ANC grapples with immigration dilemma ahead of elections

The winds of elections are blowing through the land, bringing the promise of the ANC making symbolic gestures to the people it wants to woo.

And, after years of denying there was a problem with illegal immigration – because their lax border policies and soft attitudes to our neighbouring dictators were the causes – the ANC has now realised that ordinary South Africans are angry about what they see as foreigners taking their jobs.

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While thousands stream across our borders every week, predictably the authorities chose a juicy soft target to demonstrate it is cracking down. That target was restaurants, many of whom employ foreigners (legal and otherwise).

The cops descended on some last week looking like they were dealing with a terror cell, armed to the teeth as they were with assault rifles. In the process, they scared the daylights out of ordinary people – and terrified kids – just trying to have a meal.

As Grace Harding, chair of The Restaurant Collective, correctly puts it, this is not the way to do things. We need, she says, a “more compassionate and efficient system for handling immigration checks within the restaurant industry”.

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She suggests a user-friendly online portal where restaurants and their workers can submit documents to confirm they are working in the country legally. And, if spot checks must be done (and she doesn’t deny there may be a need for this), they need to be done with subtlety and not by some Gestapo-lite.

We are not – well not yet, anyway – a police state and surely there are more humane ways to carry out this sort of investigations.

Subtle, though, is not going to win you sympathies from your own citizens… the ones you ignored for years. So we expect more strong-arm tactics as the months tick down to the 2024 poll.

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