Big Brother: South Africa’s migration overhaul should be about belonging, not fences

It is the most ambitious overhaul of migration governance since the post-apartheid Immigration Act of 2002. And it tells you almost nothing about what it means to be a migrant in South Africa today.

South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs wants to build an Intelligent Population Register (IPR) that captures the biometric data of every person in the country, citizen and foreign national alike. The IPR is designed to transition from the basic National Population Register (NPR) to a digital system that tracks the identity of every person in the country, including citizens and foreign nationals.

The draft White Paper on citizenship, immigration, and refugee protection, published in December 2025, envisions AI-driven processing, digital identity verification, and biometric capture at every port of entry. 

And don’t think this is a long way off. The Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) system, which uses AI for background checks and biometric capture, already began rolling out at major airports like OR Tambo and Cape Town in September 2025.

While the Intelligent Population Register solves the government’s visibility problem, it does not address the administrative backlog. Migrants often remain in a state of ‘legal limbo,’ tracked by the state, yet unable to access the basic services required for economic survival. Because the crisis is not about databases per se. It is about what happens to people who live for years inside systems that track them without supporting them. And of course, not all immigrants are created equal.

Flor Bretón-García, who works with globally mobile families through Families in Global Transition and has lived as a migrant in Venezuela, the United States, and Germany, puts it bluntly. “Moving countries is the visible part of migration. It involves the logistics, the visa, the house, the job. But the real work begins after the move,” she says.

South Africa’s migration policy tracks bodies, not transitions

The numbers are staggering. By mid-2025, 117.3 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced, according to The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), also known as the UN Refugee Agency. That is one in every 70 people on earth. 

And low- and middle-income countries host 71% of the world’s refugees. 

South Africa sits squarely in that category, absorbing migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and beyond, while its own citizens face 32% unemployment and crumbling public services. 

The South African political response appears robust. Its White Paper proposes a points-based system for economic migration, specialised immigration courts, and the Electronic Travel Authorisation for biometric processing. 

The Department of Employment and Labour is finalising a National Labour Migration Policy that will empower the minister to prescribe employment quotas for foreign nationals and ring-fence certain sectors for South Africans.

Bretón-García has seen this pattern before. “When migration policies focus primarily on control without equal attention to integration and human development, they can unintentionally deepen a sense of precarity, not only for migrants, but also for the communities receiving them,” she says. “People begin to experience the system as something distant or rigid rather than as a framework that helps society function fairly. It becomes oppressive rather than expansive.”

The gap between policy and a clinic door in Alexandra

That oppression has a body count. In July 2025, a one-year-old Malawian boy died after the vigilante group Operation Dudula blocked him from accessing treatment at two government clinics in Alexandra because his family did not have a South African identity card. 

Human Rights Watch’s 2026 World Report documented ongoing incidents of anti-immigrant groups preventing migrants from accessing healthcare and education. A 2025 survey by the Inclusive Society Institute found that 73% of South Africans reported not trusting immigrants from Africa “at all” or “not very much.”

Bretón-García lived through a version of this dynamic in Fulda, Germany, during the early 2010s, when large numbers of asylum seekers arrived from North Africa. “The city was trying to respond quickly, but there were very few spaces where newcomers and longtime residents could actually interact,” she says. “Without those bridges, people often filled the gaps with assumptions rather than understanding. I saw fear in longtime residents, and prejudice was part of the equation as well.”

The parallel to South Africa is direct. Politicians across the spectrum, from ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba to the Patriotic Alliance’s Kenny Kunene, have built entire platforms on anti-immigrant messaging. 

And as the 2026 municipal elections approach, that rhetoric is intensifying. But scapegoating migrants for governance failures does not build clinics. Nor does it enroll children in schools. And it does not create jobs.

A two-tier world of migration

Bretón-García’s own experience exposes another fault line. When her family moved to Germany and the US for her husband’s career, a corporate relocation package smoothed the way. Visa processing, housing assistance, professional networks. At the same time, in her German language classes, she met classmates who had arrived under completely different conditions. “Many of them arrived without stable housing, professional networks, or clear pathways into the labour market,” she says. “They were navigating the same country, but from a completely different starting point.”

South Africa’s White Paper reinforces that divide. It creates new visa categories for remote workers, start-ups and skilled professionals, a points-based system designed to attract global talent. At the same time, lower-skilled migrants, the Zimbabwean farmworker, the Mozambican domestic worker, the Congolese street trader, are pushed further into informality. The policy explicitly defers the question of lower-skilled migration to a separate labour policy framework. Two systems, running in parallel, for two very different kinds of human being.

What belonging looks like when the paperwork never arrives

The concept of the “third culture,” pioneered by researchers David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken, describes what happens to people who grow up between cultural systems. Their identity is shaped more by shared experience than by passport.

Bretón-García sees the same dynamic in families trapped in legal limbo. “People build relationships, routines, and a sense of home, yet the uncertainty of their legal status keeps that belonging fragile,” she says.

In South Africa, where Home Affairs offices in places like Marabastad see desperate queues of people who have been seeking legal status for years, that fragility is chronic. The new White Paper promises a “merit-based path” to naturalisation, replacing years of residence with measurable accomplishments. For skilled professionals, this is progress. For the millions already here, already contributing, already part of the social fabric of Hillbrow or Bellville or Musina, it changes nothing.

The institutions that matter are not at the border

“Integration happens in classrooms where children learn a new language while forming friendships,” Bretón-García says. “It happens in neighbourhoods where trust is built between long-time residents and newcomers. It happens in workplaces where people begin to contribute their skills and regain a sense of dignity.”

None of that requires a biometric database. It does, however, require political will, funding, and the kind of human infrastructure that South Africa has been hacking away at for years through budget cuts, institutional decay, and populist distractions.

Addressing UN Women, its former executive director and South African politician Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka noted: “Our hopes for a more just, safe and peaceful world can only be achieved when there is universal respect for the inherent dignity and equal rights of all members of the human family.” Bretón-García quotes Mlambo-Ngcuka often. It is worth asking whether Pretoria’s Intelligent Population Register will bring South Africa closer to that standard, or further away from it.

The modern border is no longer a squiggly line on a map. It is a system of permissions, databases, and extended waiting periods that stretches deep into the interior of societies. For some, corporate executives, remote workers, it opens doors with remarkable efficiency. For others, it produces years of suspended belonging. South Africa is building one of the most sophisticated versions of that system on the continent. The question is not whether it will work. The question is whom it is for.