Alien epistemology — framing foreigners as enemies within a culture of legal antipathy
In this Daily Maverick opinion, Claudia Pizzocri introduces the concept of “alien epistemology” to describe a way of thinking in which foreignness itself becomes a framework through which social and economic problems are interpreted. The article argues that, in such an environment, legal status, individual conduct and constitutional protections increasingly give way to generalisations that portray non-citizens as collective sources of societal harm.
Rather than examining migration through conventional political or enforcement narratives, the opinion explores the relationship between law, language and public perception, asking how societies come to frame foreigners as “the other” and what consequences that has for the rule of law, constitutional values and social cohesion.
Read the full Daily Maverick opinion here
Some extracts below:
Although the language of “aliens” that permeated the repealed Aliens Control Act may have disappeared, the misconceptions that informed it have proved more durable. The Immigration Act defines a “foreigner” simply as “an individual who is not a citizen”. It says nothing, by itself, about criminality, fraud, poverty, competition, moral worth or threat.
Those meanings are added by language, by political performance, by administrative habit, and by a public discourse that has increasingly turned the non-citizen into the explanation for disorder. In that frame, distinctions collapse. Documented migrant, undocumented person, asylum seeker, refugee, trader, student, worker, parent and criminal suspect are drawn into the same social shadow. The foreigner becomes not a person whose position must be established, but a container for public grievance.
That distortion is not produced by immigration, citizenship or refugee legislation, not yet at least. But recent policy language, including the Revised Draft White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection, risks riding the same distortion rather than correcting it. It enters a public culture already primed to read migration through suspicion, “abuse”, control and national threat. The foreigner-as-enemy is not born in the statute book. It is produced by framing, by mismanaged expectation, and by the repeated suggestion that immigration control can solve failures that lie elsewhere.
by Claudia Pizzocri, CEO at Eisenberg & Associates Inc.