Photo credit: Boston Globe
As anti-immigration rages, migrants from Zimbabwe are jumping the border into South Africa with ease.
Sky News reports that a knee-height barbed wire fence can easily be hooped over to enter South Africa from Zimbabwe where migrants hope to find a better life but are often forced to live in poverty and face persecution.
Donkey karts loaded with wrapped parcels of unknown goods weave around the large puddles of water left in the dried riverbed. Young men quickly hop over laid bricks to bridge the puddles followed by women treading carefully with babies on their backs.
The Limpopo River’s seasonal dryness is a natural pathway for those moving into South Africa from Zimbabwe irregularly. A sandy narrow beach is undisturbed by border patrols with crossers chatting peacefully under trees on both banks as men furiously load and unload smuggled goods on the roadside.
Against the anti-immigration rage and xenophobia boiling over in South Africa’s urban centres, the tranquillity and ease of the border jumping is astonishingly calm.
One man crossing illegally said, “You can’t stop someone who is suffering. They have to find any means to find food.”
Hundreds of women and children escaping conflict in the late 1980s and early 1990s were electrocuted when the then Apartheid regime connected the fence to 3,500 volts of electricity.
The man said, “Now, it’s easy. There’s no border authority here.”
He crosses regularly and always illegally. There are no border agents but according to the man, he has been stopped by soldiers in the past.
“They send us back but then the next day you try to come back, and it is fine.”
The “fence” is only a knee-length barbed wire laid across 25 miles of South Africa’s northern edges in 2020. Some sections are completely trampled, and others are gaping with holes.
Zimbabweans can live, work and study in South Africa on a Zimbabwean exemption permit.
There is a shelter for trafficked children who were rescued. Other shelters are full of men looking for work.
In Johannesburg, South Africa’s economic centre, irregular migrants are facing raids and deportations organized by the Ministry of Home Affairs at the behest of popular discontent. The heavy-handed escalation in the interior starkly contrasts with the lax border control.
In 1994 as South Africa’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela ordered the removal of all electric fences. But in the present climate of increasing anti-migrant hate, the order is shaky.
Now, people fleeing drought and economic strife are smuggled across or walking through blind spots like this.
