Eroding democracy — scapegoating foreigners is a sign of institutional exhaustion
From Donald Trump’s US Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to Operation New Broom and South Africa’s Revised Draft White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection, when states won’t confront their own decay, they externalise the blame.
Read the full opinion by our CEO, Claudia Pizzocri, as published by Daily Maverick, Some extracts below,
From Donald Trump’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to Operation New Broom and South Africa’s Revised Draft White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection, when states won’t confront their own decay, they externalise the blame.
There is a familiar pattern playing out globally: take a real crisis, strip it of its causes, and attach it to a target that cannot vote you out. The target is rarely chosen because it is the real driver of unemployment, housing failure, collapsing public services, or violent crime. It is chosen because it’s visible, precarious, and politically dispensable.
What has changed globally is not that societies suddenly discovered nationalism, nor that scarcity is a novel issue. What has changed is that institutional capacity has been thinning into institutional exhaustion: the point where government still performs authority but can no longer produce predictable results.
In this context, immigration becomes a reliable accelerant. Blaming foreigners and performing high-visibillity enforcement can be easier than doing the hard work of institutional repair. Plato’s cave captures the method: showcase what is visible over what is causal.
The United States offers one of the clearest and perhaps most troubling examples of how speed enforcement untethered from institutional restraint can look like. Heightened raids, expanding detention capacity, aggressive removals are all part of the normalisation of a politics that treats rights as obstacles rather than boundaries. Due process becomes an inconvenience, and criticism is framed as disloyalty.
The University of Pretoria recently described this wider mood as “democratic fatigue”: a procedural hollowing-out where elections and deliberation persist, but the experience of agency and improvement disappears. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s enduring point was that representation without meaningful control can become its own illusion; people feel free briefly, then return to being governed without real recourse.
Statistics South Africa keeps recording structurally high unemployment; Afrobarometer keeps recording a public preference for restricting immigration. These sentiments intensify when people experience government failure as permanent rather than temporary.
In that environment, foreigners become political currency. Not because they caused the crisis, but because blaming them can temporarily unite otherwise competing groups and divergent political agendas. Operation Dudula is an example of this currency in motion. At the same time, the Department of Home Affairs has amplified enforcement campaigns such as Operation New Broom with publicised raids, detentions and deportations presented as proof of regained control and success.
The problem is not that “national interest” is mentioned as a driver of policy; the problem is how much discretionary space is created under that banner, and whether a state with a track record of administrative failure can be trusted with broader powers without stronger checks.
The RDWP’s response leans toward more tools of control: quotas, points systems, safe-country designations, digital IDs and widening ministerial discretion. In a system already marked by inconsistency and integrity failures, expanding discretion without clearly rebuilding capacity invites arbitrariness.
The digital turn is telling. Remove the human layer because it is the point of failure. But “national interest” cannot be built on an admission that the state no longer believes in training, professionalism, or institutional culture.
Democracy erodes when the state normalises governance by suspicion and treats rights-based constraint as an obstacle. If scapegoating foreigners is where cohesion is found, then cohesion is being built on the wrong foundation. Exhausted institutions cannot sustain a politics of permanent emergency. The closing question is this: do we need a complete overhaul, or do we need the discipline of targeted reform, real accountability, and digital transformation to make the existing framework work as intended, rather than declaring legislative failure as a pretext for wider discretion?
By Claudia Pizzocri, CEO at Eisenberg & Associates Inc,