A recent protest march in Cape Town where protesters called for tougher action against undocumented migration. turned chaotic. Heavy police presence was required to restore order.
South Africa's debate on undocumented migration has become a defining ethical and political test of its constitutional democracy. The state unquestionably has the authority and responsibility to secure borders, regulate entry and residence, and enforce immigration law. Yet democracies are judged not only by whether they exercise power, but by how they exercise it. Effective migration governance must therefore be combined with fairness, proportionality and respect for human dignity.
The 2026 Professor Fatima Meer Memorial Lecture, will be delivered by former Cabinet minister Barbara Hogan under the theme 'Commitments to Truth-Telling, Ethical Leadership and the Protection of Democratic Spaces', offers a timely framework for this debate. Meer's philosophical humanism begins with a simple proposition: before a person is classified as documented or undocumented, skilled or unskilled, citizen or foreign national, that person is a human being.
Legal status matters to administration, but it cannot erase personhood. Hogan and Meer remind us that democracy is neither self-sustaining nor self-correcting. It survives through ethical leadership, active citizenship and institutions willing to defend truth when doing so is politically inconvenient.
