He ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.

In South Africa, it appears that charity has its limits and those limits have been exceeded. While Thabo Mbeki’s government makes the right noises decrying xenophobia and calling on its people to remember the hospitality extended to South Africans in exile during the apartheid years, it has been instrumental in creating the atmosphere of hostility that has led to the recent violence. Mbeki’s absurd assertion that there was no crisis in Zimbabwe contributed directly to the influx of millions of Zimbabweans into South Africa by lending legitimacy to Robert Mugabe’s rule and ignoring a humanitarian crisis on his own border. The violence against immigrants perpetrated by the South African police only emboldened local rioters, whose belief that immigrants were less worthy of the protection of the law was vindicated by the State security apparatus. The South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) has issued a scathing indictment of the Mbeki government’s policy failures which has led to the present situation. The organization cites crime, inadequate border control, unemployment, education and corruption as some of the key areas where government has failed. South Africa, however, is not alone in struggling with the problem of human migration and the degree to which the host country can provide for others, when it is already struggling to provide enough for its own.

The grass is always greener, they say; the point being that you should accept your lot in life, and problems abound even in supposedly richer pastures. Except that for a majority of the world’s inhabitants – the grass really is greener on the other side. As long as economic, social and political disparities exist, and the world is divided into haves and have-nots, humans, being the rational creatures they are, will migrate to those greener pastures in pursuit of the dream of a better life.

So it is that the Vietnamese and Cubans became boat people, Mexicans became a political debate in the US and 3 million lost souls fleeing economic deprivation jumped from the frying pan of Zimbabwe into the fire of a newly awakened xenophobia in South Africa.

No nation is immune from this visceral hatred of the other, and increasingly, countries of the so-called first world consider themselves under siege, either from their colonized step-children from the third world, or envious and desperate neighbors next door. So Silvio Berlusconi’s resurgent center-right government in Italy cracks down on 200 000 Roma from Bosnia and Romania, the French under Nicolas Sarkozy battle marginalized Algerian rioters in Parisian suburbs, and South Africa wrestles uncomfortably with its role as the US of Africa, reluctantly taking in the huddled masses of the continent.

The truth is that the prime motivation of nations and individuals is self interest. Immigration is tolerated only insofar as the immigrants provide cheap labor, expertise or some other quality or commodity that does not exist in the host country. Otherwise, loss of jobs, competition for resources, fear of the dilution of national identity, and nativism will trump philanthropy every time.

There are no easy solutions. Nations cannot simply close their borders, and although the European Union allows travel freely within the Schengen territories, it is not an open border policy with regard to other countries. Immigration, legal and otherwise, is a symptom of larger problems. No one easily uproots family and cuts generational ties on a whim. To address the immigration dilemma, our leaders have to jointly address the roots of human suffering – poverty, racism and political and religious persecution -  and acknowledge the aspirations of their citizens.