same,same, but...
It's a story we might feel we recognise... angry crowds fill the streets demanding the expulsion of undocumented immigrants. The noise is intended to intimidate, and with multiple instances of horrific mob violence against foreigners being reported every week, the intimidation is effective enough to force many who had first arrived decades ago to "return" to a country they no longer see as home.
But this isn't Europe, the UK, the USA, or Australia... this is South Africa; and this anti-immigration movement is being led almost entirely by black Africans. The subject of their contempt... other black Africans.
The official estimates suggest there are around 3 million immigrants in South Africa, however, some suggest the real figure is more than twice that. Overwhelmingly, they have come from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Malawi.
By its most fundamental definitions, these populations are not different races. However, Africa has an extraordinary diversity of ethnicities, languages, and cultures, making it difficult to disentangle the roles of xenophobia, ethnic prejudice, economic competition and legitimate policy concerns in South Africa's immigration debate.
The grievances sound familiar. South Africa is the most unequal country on Earth by income inequality, more than 60% of those under 24 are unemployed, and approximately 58 South Africans are murdered every day. It's within this intolerable context that populist politicians have found fertile ground for discontent, with immigrant workers now blamed for crime and stealing local jobs.
But perhaps most unsettling is the manner in which the country's ruling political elite, who have overseen one of the most gratuitous examples of corrupt plunder and state capture over the past 30 years, has done little to stem the rising tension.
The ANC has held power since 1994, and the men who control Mandela's legacy have shamelessly enriched themselves as basic infrastructure begins to crumble. But public resentment at the declining living standards is growing, forcing the ANC to form a coalition to maintain a parliamentary majority for the first time.
Immigrants provide those in power with an irresistible beacon to deflect the resentment that should be theirs to absorb. They offer a simple solution to the intractable institutional problems their corruption and incompetence has caused.
This is where the common thread connects these movements across the continents of the world... the prejudices are real, but not the reason for the anger. The grievances are real, but are being exploited by those who have the greatest culpability for that grievance.
This is perhaps the cruellest irony of every single anti-immigration movement across the world. The problems aren't being imagined... the solutions are.
Antimigration sentiment is growing all over the world, even in countries in Latin America like Chile or Argentina where the targets are Venezuelans fleeing the country, and in Japan, where the target are TOURISTS. And this should tell us something, people are feeling unhappy everywhere, long gone are the days where families could live on one income, people could afford a home, have a decent lifestyle without squeezing every cent. We live in a system where the gap between the rich and poor has become wider as ever, we have our first trillionare, in a country where veterans need stamps to buy groceries, a man wealthier than entire countries together. How did we allow this to happen? But the system that we live, rather than fixing these problems, it looks for a scapegoat to perpetuate the wealth and power of the 1%, and that target is migrants.