‘I can’t survive’: Malawians hit hard by South Africa’s crackdown on illegal migration

Collins Kamoto was heading out for a drink with a friend on a Sunday evening in May in the small gold mining town of Nigel, south-east of Johannesburg, when they were stopped by the police and arrested.

A month later, the 46-year-old, who had been in South Africa since March 2023, was charged with not having proper documentation. Then in September, after four months in jail, he was deported back to Malawi, part of what many of his compatriots believe is a renewed crackdown by South African authorities on immigrants working there illegally.

“My life is miserable, because even when I was working here it was not enough to help my family,” Kamoto said in an interview in his home village of Kampala in Mulanje, a district bordering Mozambique in Malawi’s south-east.

Kamoto, who has three children and one grandchild, left Malawi to look for work after losing his job and seeing friends in South Africa doing well. Life in South Africa turned out to be hard, he said. He lived in a metal-walled shack with no running water, doing occasional, difficult work feeding farm animals or working in fields, and was paid 100-350 rand (£4.35-£15.21) a day.

But, even though he could go for days without a job, Kamoto said it had been worth it: “When I went to South Africa, I was getting enough to support my relatives.”

South Africa has a history of importing migrant labour, especially to work in its mines. In recent years, poverty and political unrest have contributed to migration to the country.

There are about 2.4 million foreign-born people in South Africa out of a population of 62 million, according to the 2022 census, which aimed to count people regardless of immigration status. Almost half are Zimbabweans, followed by people from Mozambique and Lesotho, with just under 200,000 Malawians.

However, the struggles of South Africans – more than four in 10 are out of work – have fuelled xenophobia against other Africans, which has periodically erupted into anti-immigrant violence.

“In South Africa, you always look left and right and usually meet with the sound of sirens,” Kamoto said, of his eventually unsuccessful attempts to evade police, which led to him being among 205 Malawians deported from South Africa in four bus-loads last month.

South African police have been mounting roadblocks and searching shacks and blocks of flats where they suspect illegal immigrants are living, something that did not used to happen, said a Malawian in his 30s, who had been deported several times and did not want to be named. One video seen by the Guardian appeared to show four men hiding from authorities on a roof.

In recent years, Malawi has faced a collapsing currency, soaring inflation and shortages of imported fuel, medicines and food. In 2022, 89% of Malawians said the country of 20 million was going in the wrong direction, according to the pan-African survey network Afrobarometer.

The dire economic situation, lack of formal jobs and poverty – GDP per capita was just $645 in 2022 – has pushed many people to leave. Remittances from Malawians working abroad have more than trebled in the last decade as a proportion of Malawi’s GDP, to 1.3%, according to World Bank data.

“Anecdotal evidence shows that there is an increase in irregular migration flows out of Malawi,” said Ncube Nomagugu, the International Organisation for Migration’s Malawi chief of mission.

“South Africa remains the preferred destination for most of these flows. We also do not have figures for Malawians being deported back but anecdotally there seems to be an increase driven by the evolving policy direction of the South African government on migration.”

From 2018 to 2022, South Africa deported about 20,000 people a year, after an increase above 135,000 in 2017. In the early 2000s, deportations never fell below 105,000 annually, and reached a high of more than 312,000 in 2007, according to government data.

At a border post with Mozambique, a driver of one of the transport companies contracted by the South African government to ferry deportees back to Malawi said that they had been doing more trips in the last three months, sometimes weekly compared with one or two a month previously.

South Africa’s home affairs minister, Leon Schreiber, said in July, just weeks after joining the cabinet after elections in May, that operations to crack down on illegal immigration would increase.

“South Africa is wide open for business, wide open for people who want to legally contribute with their skills through our visa system,” he told journalists. “But at the same time we are also going to be more strict in enforcing when there are violations of the law.”

Meanwhile, Kamoto has not been able to find work in Malawi and wants to return to South Africa: “I can’t survive with nothing to do.”