Migration and Migrant Workers in the Post-Apartheid Era

Abstract

Few issues have proven more vexing for labor organizations than international labor migration.Unions that seek to preserve labor standards and improve the economic life of their members are often torn between advocating for limiting the supply of foreign labor, in order to protect existing wage standards, and supporting more liberal labor migration policies that recognize the economic and political forces that set people in motion.While their policy positions may appear at first blush to be contradictory, a consistent logic underlies them; their attempt to stand in the breach, to defend the interests of those already in the country as well as those who are still coming.A review of the migration policy positions adopted by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 1 the largest South African labor federation, over time gives the impression of an organization struggling to do just that: defend the labor market positions of South African workers and at the same time secure the rights of labor migrants who have been part of the labor force for many years.Migration of people and communities has been a major part of South African history and that of the region.Colonial boundaries did not neatly overlay ethnic and cultural communities that stretch across multiple states, and introduced elements of exploitation, exclusion, and migration control.During the apartheid years, the South African resistance movement, of which COSATU and its predecessor unions were such an important part, derived strength from support of other Southern African nations, the neighboring states which were instrumental to the isolation of the regime.Some of COSATU's largest unions, particularly the mineworkers, counted migrant workers among their leadership as well as membership.'COSATU has called for regional integration that links South Africa's problems to Africa's problems in devising solutions to the underdevelopment of the continent, promotes the free movement of people, is linked to the need to fight national chauvinism and xenophobia and facilitates the enhancement of working class and trade union unity throughout the region.' 2 The African National Congress (ANC) government, other states in the region and COSATU all strongly assert the importance of regional collaboration and integration for economic development through the expansion of trade, income and bargaining power.Despite shared convictions in support of regionalism however, it has been difficult to translate this desire into an effectively functioning institutional reality, 3 and modernization of South Africa's immigration regime has been one of the casualties.At the end of apartheid, regionalism gave way to the growth of a robust national citizenship among South African blacks (who had been denied not only the right to vote under apartheid, but even the right to call themselves South African).4 Over the past few decades, negative associations from the apartheid past, increased migration, and stubborn unemployment rates among the lowerskilled black majority have underpinned migration policy debates.5 Xenophobic attacks began in

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