'P.S. no foreigners. South Africans only': institutional barriers to employment for refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa

Pheiffer, Chantel Ferreira

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Year:: 2016
Contributor:: Pheiffer, Chantel Ferreira (creator); Schrank, Andrew (advisor); Brown University. Department of Sociology (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: South Africa; Refugees; Xenophobia; Political refugees
Extent:: 40 p.

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Abstract:: Despite having by international standards some of the most extensive socio-economic rights in the world, refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa are consistently unable to transform their formal rights into substantive reality. