Post-Apartheid S. Africa Targets Illegal Migrants

A few peered out the grimy windows. A few others wiped away tears. But the 480 passengers--all men except for four young women and an infant--sat in silence as the train jerked to a start.

All had been declared illegal immigrants. And all were being expelled from Africa’s richest country to one of its poorest, neighboring Mozambique.

“Say goodbye to the land of milk and honey!” a beefy policeman shouted as shrill whistles blew and police dogs barked.

Salim Mohammed Ali, clutching a loaf of bread as his only luggage, shook his head sadly as the train clattered down the track.

“I’ll be back in two days,” he whispered.

Not if President Nelson Mandela’s government can help it. Barely 2 1/2 years after South Africa ended apartheid and opened its long-closed borders, the new democracy has launched a concerted crackdown against illegal immigrants.

More than 157,000 people were deported last year, a 75% jump from 1994. Even more are expected to go this year. Most are arrested in police raids, random ID checks and 24-hour military patrols on the border--tactics once used to fight anti-apartheid guerrillas.

Immigration officials have also tightened entry laws and sought to cut government-funded benefits for illegal immigrants, including barring their children from attending public schools.

But it’s a losing battle.

From Angola to Zaire, the huddled masses on the world’s most blighted continent have poured across South Africa’s 3,000-mile land border. Some are refugees fleeing nations beset by war, disease and disaster. But most are economic migrants, seeking a promised land of jobs and hope.

“Nelson Mandela is our Statue of Liberty,” said Vernon Seymore, director of the Center for Southern African Studies, a research institute in Cape Town. “People come here to pursue their dreams.”

But the new arrivals are a nightmare to some.

Police blame illegal immigrants for rising crime. Labor unions say foreigners steal jobs and undercut wages. Government officials complain that newcomers strain limited resources for housing, health care and other critical services.

Critics argue the opposite. They say illegal immigrants are more likely to be victims of crime than to cause it, are exploited by unscrupulous employers, take menial jobs South Africans won’t accept and avoid government officials and most services for fear of being caught.

If the debate sounds familiar, it is.

“I think we have a very similar problem to America,” said George Orr, head of admissions and alien control in the Department of Home Affairs, which regulates immigration. “Except you people get all charged up about it.”

Americans may argue the ethics and economics of California’s Proposition 187--the ballot initiative now enmeshed in the courts that denies most publicly funded benefits to illegal immigrants and their children--and of more recent proposals in other states and the U.S. Congress to curb aid to illegal immigrants.

Politicians here have gone another route. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, minister of home affairs, simply asked his Cabinet colleagues in a letter last February to stop “rendering government subsidized services” to anyone without proper documents.

“The schools, clinics, hospitals, universities, all those institutions that are [funded] by government, have been requested not to provide services to these people,” Orr said.

The impact is difficult to determine. The request was not publicly announced and may have been ignored by local officials. In any case, many immigrants use forged identity papers.

“In some cases, parents have come to schools and asked teachers not to accept children of immigrants,” said Maxine Reitzes, an immigration expert at Johannesburg’s independent Center for Policy Studies. “And some principals say they exclude children of immigrants. But then these kids adopt South African surnames, and it’s very difficult to tell them apart.”

Still, immigration is a political and diplomatic minefield.

Mozambique, Zimbabwe and other sympathetic African governments gave sanctuary and support to Mandela’s African National Congress when it was banned during the long battle against white rule, as well as to other anti-apartheid groups.

The ANC is now in power, and the bonds of solidarity remain strong. So does pressure from African governments whose economies depend on remittances from migrants.

“These countries gave us a base and asylum, food and resources during our struggle,” Mandela said in a recent interview. “Now we are free. We cannot treat them as hostile people. But welcoming illegal immigrants will aggravate our unemployment. We have to find a balance.”

At first, his government appeared to tolerate outsiders. Streets in Cape Town and Johannesburg filled with foreign hawkers peddling baskets from Botswana, wire toys from Zimbabwe, dyed cloth from Nigeria and carved masks from West Africa.

But xenophobia grew as immigrants were accused of also selling drugs and guns. Vigilante violence and protests erupted as foreigner-filled shantytowns mushroomed along highways and around major cities. Opinion polls began showing fierce anti-foreigner fervor, with immigrants blamed even for importing infectious diseases.

“These people come largely in poor health and are malnourished,” insisted Hussein Solomon, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Policy, a think tank outside Johannesburg. “So they are susceptible to cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis and AIDS. There is a correlation between immigration and malaria.”

Strict new immigration laws were imposed in July. Airlines now face fines for carrying undocumented passengers, and employers who hire illegal immigrants can be prosecuted.

Citizens of 73 nations need visas to enter South Africa--far more than before. Among Americans, tourists can get visas at the airport; all others must apply in advance.

In the past, arrested immigrants were held in police cells. Now, most are hauled to the country’s first detention camp for illegal immigrants. It opened in mid-August in a former mine workers hostel here in Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg. The facility is clean, freshly painted--and packed.

