Alien epistemology — framing foreigners as enemies within a culture of legal antipathy

In recent weeks, South Africans have witnessed increasingly alarming reports of vigilante-style witch-hunts against foreigners, from Durban and the Eastern Cape to Pretoria. These events should not be read only as isolated eruptions of xenophobic anger. They are the visible expression of something more settled: a way of seeing the foreigner as the assumed culprit of shortage, disorder and institutional failure. What is at issue is therefore not only how foreign nationals are treated, but how they are known. This is alien epistemology: the making of the foreigner as a person known by negative assumption.

Although the language of “aliens” that permeated the repealed Aliens Control Act may have disappeared, the misconceptions that informed it have proved more durable. The Immigration Act defines a “foreigner” simply as “an individual who is not a citizen”. It says nothing, by itself, about criminality, fraud, poverty, competition, moral worth or threat.

Those meanings are added by language, by political performance, by administrative habit, and by a public discourse that has increasingly turned the non-citizen into the explanation for disorder. In that frame, distinctions collapse. Documented migrant, undocumented person, asylum seeker, refugee, trader, student, worker, parent and criminal suspect are drawn into the same social shadow. The foreigner becomes not a person whose position must be established, but a container for public grievance.

That distortion is not produced by immigration, citizenship or refugee legislation, not yet at least. But recent policy language, including the Revised Draft White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection, risks riding the same distortion rather than correcting it. It enters a public culture already primed to read migration through suspicion, “abuse”, control and national threat. The foreigner-as-enemy is not born in the statute book. It is produced by framing, by mismanaged expectation, and by the repeated suggestion that immigration control can solve failures that lie elsewhere.

South Africans have been led and allowed to believe that immigration enforcement can do work it was never designed to do. It cannot repair municipal collapse, cure unemployment, regulate informal trade, rebuild a failing health system, or compensate for policing failures and administrative corruption. Yet the foreigner is repeatedly placed at the centre of those failures. Once that happens, the public begins to look for a tangible target on which disappointment can be acted out.

DIY governance

The recent marches and street-level confrontations must be understood in that context, not as simple protests but as dangerous forms of DIY governance: the belief that institutions have failed, law is too slow, lawyers obstruct, and ordinary people must now do what the state cannot or will not do. Immigration control is a state function that must be exercised by authorised officials, under statute, within the Constitution, and on the basis of facts that can be tested. The failure of government does not confer public power on private groups.

Legal culture here matters. When the state itself presents immigration enforcement through the language of clean-up, sweeping brooms, raids, numbers and deterrence, it does more than communicate policy. It teaches the public how to see, planting the seeds of mistrust. This is the terrain Foucault identified in his lectures on security: the movement from law as prohibition to the management of populations, risks and probabilities. Once that logic dominates, the individual foreigner is absorbed into an administrative field of suspicion.

The Department of Home Affairs recently publicised that 109,344 “illegal immigrants” had been deported since the formation of the Government of National Unity, describing this as a 46% cumulative increase over two financial years. Minister Leon Schreiber linked the increase to reforms and intensified enforcement, adding the grim warning: “self-deport now before we find you and ban you from ever entering our country legally in future.”

The state is entitled to enforce immigration law. What is contested here is not enforcement, but the way enforcement is narrated, because that has historically mattered in this field.

A deportation figure tells us that the state acted; it does not tell us whether each person was correctly identified, whether status was properly assessed, whether an asylum claim was recognised, whether children were protected, whether detention was lawful, or whether the decision would withstand scrutiny. These are not speculative concerns. Over the past two years alone, civil society organisations, including Lawyers for Human Rights and the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town, have repeatedly approached the courts over immigration detention, access to asylum and failures of administrative legality. Against that record, asking what sits behind the number is not obstruction; it is the minimum discipline of a constitutional state.

Legal antipathy

This is where legal antipathy enters the discussion. By legal antipathy, I do not mean merely that some officials dislike lawyers or mistrust legal representation in administrative processes. I mean a broader institutional disposition in which law is tolerated as conceptual text but resisted as discipline. The law is there, but the habits of legality are treated as interference. Legal representation is too often perceived as a challenge to authority rather than part of lawful administration. That pattern reflects more than administrative inefficiency. It reflects a mistrust of legality at the point where legality is most needed for those who are least protected.

When institutions communicate that foreignness is a problem to be swept, cleaned, counted and removed, the crowd learns that legal process is an obstacle between disorder and order. Street-level witch-hunts are then not an aberration from the culture of enforcement but its crude translation.

That does not mean public concern is illegitimate. South African cities are under strain. Informal trading is unevenly regulated, public spaces are neglected, crime is pervasive, and documentation fraud and corruption exist. But none of this changes the central point: governance failures cannot be displaced onto foreigners simply because foreigners are politically available.

The more the foreigner is framed as the cause of disorder, the easier it becomes to justify enforcement, and the harder it becomes to question this. The point is not that every act of immigration enforcement is apartheid. The point is that South Africa knows, from experience, how quickly administrative categories can become moral hierarchies; how easily movement control can be dressed as public order; and how dangerous it is when legality depends on whether the person before the state is regarded as belonging.

There is also a more immediate constitutional concern. South Africa’s constitutional framework protects “everyone”, including documented and undocumented foreigners, even where their legal positions differ. However, the protections afforded under the post-apartheid framework often remain, in practice, a matter of bureaucratic conduct. That is precisely where culture becomes decisive. Rights on paper are not enough when the administrative instinct is hostile to the person invoking them. Alien epistemology, combined with legal antipathy, produces a dangerous civic lesson by telling the public that the foreigner is the source of disorder and that legality is the reason disorder persists. That lesson cannot be allowed to harden.

A state may enforce borders, but it should not cultivate contempt for the people on whom that enforcement falls. It should not govern by insinuation or enable the non-citizen to become a proxy for every failure it cannot otherwise explain. The warning is not only about foreign nationals. It is about the habits a society permits itself to develop around the weak.

Once people accept that one category may be handled outside ordinary legality, the habit does not remain confined to that category. The machinery of suspicion is rarely so disciplined. And once law is experienced as an inconvenience to be swept aside, the broom is no longer pointed only at those without citizenship. DM