Durban - People in KwaZulu-Natal are less welcoming of foreigners than those in the other provinces.
This is according to a recently published report by social sciences researchers Steven Gordon, Benjamin Roberts and Jare Struwig, titled “Intolerable cruelty: anti-immigrants sentiment in KwaZulu-Natal”.
The trio used data from the South African Social Attitudes Survey (Sasas) - a cross-sectional survey series conducted annually by the Human Sciences Research Council since 2003.
The report was published by the council after the recent xenophobic attacks which forced thousands of foreigners, around Durban and in Pietermaritzburg, to flee their homes to temporary shelters.
Many of those displaced have either been repatriated, relocated to other areas or reintegrated into the communities they fled. However, 146 of them have sought refugee at a privately owned farm at Cato Ridge.
They cited fear as the reason for not going back into South African society, even though it has been four months since the attacks broke out and the government has assured them that the situation has stabilised.
The HSRC research indicated that anti-immigrant sentiment in KZN was a little above the national average even though people in Limpopo, Gauteng and the Northern Cape also voiced strong anti-immigrant sentiment.
“Using an attitudinal survey, we did find that people in KwaZulu-Natal were slightly less welcoming of foreigners than people in many other provinces in 2013,” he said.
People from sub-Saharan Africa were resented, but research indicated that Nigerians, Zimbabweans and Somalis were most disliked.
“Foreign immigrants of African descent have been targeted in anti-immigrant attacks in April 2015 as well as during other episodes of anti-immigrant violence. Our research (using Sasas data) has shown that people tended to identify select groups as their least tolerated foreign group,” said Gordon.
In 2010 KZN people showed less indication of being xenophobic and that could be attributed to the Fifa World Cup.
In both the 2008 and 2013 HSRC research into the causes of xenophobic violence, people in KZN believed immigrants were linked to crime and unemployment as they “took jobs from people born in South Africa”.
Foreigners who were entrepreneurs were seen “as a threat to the material livelihoods of local communities in KZN”.
Dr Sagie Narsiah of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Social Sciences said immigrants who were seen as “the other” became scapegoats for social ills such as poverty, unemployment and inequality.
“They are stigmatised and ridiculed for the way they speak and the government needs to acknowledge that this is xenophobia so that it can be tackled as such, but first the structural issues of poverty and unemployment need to be addressed,” he said.
Narsiah said immigrants who owned shops were seen as easy targets.
Gordon doubted that the country would experience xenophobic violence on the scale of 2008, when 60 people were killed, or like the recent attacks.
But xenophobia should still be a national concern because anti-immigrant sentiments were still prevalent.
While he commended the government for the “robust” manner in which it dealt with the recent attacks, he said effort was needed to combat xenophobic attitudes.
The Mercury