And so he hit the road, leaving his hometown and heading to the capital, Addis Ababa. He found work as a laborer, digging foundations by hand and moving stones on construction sites.

It didn’t take long for him to realize he’d need to keep moving. The brutal work paid little, and there were few opportunities for young men like him. The government was dominated by a northern ethnic elite that shunned his southern tribe. The last straw came when the government started rounding up young men to send them to fight an ill-advised war with Eritrea. Orebo feared that southerners like him would be used as cannon fodder in a pointless conflict.

But when he finally set off on his cross-border journey, he didn’t head north, toward Europe, or try to somehow get to the distant, prosperous lands of North America, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians have settled. He set his sights on Kenya, his country’s neighbor to the south, where he found a job in a cafe, then farther south still, to South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest economy, where he had heard that an enterprising young person could make a prosperous life.

There, he said, he was granted asylum as a member of a persecuted minority, and he ultimately settled in Heidelberg, a town about an hour’s drive southeast of Johannesburg. Finally, his dreams came to life. He built a successful business, a pair of convenience stores, known locally as spaza shops, in the nearby Black township of Ratanda. He married a young South African woman, and they are raising their children in a comfortable, suburban-style home. He has long sent money home to Ethiopia, supporting his siblings while they were in school and helping to build a house for his father, who had been a farmer, to enjoy a comfortable retirement.

Orebo’s story illustrates an important but often occluded fact in this age of migration. Despite the panic in rich countries over the arrival of people fleeing poor, war-tossed nations, most people from the global south who migrate don’t head north. The majority who flee in haste end up quite near where they came from, hoping to go home as soon as possible. And even those who migrate farther afield — searching for work, fleeing political persecution or simply wanting a new life — tend to remain in their own region or continent. In our hyperconnected, jet-powered age, the median distance traveled by modern migrants is less than 400 miles.

This pattern has been repeated across the globe in the biggest crises of our time. The 2015 surge of Syrian refugees that remade European politics was a small fraction of the total number of Syrians forced to flee; a vast majority ended up in neighboring countries, with Turkey alone playing uncomfortable host to some 3 million people, roughly three times the number taken in by the entire European Union. More than 7 million Venezuelans have fled their country’s long-running political and economic crisis. President Donald Trump’s recent spat with the president of Colombia over deporting Colombian migrants looks quite different when you consider that Colombia, a country of some 50 million people, with a per capita GDP of less than a tenth that of the United States, has taken in about four times as many Venezuelans as America. Indeed, 85% of Venezuelan refugees and migrants have remained in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Perhaps the most urgent refugee crisis in the world right now, one of the largest since the partition of India in 1947, was set off by the civil war in Sudan, which has forced some 14 million people to flee their homes. Most of Sudan’s refugees have fled into often troubled bordering nations: Chad, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Egypt, Libya and Ethiopia. Vanishingly few have managed to reach Europe or North America.

Sudan is just the latest of the many long-simmering refugee crises on the continent. Decades of turmoil in Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo, Zimbabwe and more have produced floods of refugees. Sub-Saharan Africa leads the world in the number of forcibly displaced people, with some 45 million on the move, more than doubling since 2017. But an estimated 96% of those people remain within the continent.

While governments across the global north panic over a relative trickle of migrants, a very real migration crisis is unfolding in the global south. And as wealthy countries in the global north raise their fences ever higher and outsource their border control to countries beyond their frontiers while slashing development aid to the poorest nations, the pressure on migrant destinations in the global south is ratcheting up — sparking violence, xenophobia and instability. By closing their borders to the relatively small numbers of migrants who make the crossing, rich countries risk destabilizing some of the most important nations for regional stability across the globe.

That danger is abundantly clear in South Africa, where a country long home to migrants has now turned against them, with devastating effect. For other magnet countries in the global south facing great flows of migrants fleeing war, poverty and the degradation of their land by climate change, South Africa is a potent cautionary tale. And for the rest of the world, it’s a warning.

Xenophobia in South Africa is not new, but the issue gained political significance in last year’s elections. Since 1994, the African National Congress has held large majorities, a virtual hammerlock on electoral politics with a broad-church approach that papered over many of the cleavages within the country’s diverse population. But its support has been steadily slipping, and the fault lines within its coalition have taken on predictable if tragic forms: stoking ethnic divisions and scapegoating of foreigners.