Author: Johannes Machinya
Undocumented labour migrancy: illegalised and criminalised – a form of an unfree labour regime
Post-apartheid South Africa has increasingly closed its borders to undocumented migrant job seekers who, despite the existence of a portmanteau of immigration restrictions, always find their way inside. The highly restrictive nature and exclusionary character of immigration legislation in South Africa create a contradiction between undocumented migrants’ physical presence and their socio-economic value, and official negation as ‘illegals’ which forces them into spaces of non-existence where they are extremely vulnerable to exploitation and abuse without legal protection. The principal objective of this paper is to show how migrant ‘illegality’, not only as a state of being, but as a matter of social-political construction and struggle, particularly its criminalisation, affects the broader life and work experiences of undocumented migrant workers in the mining town of Witbank, South Africa. Migrant ‘illegality’ and the subsequent criminalisation of undocumented migration produce undocumented migrant workers as politically, socially and economically precarious. Using the theoretical tools of ‘precarity as a political concept’ and ‘unfree labour’ the paper shows that the governmentality of ‘illegal’ migrants plunges them into forced labour exploitation and makes their life-worlds extremely uncertain and unstable. This paper is based on my doctoral research where I am focusing on the experiences of ‘illegality’ by undocumented migrant workers in their everyday encounters with state power in the form of immigration enforcement. These findings are from ethnographic observations and 38 in-depth interviews conducted with undocumented migrant workers in Witbank between August 2015 and April 2016. The research has shown that migrant ‘illegality’ produces undocumented migrant workers as a form of unfree labour. It forces them to work a little harder, little longer hours for a little lower pay. It signals the death of a normal, peaceful human existence among ‘illegal’ migrants. Their general life experiences are marked by fear, confinement and uncertainty.