She has spent a month observing the Zimbabwean asylum seeker situation in Cape Town. The number of immigrants now being served has increased to 120 a day and is approaching the 200 mark, but only 2 days – Thursday and Friday – are set aside for Zimbabweans. I encourage Zimbabweans in the queue to be patient, but also to persist in coming to Home Affairs.
Braam Hanekom, Passop
As an American student coming to Cape Town on holiday over my winter break, I had no expectation of being caught up in the plight of African refugees, the brutality of the South African police, or the corruption in the Department of Home Affairs.
Even so, my January holiday has turned into a crash course in the politics of immigration in South Africa. I have spent the month as a volunteer for PASSOP, and this one month has taught me lessons that my four years of university courses have thus far been incapable of teaching me. In the abstraction of academia, my politics and economics textbooks have taught me that the power and the relevance of national governments is steadily declining in the face of capitalist globalisation – that the increasing pace of cross-border movement of capital is resulting in the decreasing significance of the nation-state and its attempts at regulatory policies.
But as global capital moves ever more freely, what of the labour needed to release the value of this capital? Though capital can move effortlessly from country to country and multi-national corporations hold a frightening amount of influence over its regulation (or lack thereof) – who holds power over the movement of the people that represent the realization of the value of global capital?
The state!
It is the state that invariably controls the movement of people across the face of the globe, and therefore controls the conditions of their labour. Here, finally, in the regulation of labour and the movement of people, is an opportunity for the national governments of the world to recapture at least one facet of their power in the international community, to create within their borders conditions that support, not undermine, the rights of their most vulnerable populations. Yet this opportunity is all too often overlooked.
At home in America, for example, national policy shows a clear disdain for those ‘from south of the border’, despite the fact that it is the cheap labour of Mexicans that support many of the industries that make America what it is, and consistently give American consumers the low prices they demand.
Unfortunately, through my experience with the department of Home Affairs in South Africa, I recognize the same misinformed xenophobic attitude here. In the blanket rejection of Zimbabwean ‘economic refugees’ and in the illegal shackling of so-called Zimbabwean ‘criminals’ during their deportation, it is clear that the South African government has not yet recognized the opportunity that lies hidden in Zimbabwe’s crisis.
It is time for regional powerhouses of the world, like South Africa and America, to recognize their dependency on both domestic and foreign cheap wage labourers, and in so doing, find the platform on which they can fly in the face of western capitalist globalization and reassert the power of the nation-state. In South Africa, I find hope in the fact that deportation has decreased since my arrival in the beginning of January, and in the fact that the Home Affairs department is aiming to serve hundreds, instead of dozens, of people per day.
Slowly, the government is recognizing the importance of dealing with crises in neighbouring nations. With continued appeals from people at the ground level, these improvements can continue. I only hope that I can put these lessons learned to use at home in America, and that Zimbabweans know that they are not alone in their struggle.