The recent violence in Durban and Soweto was indefensible. Burning shops, torching vehicles and homes, and looting businesses solve nothing. Such actions destroy livelihoods, deepen mistrust, and hand the argument to those who would rather dismiss community anger than examine what has produced it.
Lee Rondganger is right to condemn this violence. He is also right that corruption within Home Affairs, at border posts, and within the police has allowed immigration enforcement to become a source of illicit profit.
The cases he cites are serious. The Special Investigating Unit has traced more than R181 million in financial gains associated with beneficiaries of fraudulent visa applications. Border officials have allegedly accepted bribes to facilitate unlawful entry, while corrupt police officers have reportedly exploited undocumented foreign nationals for personal gain. These are not minor administrative failures. They represent a betrayal of public trust, and those responsible must face prosecution.
But Rondganger's argument becomes less convincing when it moves from condemning violence and exposing corruption to suggesting that the anger has simply "found the wrong target". His headline, "South Africa's immigration crisis: Who is really to blame? (Hint, it's not the immigrant)", presents a choice that the evidence does not require us to make. Government corruption and the consequences of poorly managed immigration are not mutually exclusive explanations. Both can be true, and addressing only one leaves the other unresolved.
Corruption explains how the system has failed. It does not make the consequences of that failure disappear.
South Africans are entitled to expect secure borders, orderly immigration, credible asylum procedures, and the consistent application of the law. When these systems fail over extended periods, the consequences are felt not only in government offices but in neighbourhoods, informal businesses, housing markets, public facilities, and the daily competition for limited opportunities.
Acknowledging those consequences is not the same as blaming every foreign national for South Africa's problems. Nor does it justify treating people as collectively guilty because of their nationality or immigration status. It does, however, require us to resist the equally simplistic idea that the presence and status of migrants are irrelevant to a discussion about immigration.
The problem with labels
Labels such as "xenophobic" become the lowest form of conversation when they are used to avoid engaging with the substance of what people are saying. They turn a question that deserves evidence and debate into a verdict on the character of those raising it. Once a person has been labelled, it becomes easier to dismiss the concern than to investigate whether any part of it is legitimate.
Calling communities xenophobic does not make competition for scarce informal trading opportunities disappear. It does not resolve disputes over employment, overcrowded housing, or overstretched public services. And it does not answer questions about crime, immigration enforcement, or the capacity of the state to manage the people entering and remaining within its borders.
There is an important distinction between criticising a policy and dehumanising the people affected by it. The first is necessary in a functioning democracy. The second is unacceptable. We should be able to condemn anti-immigrant violence without treating every concern about immigration as an expression of hatred.
The same principle applies in reverse. A person cannot make prejudice legitimate simply by attaching a genuine economic grievance to it. Claims must be tested, evidence must be examined, and individual responsibility must never be replaced by collective blame.
That is precisely why the debate needs more substance, not fewer questions.
Crime, evidence, and public safety
Crime is one of the most emotionally charged aspects of this debate, and it must be handled with particular care. Foreign nationals should not be presumed criminal because they are foreign, undocumented, or from a particular country. Equally, concerns about the involvement of foreign nationals in crime should not be dismissed merely because the subject is politically uncomfortable.
Reported figures supplied by the Department of Correctional Services in August 2026 indicated that foreign nationals accounted for approximately 17.5% of the inmate population. Statistics South Africa's 2022 Census, meanwhile, recorded approximately 2.4 million international migrants, just under 4% of the national population. These figures are worth examining, but they are not, on their own, proof that foreign nationals are more likely to commit crime. The prison figure is a snapshot of people in correctional facilities, which includes both sentenced prisoners and people awaiting trial. A meaningful comparison would require more detailed information about the categories of offences, legal status, remand detention, population denominators, and other relevant factors.
The appropriate response is neither to use these figures to condemn an entire population nor to pretend that they raise no questions. The state should publish transparent, comparable data that allow the public to understand the picture accurately. Where particular patterns exist, they should be investigated. Where claims are exaggerated or unsupported, they should be corrected.
Public safety is too important to be governed by rumour, but it is equally too important to be protected by silence.
The fiscal cost of incarceration also deserves attention, although that cost cannot fairly be attributed to nationality alone. Every person who commits a crime must be dealt with through the justice system, and every person detained by the state must be afforded due process. The objective should be a system that is effective, fair, and accountable, not one that treats nationality as a substitute for evidence.
Unemployment is structural, but competition can still matter
South Africa's unemployment crisis is undeniable. Statistics South Africa reported an official unemployment rate of 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026, with approximately 8.5 million people unemployed. Young South Africans face particularly severe barriers to entering the labour market.
The primary causes are structural: weak economic growth, inadequate job creation, skills mismatches, failures in education, and years of poor governance. No serious argument about immigration should deny these realities. South Africa cannot solve unemployment by treating foreign nationals as the explanation for a crisis that has deep domestic roots.
But the reverse conclusion is equally flawed. The fact that unemployment is primarily structural does not mean that immigration can have no effect on particular parts of the labour market.
In construction, domestic work, street trading, small-scale retail, and other informal or low-wage sectors, workers and small businesses often compete in markets where margins are thin and opportunities are scarce. Where employers or businesses engage workers without complying with applicable labour, tax, licensing, or immigration requirements, enforcement failures can create unfair competition. This can affect South Africans and lawfully employed foreign nationals alike.
The extent of these effects varies by sector and location, and it should be established through credible research rather than assumed. We should not claim that foreign workers are responsible for unemployment without evidence. But neither should we dismiss the possibility of localised competition simply because the national unemployment crisis has wider causes.
Equally, the fact that South Africa's unemployment rate remains extremely high despite immigration enforcement and deportation operations would not establish that irregular migration has no effect. It would demonstrate that deportations alone cannot fix an economy that fails to create enough jobs. Those are two different propositions.
