As public debate around migration has become increasingly polarised, constitutional values are often treated as obstacles to effective immigration enforcement rather than the principles that should guide it.
In this Daily Maverick opinion, Claudia Pizzocri argues that South Africa’s Constitution does not require the country to choose between lawful immigration control and human dignity. Rather, dignity remains one of the foundational values upon which the Republic is built and should continue to inform both immigration policy and its administration.
Drawing on recent developments and the Cabinet-approved Revised White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection, the article reflects on why constitutional restraint matters most when public pressure is at its greatest, and why the true test of constitutional democracy lies not in easy cases, but in difficult ones.
Read the full Daily Maverick opinion here
Some extracts below:
What is being exposed, both in government enforcement action and in the vigilante-style campaigns that have erupted in recent months, is something more fundamental than disagreement over migration numbers. It is the weakening of constitutional restraint. There are moments in national life when a country must decide whether its constitutional values are real commitments, or just ceremonial language. Few issues test those values more directly than immigration.
SA’s constitutional framework is distinctive in the clarity with which it protects the rights of all people within the country and places dignity at the centre of its legal order. That is why South Africans should be careful not to undervalue what they have. The country possesses a constitutional vocabulary that many democracies do not have in the same form. The question is whether political leadership has the courage to use it.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent address on migration recognised real concerns. Yet, the speech also revealed what many may regard as a missed opportunity. For months, government departments, political leaders and media commentary have largely focused on enforcement, border control, deportations, documentation and the pressures associated with migration, at times to the extent of legitimising negative sentiment against foreigners and reinforcing the perception that migrants are primarily responsible for broader social and economic challenges. The president’s address largely repeated that familiar framework. What was missing was not another enforcement message, but a constitutional one.
At a moment of heightened public anxiety, the country needed its head of state to speak not only as an enforcer of state authority, but as a custodian of the constitutional values that define SA’s legal order. It needed a reaffirmation that dignity, legality, equality and ubuntu remain the foundation of public policy. It needed a constitutional address before it received another enforcement agenda.
by Claudia Pizzocri, at Eisenberg & Associates Inc.