“We’re already running at full capacity,” said Frans LeGrange, manager of the 770-bed facility. Ringed by barbed wire and electric fences, the center is called Lindela, which means “Place of Waiting” in the Xhosa language.

Few wait very long. Most of the detainees get a quick interview with an immigration officer, are handed a “removal warrant” and are deported in less than a week.

“Due to our courts being overloaded, we take the short route,” said Chris Kruger, an immigration official at Lindela.

Critics say the system is abusive.

“They’re gone before anyone knows they’ve been picked up,” complained Sheena Duncan, head of the Black Sash Trust, a nongovernmental group. “It’s a real human rights issue.”

Although some deportees are flown home, the vast majority are trucked to a nearby railroad siding and put aboard heavily guarded trains that leave each Monday for Zimbabwe, each Wednesday for Mozambique and on other days for Lesotho and Malawi. The trains, which started running two years ago, rarely have empty seats.

Not all aboard are jobless squatters. Bhekinkosi Mhlanga, who was expelled last month, left behind a family and a $180 monthly salary as a carpenter--10 times what he could make in Mozambique.

“My money is still in the bank here,” he complained as he boarded the deportation train. “South Africa is no good now.”

It was far worse under the apartheid regime, which let in blacks only as indentured labor for farms and mines. Nor are deportations new. But they have risen sharply.

In 1990, the year Mandela was freed from prison, 53,418 people were expelled. In 1994, when white rule ended, 90,692 people were repatriated.

Last year, the first of full democratic rule, South Africa expelled 157,084 people, mostly to Mozambique.

The total is expected to grow this year, despite a new amnesty program for migrants from 11 countries in southern Africa who can prove they have worked here at least five years.

By contrast, 41,715 people were deported from the United States in fiscal 1995 after deportation hearings, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. An additional 100,000 people agreed to leave without hearings. The Census Bureau estimates that 3.5 million to 4 million illegal immigrants remain in the U.S., or less than 1.5% of the population.

No one knows how many illegal immigrants are in South Africa. The government cites estimates of 2.5 million to 4.1 million, or nearly one-tenth of the population. Police use estimates more than twice as high.

Outside analysts say the numbers are incomplete and inaccurate.

“The figures have no substance,” said Jonathan Crush, head of the Southern Africa Migration Project in Cape Town. “But they’ve become embedded in official discourse and the press.”

One result is that police now run regular roadblocks and massive raids to check identity documents. As twilight fell one recent afternoon, 96 police officers with pistols and assault rifles stormed the Statesman, a dingy 17-story apartment building in Hillbrow, a seedy Johannesburg district considered an epicenter of the immigrant scene.

“This building is 99% occupied by Nigerians,” the police commander, Pieter Dewitt, said as his men ran from floor to floor, banging on doors and interrogating residents. “And it is a mecca for drug dealing.”

Although they had no search warrants, officers opened apartments, ransacked closets, overturned mattresses and went through suitcases for evidence. Ten people were finally arrested, all Nigerian. Scores of others showed papers certifying that they had applied for asylum as political refugees.

But the real front line in the immigration war is the border with Mozambique, specifically a 38-mile-long, 7-foot-high barricade of rolled barbed wire and taut electric cables that runs atop rocky ridges and down rugged ravines.

Built in 1986 by apartheid officials to deter incursions, the fence first carried enough voltage to kill anyone caught on it. By the time the juice was reduced in 1990, dozens had perished on the grisly “snake of fire.”

With the power down, the fence now gives a mild jolt, like a car’s spark plug. But if the fence is touched, electronic sensors ring an alarm that sends army troops racing to catch the intruder. The army wins most of the time, said Col. Dewald Swart, spokesman for the military’s border forces.

But not always. On a recent morning, a computer board at a hilltop command post near one busy border crossing suddenly lighted up and began beeping. Four soldiers with assault rifles jumped into a pickup truck and tore down the steep track that follows the fence. Others radioed foot patrols in the area.

All they found were torn shreds of bright cloth on the fence, a pair of rubber sandals in the dirt and forked sticks used to prop up the razor-sharp coils so people could slither under. Local guides, called “ninjas,” had scored again.

“It’s impossible to prevent it,” Swart said wearily. “We don’t have enough concrete and barbed wire to stop these people.”

The view from the fence line shows why. On one side, South Africa’s bounty beckons with lush banana groves, irrigated orange orchards and emerald fields of sugar cane. Paved roads and power pylons complete a picture of prosperity.

On the other side, Mozambique appears a wasteland. Tiny huts and broken buildings are the only signs of habitation. Fields lie fallow, and brown scrub stretches to a hazy horizon. Although the country’s long civil war ended in 1991, land mines still litter the ground.

At the army’s holding center, seven Mozambicans who were arrested trying to crawl under the fence at dawn lined up to get deportation orders. They wore torn clothes, ragged sneakers and tired expressions. All admitted that they had crossed several times before--and would again.

“I’ll be back,” Vito Tivane, 18, said with a shrug. “Here I’ve got a job. At home there is nothing but misery.”