With concerns about border security and hostility towards migrants having become dominant issues in South Africa over the winter, the government has noted with concern that ordinary South Africans are taking enforcement upon themselves.

Speaking at a media briefing on Sunday, Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Mmamoloko Kubayi pointed to incidents in which protestors had entered homes and businesses to demand documents of suspected migrants.

This, she said, was illegal. “Government reiterates that the management of immigration, border management, deportation and facilitated repatriation is the exclusive responsibility of the state, and no individual or group has the authority to take the law into their own hands or to intimidate, threaten, or unlawfully remove any person from any community,” she said.

In response to this, more than 200 cases had been opened with the police, and 350 people arrested. The charges included incitement and intimidation.

In this regard, Kubayi warned: “Government will continue to act firmly against criminality, vigilantism, public violence, intimidation, discrimination, and any attempts to conduct informal enforcement of immigration-related concerns.”

She added that the government was acting against migrants who were unlawfully in the country. It had stepped up its enforcement and repatriation capacity, as announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa last month, and more than 53 000 people had been processed for repatriation. Malawians were the largest group involved.

She said that this dedicated initiative proceeded alongside standard deportation procedures for people who entered or remained in the country illegally. In June, 4 898 people were removed through these processes.

The official response to the upsurge in popular anger at the presence of migrants in South Africa has shaken the country’s authorities. South Africa’s borders have historically been porous, and for much of the period following 1994, the country lacked a proper immigration policy and defaulted to a resignation that migration was unstoppable and should in any event be accepted as a pan-African imperative. The government was dismissive of public frustration in this regard until xenophobic riots broke out in 2008, resulting in 62 deaths.

The state was unable to do much to control migration, and over the course of the subsequent decade there were occasional flare-ups of violent xenophobia. Hostility to migrants also became enshrined in the political platforms of parties such as ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance (the latter now represented in Cabinet), and at times expressed by leaders in larger, established parties.

“Inspections” coordinated by civic groups of foreign-owned businesses – with considerable fanfare where expired or questionable goods were found – have been undertaken in recent years.

The March and March movement, meanwhile, has been associated with pressure on larger, formal businesses, demanding that they dismiss foreigners and hire South Africans.

At the root of this is South Africa’s diminished state capacity. The country’s administrative systems have been allowed to decay, with staffing determined by criteria other than merit. This has made it inevitable that private actors would step in. Suburban communities are increasingly serviced by private providers and taking up maintenance of neglected infrastructure. The growing cession of control over migration to social movements is merely another expression of this phenomenon.