By African Meridian | Media
As thousands of migrants stream out of South Africa amid intensifying anti-illegal-immigration protests, a troubling pattern is emerging from the testimonies of returnees arriving in Zimbabwe and Malawi: many say they did not set out to be undocumented at all. Rather, they describe being pushed into irregular status by the administrative delays and inefficiencies of South Africa’s own Department of Home Affairs — a bureaucratic failure that critics say has manufactured the very illegality now fueling social unrest.
The accounts follow a consistent arc. Migrants who entered South Africa legally — on work permits, special dispensation permits, asylum documents, or spousal visas — submitted renewal applications months or even years before their documents expired, exactly as the law requires. Then they waited. And waited. Applications sat unprocessed as expiry dates passed. Receipts acknowledging pending applications were not always recognized by employers, banks, landlords, or police. In the gap between a lawful application and a decision that never came, people who had followed every rule found themselves treated as lawbreakers.
The consequences cascaded through their lives. Workers lost jobs when employers, fearful of penalties for hiring undocumented staff, declined to accept proof of pending applications. Bank accounts were frozen when identity documents lapsed. Children faced obstacles enrolling in school. Tenants lost leases. And as anti-migrant sentiment hardened into house-to-house searches in some communities, an expired permit — even one expired through no fault of its holder — became a danger to personal safety. For many, the rational choice was to leave before they were forced out.
The Department of Home Affairs has for years faced criticism over its permitting backlogs. Successive special permit regimes for Zimbabweans — designed to regularize hundreds of thousands of workers — have lurched through extensions, court challenges, and abrupt policy shifts, leaving holders in chronic uncertainty about their status. Asylum seekers have routinely waited years for determinations that legally should take months, renewing short-term papers again and again at overburdened refugee reception offices. Auditors and courts have repeatedly documented the dysfunction; litigation by civil society groups has produced court orders compelling the department to process applications, orders that have not always translated into functioning queues.
Legal scholars describe the phenomenon as “bureaucratically manufactured illegality” — a state creating undocumented people through its own incapacity, then bearing down on them through enforcement. The injustice, they argue, is compounded when public anger over illegal immigration falls on individuals whose only failing was trusting the system to process their paperwork.
The human cost is now visible at border posts, where returnees describe abandoning homes, businesses, school terms, and years of carefully maintained legal compliance. Some carry files of receipts and application records — a paper trail of good faith that ultimately protected nothing.
The pattern carries lessons that extend beyond the current crisis. Regional bodies have long urged member states to match migration enforcement with functioning legal pathways; when the legal channel is a queue that never moves, pressure flows into irregular channels, and enforcement becomes both harsher and less just. Business associations in South Africa have also weighed in, noting that sectors from agriculture to hospitality depend on migrant labor whose legal status the state has failed to administer competently. For the returnees crossing into Zimbabwe and Malawi, such policy debates come too late. Their experience stands as a cautionary tale now circulating through the region: that in South Africa, the line between documented and undocumented could be crossed without a person taking a single step — it moved beneath their feet, at the pace of an unprocessed form.