Who Is Wrong On Immigration?

Immigration tensions are not just about policy. They are about people and elites seeing the same reality through very different lenses.

As the debate on immigration continues to rage in a context where it may even influence the outcomes of local government elections, it is increasingly clear that some of the tension stems from the fact that ordinary people and elites are speaking past each other.

From the outset, it is worth noting that not all elites disagree with the sentiments expressed by many ordinary citizens. Equally, not all citizens disagree with the views put forward by some elites. The term “elites” in this piece refers specifically to certain academics and media pundits who are dismissing the discourse around immigration as scapegoating and Afrophobia, while “the people” refers largely to poor South Africans who are represented by grassroots organisations such as Operation Dudula and March and March.

What appears to the people as elite indifference, and to elites as popular prejudice, is in fact a sign that both sides are missing something fundamental about the other’s reality.

Lived experience and intuitive reasoning

For the people, the issue of immigration is interpreted at the level of lived experience and pattern recognition. Scenes of immigrants who commit crimes in their communities, spaza shops that are almost exclusively immigrant-owned, and public institutions that are visibly used by immigrants come together to form a story of displacement and encroaching dominance by outsiders.

In this context the natural response is to view these outsiders as the source of their problems and to call for their complete expulsion as a solution, whether rightly or wrongly.

While the people’s concerns are valid and deserve genuine attention, a downside of reasoning intuitively in this case is the tendency towards overgeneralisation and misattribution. Overgeneralisation occurs, for example, when all crime is blamed on immigrants. Misattribution happens when problems are ascribed solely to immigrants, rather than to government failures and, to some extent, the people themselves.

Abstraction and misreading

The elites, who mostly operate at the level of theories and ideas and therefore interpret the issue on an institutional level, are not entirely wrong in identifying a nationalistic impulse as one driver of grassroots frustration. They are also not entirely wrong in criticising some misinformed leaders of these grassroots organisations who are clearly exploiting the people’s frustration to advance their own agendas.

But what they are missing – and this is not being said condescendingly – is that the average person on the ground is not operating at the same level of abstraction. The average person is not thinking critically about uneven development in Africa and the pressure this inevitably places on their country.

They are not analysing systemic corruption in immigration institutions, crunching crime statistics, or considering the complex factors behind the economic success of immigrants. Nor are they attuned to arguments about state capacity and the failure to deliver social goods. They are simply responding intuitively to the reality they experience and the patterns they observe around them.

Criticising the limits of intuitive reasoning and calling for more nuanced responses to a complex issue is undoubtedly important. But being dismissive and immediately reaching for labels without appreciating that it is somewhat unfair and even unrealistic to expect people to operate at the same level of abstraction is problematic. Expecting people to communicate in polished, scholarly language rather than the raw, unfiltered terms in which they articulate their concerns is also problematic.

Both tendencies create the false impression that elites do not care because they simply do not share the same experiences. The ultimate outcome on the people’s end is resentment and a feeling of being ignored and disrespected.

Towards a middle ground

This may well sound idealistic, but perhaps a potential way forward is a middle ground that acknowledges different frames of reference and addresses immediate, tangible experiences without losing sight of the deeper institutional and structural dynamics that are driving the problem. The aim here is not to get everyone to start thinking in the same way, but to find common ground for mutual understanding and practical action. This could well be the approach that makes everyone in the discussion feel acknowledged.

One must reiterate that this piece rests on no presumption of ignorance or simple-mindedness on the part of the people, and it is not a thinly veiled justification for elite-driven conscientisation of supposedly ignorant masses. Some level of thinking and reasoning is arguably a universal human capability, and human behaviour is always partly shaped by ideology, even when that ideology operates unconsciously for many.

The key nuance lies in how the human mind can be sharpened – or can sharpen itself – to resist the natural urge to default to intuitive reasoning and ascend to higher levels of abstraction that allow for a more reflective and informed understanding of complex social problems. This again is a universal human capability, and it should be remembered that elites themselves are humans who do not always interpret issues at high levels of abstraction.

In closing, who is wrong on immigration? The simple answer is that no one is, at least not entirely. The more complex, and perhaps unsatisfactory, answer is that we need to appreciate how different frames of reference can lead to different understandings of social reality as we engage constructively in dialogue on a way forward.

Ayanda Sakhile Zulu holds a BSocSci in Political Studies from the University of Pretoria and is a Policy Officer at the Free Market Foundation.