South Africa: prejudice surge

Has globalisation been accompanied by a surge in xenophobia?

The reasons for migration are the same the world over: it is driven by differentials in economic opportunity, living conditions and service. As the world shrinks and economies integrate, national boundaries supposedly become less important. Yet the recent xenophobic violence in South Africa shows migration it is a different story for the world's poor.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz noted that globalisation might be creating rich countries with poor people. Time agrees, writing that South Africa's recent impressive growth rate has done little to reverse inequality or high levels of unemployment. There remain millions that feel excluded from the promises of the new South Africa, and the country's poor are determined not to share the little they have with foreign migrants from Malawi, Nigeria, Congo, Mozambique, Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe.

The New Yorker points out that their presence could be seen as a measure of South Africa's success: the nation that once produced asylum seekers had become a place of asylum. Yet divisiveness and inequality persists in the the Rainbow Nation despite the banishment of white-supremacist rule; the terms have merely been reconfigured.