I did not initially see Brian Benfield's critique of my article, South Africa's Colonial Hangover: Demonising Africans While Courting Western Parasites published on IOL. His critique was forwarded to me by a friend. Having now read it, I welcome the opportunity to respond.

Criticism is healthy. It sharpens arguments and exposes weaknesses. But it serves little purpose when it critiques an argument that was never made.

Benfield's response is an example of precisely that. Rather than engaging my central thesis, he substitutes another one, dismantles it with great confidence, and declares victory. It is a familiar debating technique. It is also intellectually unsatisfying.

My article made a simple observation. South Africa exhibits radically different attitudes toward different categories of foreigners. Poor African migrants are routinely blamed for unemployment, crime, pressure on public services, and economic decline. They become the objects of political campaigns, inflammatory rhetoric, and, at times, mob violence.

Meanwhile, affluent Western migrants, digital nomads, and foreign property purchasers, despite exerting significant pressure on housing markets and accelerating urban displacement, are greeted as cosmopolitan assets whose presence supposedly enhances South Africa's global appeal.

That asymmetry was my argument.

Benfield never actually confronts it.

Reframes

Instead, he reframes the debate into one about whether immigration policy should be colour-blind. Of course it should. Nothing in my article argued otherwise. I did not advocate hostility towards Europeans or Americans. Nor did I suggest that South Africa should mimic its shameful treatment of African migrants. My criticism was directed at selective outrage and selective policymaking. Those are very different propositions.

One of the curiosities of Benfield's response is that it largely confirms my thesis while attempting to refute it. He devotes considerable attention to race, identity, and the moral dangers of racial thinking. Yet he spends remarkably little time addressing the actual phenomena I discussed: digital nomads, foreign purchasing power, Airbnb, speculative property investment, housing affordability, and the African National Congress (ANC) government's unwillingness to regulate these developments. In other words, his article reproduces precisely the imbalance my own article sought to expose.

He also mistakes explanation for endorsement.

Explaining why South African xenophobia manifests differently towards different groups is not an endorsement of xenophobia. Political scientists explain nationalism without advocating nationalism. Economists explain inflation without celebrating inflation. Likewise, analysing the social and historical forces that shape public attitudes towards different migrants does not amount to approving those attitudes. To confuse explanation with endorsement is a basic analytical error.

Benfield further suggests that my argument reduces immigration to race. It does nothing of the sort. My article was fundamentally about economics, class, and political power. Poor African migrants compete primarily within labour markets. Affluent Western migrants often compete in housing markets through vastly superior purchasing power. These are different forms of economic pressure requiring different policy responses.

A country capable of distinguishing between tourists, students, refugees, investors, and permanent residents is surely capable of distinguishing between immigration policy and housing policy.

As Important

Equally important, Benfield conflates tourism and investors with the phenomenon I criticised. I did no such thing. Tourism is one of South Africa's great economic assets, and nowhere did I suggest that tourists are unwelcome. The same applies to business investment. My article was directed at a different phenomenon altogether: affluent foreigners who effectively relocate to South Africa for extended periods, often on short-term visas or as digital nomads, while their foreign incomes distort local housing markets and displace South Africans from their own communities.

Confusing tourism with long-term economic migration simply obscures the issue rather than addressing it.

What is striking is that Benfield scarcely addresses the housing question at all. I wonder why? Yet that was one of the central pillars of my article.

Across much of the developed world, governments have recognised that unrestricted foreign ownership of residential property can distort local housing markets and price citizens out of their own communities. Ontario and British Columbia in Canada have imposed foreign buyer taxes. Australia regulates foreign purchases of existing residential property. Barcelona in Spain has aggressively restricted short-term tourist rentals that hollowed out neighbourhoods. London in the United Kingdom has imposed taxes on vacant luxury properties and tightened scrutiny of offshore ownership. Switzerland has long restricted foreign ownership in many parts of the country to preserve local access to housing.

South Africa's own constitutional jurisprudence points in the same direction. In Adonisi and Others v City of Cape Town, the Constitutional Court reaffirmed that dismantling apartheid's spatial legacy is not merely an aspirational political objective but a constitutional imperative.

The court recognised that access to well-located land and housing lies at the heart of substantive equality and that government bears an affirmative obligation to reverse the geography of exclusion created by apartheid. That constitutional commitment cannot be reconciled with a laissez-faire housing market that allows affluent foreign purchasing power and speculative investment to price ordinary South Africans out of the very neighbourhoods from which apartheid once excluded them. If spatial justice is a constitutional obligation, then regulating housing markets to preserve access for local residents is not xenophobia. It is constitutionally faithful governance.

None of the jurisdictions mentioned above adopted such measures because they are xenophobic. They did so because housing is not merely another commodity. Stable communities require homes, not simply investment assets for globally mobile wealth.

This raises the question Benfield never answers.

Regulation

Should South Africa regulate foreign ownership of residential property?

Should it tax vacant homes?

Should it regulate the proliferation of Airbnb in neighbourhoods experiencing severe housing shortages?

Should digital nomads whose foreign incomes inflate local housing markets contribute more directly to the communities whose affordability they enjoy?

Should the government protect South Africans from displacement within their own cities?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are policy questions.

Benfield largely ignores them.

Instead, he introduces non-sequitur strawmen and retreats to abstract appeals for consistency and equal treatment. But equality before the law does not require governments to ignore different economic realities. Tax law distinguishes between residents and non-residents. Immigration law distinguishes between tourists, workers, refugees, and investors. Property law distinguishes between owner-occupiers and speculative investors. Regulation routinely responds to different forms of economic activity because different activities produce different public consequences.

Generalisations

Nor did I argue that every European or American living in South Africa is somehow culpable or unwelcome. Generalisations of that kind would be both inaccurate and unfair.

My concern was with broader structural trends: affluent foreign purchasing power, speculative property investment, the rapid expansion of short-term rentals, and the political unwillingness to confront their effects. Those are legitimate subjects of democratic debate. I wonder why he ignores these essential subjects and seeks refuge in abstract detours.

The same applies to my criticism of the ANC government. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it has shown far greater political enthusiasm for condemning poor African migration than for confronting affluent Western capital reshaping urban housing markets. The imbalance is glaring.

If the government is genuinely concerned about protecting South Africans from displacement and economic exclusion, then its concern should extend beyond township politics to the increasingly unaffordable property markets of Cape Town and other major cities.

Ultimately, Benfield's article leaves my central question untouched. Why is South Africa's political imagination so animated by the Zimbabwean gardener and so remarkably indifferent to the foreign millionaire, digital nomad, or speculative overseas property buyer?

Until that question is confronted honestly, our immigration debate will remain selective, incomplete, and captive to the very colonial assumptions Benfield insists do not exist.

The irony is difficult to miss. My article argued that South Africa scrutinises poor African migrants while largely overlooking affluent Western migrants. Benfield set out to refute that proposition. Yet in an entire critique of my article, he devoted most of his attention to the former and remarkably little to the latter.

Sometimes a rebuttal does more to prove an argument than to defeat it.

Ziyad Motala is a professor of law at Howard University School of Law. He teaches in the areas of Constitutional Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, and International Law. He has published extensively in his areas of expertise.