The ANC has proposed a continental migration framework aimed at reshaping how African governments share responsibility for the movement of people across the continent.This follows months of anti-immigrant violence in South Africa and diplomatic fallouts with neighbouring states.None of the substantive commitments ― including ratifying the free movement protocol, establishing the refugee allocation mechanism and setting up the continental fund ― can happen without action by individual member states and the AU’s own institutions. The paper follows a tense few months in South Africa which escalated when anti-immigrant groups called for a nationwide shutdown on June 30 demanding the departure of undocumented foreign nationals, a deadline the government denounced as unlawful while still deploying police and private security to prevent a repeat of the July 2021 unrest that cost the economy an estimated R50bn. President Cyril Ramaphosa met traditional leaders in the days before the protest, seeking their help to calm tensions after weeks of attacks, deaths and displacement of foreign nationals. That concern was sharpened by a June discussion document from the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, which warned that Afrophobia threatens the ANC’s standing because the party’s liberation history was built on solidarity from African states that sheltered and supported the movement during apartheid. The foundation said weakening those ties would leave the ANC isolated from the alliances that helped sustain its rise and linked the present crisis to a longer decline it traces to the party’s 2007 Polokwane conference.“The Republic does so not in the register of grievance which would be a small register, inadequate to the moment but in the register of continental partnership. The Republic has hosted, and continues to host, substantial migrant populations from across the continent,” the ANC document reads. “South Africa has provided, and continues to provide, basic education to migrant children, primary health care to migrant patients, emergency treatment to all who present at its facilities, employment opportunities under the lawful immigration framework, social-grant access to recognised refugees and the constitutional protections of one of the most generous constitutional dispensations on the continent.” The AU has not formally responded to the South African cycles of violence. The ANC’s proposal is meant to head off further reputational damage on the continent. The ANC asked the AU Assembly to place the compact on its agenda at the mid-year coordination meeting and its next ordinary session and asked the AU Commission to produce a draft compact within 18 months.The proposal rests on five pillars. The first calls for closing legal gaps in the continental architecture, chiefly bringing the AU’s 2018 Free Movement Protocol into force. That protocol has just four ratifications against the 15 required and South Africa has never signed it. The paper also urges accession to the 1990 Migrant Workers Convention, which South Africa and 35 other AU members have not ratified and full ratification of the Kampala Convention on internally displaced persons.The second pillar proposes new institutions, most notably an African Refugee Responsibility Allocation Mechanism that would distribute asylum claims across the states migrants pass through rather than leaving them concentrated in whichever country migrants ultimately reach. A companion continental migration data platform would standardise how AU members track movement across borders.The third pillar addresses financing. It calls for a continental migration and refugee fund, contributions to which would be set according to national income and a mechanism allowing South Africa to partially recover the estimated R4bn a year it spends incarcerating foreign nationals, 25,447 of whom were in South African prisons since January 2025 according to Correctional Services data cited in the paper. Most of those inmates are held on immigration offences rather than violent crime. The fourth and fifth pillars turn to root causes and language. One commits AU members to faster rollout of the African Continental Free Trade Area, coordinated peace operations in conflict zones including the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sahel and climate adaptation funding for regions such as the Horn of Africa. The other commits states to rejecting xenophobic language from officials and developing a shared continental vocabulary for discussing migration.