Of Ranks and Peripheries

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses policy and public discourses on intraregional or continental African migrants and refugees in Southern Africa. The chapter argues that narratives on migrants and refugees, especially in South Africa, present attitudes that construct migrants as a threatening “Other” and that hostility toward immigrants in Southern Africa is rooted in a regional system of labor migration established in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. The chapter analyzes this hostility using intersectionality to consider the ways that, and why, socioeconomic exclusionary frameworks concerning immigrants persist in Southern Africa. It particularly examines the case of immigrants from South Africa’s immediate neighbors that have traditionally supplied it with migrant labor and investigates the roots of discrimination and xenophobia experienced by immigrants from other African countries living in South Africa.