Asking for trouble: A crisis without evidence? Reading Ramaphosa’s migration speech critically

By dedicating a presidential address to migration, announcing specialised interventions and framing immigration as a major national challenge, the government transforms public anxiety into political reality without first establishing whether the underlying assumptions are supported by evidence.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 7 June 2026 address on migration will likely be remembered as a disappointing attempt to give political and policy expression to what the government has described as a five-pillar comprehensive approach to tackling illegal immigration.

Delivered amid growing anti-immigrant mobilisation, increasing public anxiety and calls for mass deportations, the speech sought to reassure South Africans that the government is taking migration seriously while simultaneously warning against xenophobia, vigilantism and attacks on foreign nationals.

In many respects, however, the address represents a continuation rather than a departure from the contradictions that have increasingly characterised the government’s migration discourse.

A few days ago, in response to remarks made by the President during the Budget Speech in Cape Town, we argued that South Africa was witnessing Ramaphosa’s migration contradiction: Acknowledging xenophobia while feeding the myth. The central criticism was that while the government publicly condemned xenophobia and cautioned against blaming migrants for South Africa’s social and economic difficulties, it continued to frame migration as a central explanation for challenges that are fundamentally rooted in governance failures, economic stagnation, inequality and institutional decline.

The migration address appears to deepen rather than resolve this contradiction.

Yet beneath its language of balance, legality and constitutionalism lies a more troubling question: what exactly is the crisis that the President is responding to?

Every country faces irregular migration. Every country regulates entry, residence, employment and citizenship. Every sovereign state has both the right and the responsibility to secure its borders and enforce its immigration laws.

The existence of undocumented migration, in itself, does not constitute a crisis. A crisis implies something more specific: a measurable condition that exceeds the capacity of institutions to respond, threatens social stability and requires extraordinary intervention.

To date, no evidence has been presented showing that South Africa is experiencing an unprecedented influx of migrants. Migrants constitute approximately 4% of the country’s population, a figure that is neither