EDITORIAL: Xenophobic job curbs are a red herring

The news that President Cyril Ramaphosa is toying with the idea of job reservation for South Africans, in an apparent last-ditch attempt to tackle SA’s horrific unemployment levels, is the clearest sign yet that his administration has run out of ideas for how to revive the stuttering economy.

As a starting point, such a move would be an exercise in breathtaking hypocrisy. Were the government that concerned about an influx of foreigners from, say, Zimbabwe, you’d imagine it ought to have played a more constructive role in condemning the ruinous reign of Robert Mugabe and his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa, and contributed more to the restoration of that country’s economy. Instead, for two decades, SA’s successive administrations have employed the most flaccid of diplomatic approaches to Zimbabwe’s unravelling.

This incongruous attitude towards African migrants also flies in the face of the evidence of the benefit they bring to the SA economy.

According to a 2018 study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD), titled "How Immigrants Contribute to SA’s Economy", migrants working in SA have had a net positive impact on the country’s GDP.

"An economic model shows that immigrant workers may raise the SA income per capita by up to 5%. This could be due to the higher average educational attainment of foreign-born workers, the higher share of foreign-born individuals in the working-age population, as well as the possible increase in total factor productivity through efficiency gains as a result of, for example, increased specialisation of the labour force," it concluded.

Immigrants, the report found, have also had a positive net impact on SA’s fiscal position, due to the fact that they tend to contribute more to the tax base than locals. Anecdotally, Zimbabweans, in large numbers, rent properties from locals and buy wares in SA which they transport home — paying VAT, road tolls and petrol taxes as they do so.

It’s also not as if SA is abundantly blessed with the critical skills needed to grow the economy — and the state recently posted a list of skills in short supply that, theoretically, may be filled by foreigners. That skills shortage is also manifestly a failure to nurture SA’s education system over the 28 years since the ANC assumed power.

What’s worse, however, is that the state’s increasing turn towards xenophobic populism — which appears to be gaining traction at Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA, not to mention among SA’s home-grown fascist foot soldiers, the EFF — is also in diametric opposition to the department of home affairs’ own position on the issue.

In two papers released by the department in 2016 and 2017, it argued that international migration was, in general, beneficial if well managed.

But, of course, that’s the crux of the issue: the government’s calamitous failure to implement a well-thought-out plan on border control, not to mention an actual, well, border.

The OECD paper, meanwhile, says that in order to foster better integration, what is needed is a "coherent whole-of-government approach" that "addresses all dimensions of immigrants’ integration".

As is made clear in this week’s lacerating report into the July riots, from Prof Sandy Africa, a coherent policy on anything from the government seems as elusive as any decision from Ramaphosa.

Nonetheless, now is clearly the moment to make the hard calls. Among others, Ramaphosa must cut his way through the weeds choking SA’s reform path if we are to unleash anything resembling our actual growth potential. Reverting to an easy populist us-and-them stance, where "they" take our jobs, is a red herring — and the refuge of politicians who are no longer fit to govern.