The same applies to public services. Migration is only one factor influencing demand for clinics, schools, housing, and municipal infrastructure. Population growth, internal migration, planning failures, budget constraints, and poor administration also matter. Yet a state already struggling to deliver basic services must plan for the population it serves and enforce its laws consistently. It cannot treat the cumulative demands placed on limited capacity as though they carry no cost.
The point is not that foreign nationals should be denied basic dignity or lawful access to services. It is that responsible immigration policy must take account of the country's capacity, legal obligations, and existing social pressures. A government that cannot manage these competing responsibilities should be held accountable for that failure.
Government corruption is central, but it is not the whole story
Rondganger is right to argue that politicians have too often responded with speeches and occasional operations instead of sustained enforcement. Corrupt officials undermine public confidence and create incentives for people to bypass the law. When permits can allegedly be bought, passports unlawfully stamped, or police protection purchased, the integrity of the entire system is compromised.
But corruption is not the only issue requiring attention. The volume of irregular entry and unlawful overstay also creates opportunities for corruption. Where demand for unlawful access is profitable, criminal networks and compromised officials have incentives to keep the market alive.
Closing that market requires accountability inside government and effective controls at the borders. It requires adequate staffing, reliable technology, effective identity and document verification, and investigations that reach the officials who facilitate unlawful entry or residence. It requires employers to comply with immigration and labour laws, and it requires consistent action against those who exploit workers, regardless of nationality.
It also requires an asylum system that is properly resourced and capable of processing claims fairly and efficiently. Refugees and asylum seekers are not interchangeable with economic migrants, and an application for asylum is not the same thing as an automatic grant of permanent or lawful status. The state must respect its legal obligations while ensuring that procedures are not undermined by fraud, administrative dysfunction, or political expediency.
Those who have a lawful right to remain must be treated in accordance with the law. Those who do not must be dealt with through lawful, consistent procedures. Enforcement must be effective, but it must also be lawful. The objective is not indiscriminate removal or punishment by nationality. It is a credible system in which the rules mean what they say and apply to everyone.
Nor can the government expect public trust simply by telling people to be patient. Trust must be earned through visible results, transparent data, consistent enforcement, and consequences for officials who abuse their positions.
The government cannot outsource its responsibilities
There is a further problem with framing the crisis primarily as a question of misplaced public anger. It risks making the public's reaction the central issue while relegating the failures that produced the frustration to the background.
The violence must be condemned. People who burn homes, loot shops, assault others, or intimidate residents must face the law. No grievance, however genuine, gives anyone the right to attack an innocent person or destroy a business. A foreign-owned shop is not a government department, and its owner is not personally responsible for every failure at Home Affairs or a border post.
But condemning violence does not absolve the state of its responsibilities. Law-abiding citizens should not have to choose between accepting a dysfunctional immigration system and being associated with those who take the law into their own hands. There is a legitimate space between those two positions: peaceful protest, public scrutiny, democratic pressure, legal action, and demands for enforceable policy.
The government has a duty to protect foreign nationals from violence. It also has a duty to its own citizens, including the duty to maintain credible immigration controls, enforce labour laws, protect public safety, and provide services within its capacity. These obligations are not in competition. A state that fails to uphold either set of responsibilities undermines its legitimacy.
Nor should the public be expected to accept an endless cycle in which officials fail, communities become frustrated, violence erupts, and the national conversation focuses almost exclusively on the people who react rather than the institutions that failed to act. The people responsible for violence must answer for their conduct. The officials responsible for corruption and administrative failure must answer for theirs. Accountability cannot be selective.
Two truths can coexist
South Africa does not have to choose between condemning violence and demanding immigration enforcement. It does not have to choose between acknowledging government corruption and recognising that irregular migration can create real pressures in particular communities. It does not have to choose between protecting the rights of foreign nationals and insisting that immigration law be enforced.
These positions are compatible. In fact, a credible response depends on holding them together.
The proper response to corruption is investigation, prosecution, and institutional reform. The proper response to irregular migration is effective, lawful, and consistent enforcement. The proper response to unemployment is economic reform and job creation, supported by fair enforcement of labour laws. The proper response to crime is evidence-based policing and equal application of the law. The proper response to public anger is to listen, investigate, and act, not to excuse violence or dismiss every grievance as prejudice.
Rondganger is right that burning an immigrant's shop will not create a job, repair a broken immigration system, or remove a corrupt official from office. But pointing to government offices while insisting that the consequences of unmanaged migration are irrelevant is also an evasion. It replaces one oversimplification with another.
A country can recognise the humanity of migrants while acknowledging the limits of its institutions. It can oppose collective blame while demanding individual accountability. It can reject violence while insisting that public concerns be answered with evidence and action.
The immigration debate will not be resolved by declaring one side morally defective or by pretending that one cause explains every consequence. It will be resolved when government accepts responsibility for the system it administers, when the law is enforced consistently, and when public concerns are judged on their merits rather than dismissed through labels.
South Africans who live with unemployment, crime, overcrowding, and failing services deserve more than lectures about what they should not feel. Foreign nationals who live and work in the country deserve more than being treated as symbols of a political failure. Both deserve a state capable of enforcing the law, protecting people, and telling the truth about the problems it faces.
That is what accountability looks like. And it must begin with government, extend to those who exploit the system, and apply to anyone who breaks the law, regardless of nationality.
Mdu Sibanyoni is a South African business owner with over 20 years of experience in corporate leadership and more than 15 years as an entrepreneur. His interests include South African society, governance, public policy, and accountability. He writes from an independent perspective, with a focus on reasoned debate, institutional responsibility, and the importance of engaging honestly with difficult national issues.