Eroding democracy — scapegoating foreigners is a sign of institutional exhaustion

There is a familiar pattern playing out globally: take a real crisis, strip it of its causes, and attach it to a target that cannot vote you out. The target is rarely chosen because it is the real driver of unemployment, housing failure, collapsing public services or violent crime. It is chosen because it’s visible, precarious and politically dispensable.

What has changed globally is not that societies suddenly discovered nationalism, nor that scarcity is a novel issue. What has changed is that institutional capacity has been thinning into institutional exhaustion: the point where a government still exercises authority but can no longer produce predictable results.

In this context, immigration becomes a reliable accelerant. Blaming foreigners and performing high-visibility enforcement can be easier than doing the hard work of institutional repair. Plato’s cave captures the method: showcase what is visible over what is causal. Raids and removals are the shadows on the wall; the institutional machinery that produced the crisis remains in the dark.

Global parallels: raids, discretion, and democratic fatigue

The United States offers one of the clearest and perhaps most troubling examples of what speed enforcement untethered from institutional restraint can look like. Heightened raids, expanding detention capacity and aggressive removals are all part of the normalisation of a politics that treats rights as obstacles rather than boundaries. Due process becomes an inconvenience, and criticism is framed as disloyalty.

The University of Pretoria recently described this wider mood as “democratic fatigue”: a procedural hollowing-out where elections and deliberation persist, but the experience of agency and improvement disappears. The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s enduring point was that representation without meaningful control can become its own illusion; people feel free briefly, then return to being governed without real recourse. When people stop believing ordinary governance can deliver, scapegoating stops looking irrational and starts looking functional.

South Africa: scarcity meets institutional exhaustion

South Africa is accustomed to scarcity, deep inequality, spatial exclusion, chronic unemployment and uneven service delivery. It is not scarcity itself that explains the recent rise in anti-foreigner mobilisation and the sharper edge of enforcement. The deeper shift is institutional legitimacy: the growing public belief that the state cannot, or will not, deliver basics fairly.

That belief is measurable in surveys and felt on the ground. Statistics South Africa keeps recording structurally high unemployment; Afrobarometer keeps recording a public preference for restricting immigration. These sentiments intensify when people experience government failure as permanent rather than temporary.

In that environment, foreigners become political currency. Not because they caused the crisis, but because blaming them can temporarily unite otherwise competing groups and divergent political agendas. Operation Dudula is an example of this currency in motion.

At the same time, the Department of Home Affairs has amplified enforcement campaigns such as Operation New Broom with publicised raids, detentions and deportations presented as proof of regained control and success.

The RDWP: tightening control and widening discretion

That is the temperature in which policy gets rewritten. On 12 December 2025, the Revised Draft White Paper (RDWP) was published for public comment. Its language and policy framing reveal the state’s current self-conception: national sovereignty and public security sit alongside economic-enabler aspirations, and the “national interest” is framed as the anchor value that should guide the system.

That framing is not inherently wrong. Every state has a right, and an obligation, to manage its borders, protect residents and design migration pathways that are coherent. The problem is not that “national interest” is mentioned as a driver of policy; the problem is how much discretionary space is created under that banner, and whether a state with a track record of administrative failure can be trusted with broader powers without stronger checks.

The RDWP contemplates a shift away from what it describes as “mechanical”, “compliance-only” pathways toward quota-based and points-based systems that better reflect value added and risk management. Again, that is not automatically sinister. Other countries run points systems; many manage annual intake. But quotas and points systems aren’t neutral tools. They are an exercise of power. And power, in an exhausted institution, is frequently used to conceal failure rather than correct it.

The draft paper is candid in its opening statement that the April 2024 White Paper, approved under the previous administration, contained reforms contentious enough to be challenged by “several international organisations and local public interest groups” to the extent that the Cabinet required a legal opinion before implementation.

The current RDWP then frames its updates as alignment with “new priorities” of the Government of National Unity (GNU), including digital transformation. That combination should make readers alert: if the 2024 direction was legally exposed, what stability is gained by re-anchoring an even wider overhaul to the goals of a still-young GNU, while expanding discretionary levers at the same time?

Institutional credibility and transactional policies

If the current and previous frameworks have been poorly implemented, inconsistently adjudicated, and vulnerable to corruption, why should the public trust a “complete overhaul” that expands discretion? When you read the RDWP’s language about “abuse” and exploitation, the question sharpens. The draft speaks of high volumes of mixed migration flows and the “opportunistic” use of asylum mechanisms to regularise staying. That language will land with a public already primed to read migration through suspicion.

It is widely recognised in migration governance that when legal options are limited, slow, expensive or arbitrarily administered, parallel corrupt and corruptible markets emerge. Restrictive regimes can drive people into illicit channels. Corruption and weak governance degrade migration systems and public trust, creating the conditions in which institutional exhaustion thrives: a system that generates the behaviour it later condemns.

The RDWP’s response leans toward more tools of control: quotas, points systems, safe-country designations, digital IDs and widening ministerial discretion. In a system already marked by inconsistency and integrity failures, expanding discretion without clearly rebuilding capacity invites arbitrariness. In that sense, the RDWP can read like an attempt to outrun institutional exhaustion by adding levers, rather than fixing the operating condition that makes those levers work under check.

The digital turn is telling. Remove the human layer because it is the point of failure. But “national interest” cannot be built on an admission that the state no longer believes in training, professionalism or institutional culture. If digitisation becomes an end-run around competence, it hardens exhaustion rather than curing it.

Elitism can’t build belonging

For meaningful public comment, a redesign proposal of this scale should state clearly what remains of the existing legal scheme across immigration, refugee protection and citizenship, what will be safeguarded, what will change, and where the guardrails sit. That matters in a constitutional order where migration and citizenship governance are still being tested, refined, and litigated decades into the democratic dispensation. The RDWP does not do this with sufficient clarity; too much is left at the level of conceptual direction rather than operational criteria.

With regard to citizenship reform, for instance, no express mention is made of children born and raised in South Africa to legally admitted foreign parents, who have lived here continuously from birth to age 18. These are children who mostly know South Africa as their only home and centre of life and who, under the current legislative scheme, have legally recognised, compliance-based pathways to citizenship upon reaching majority.

If reform claims to be strategic and values-driven, it must state plainly whether and how those lived-belonging pathways remain protected and how they interact with the new discretionary and selective mechanisms the RDWP introduces across the whole migration-and-civic governance framework. Silence on these points is more than a drafting gap; it is somewhat alarming.

Governance by suspicion is not accountability

When you have a society under pressure, and institutions that no longer convince people that lawful processes will produce fair outcomes, scapegoating becomes cohesive. It gives people a shared enemy when they do not share solutions. It offers a sense of agency when ordinary democratic participation feels pointless. It gives politicians a lever that looks like delivery. This is a dangerous cohesion, because it trains the public to accept the erosion of constraint. Today it is the undocumented migrant; tomorrow it is the person who fails a database check, the person with the wrong surname, or the person whose papers cannot be produced on demand because the state itself cannot consistently issue them.

Democracy erodes when the state normalises governance by suspicion and treats rights-based constraint as an obstacle. If scapegoating foreigners is where cohesion is found, then cohesion is being built on the wrong foundation. Exhausted institutions cannot sustain a politics of permanent emergency.

The closing question is this: do we need a complete overhaul, or do we need the discipline of targeted reform, real accountability and digital transformation to make the existing framework work as intended, rather than declaring legislative failure as a pretext for wider discretion? DM

Claudia Pizzocri is CEO at the immigration and citizenship law firm Eisenberg & Associates.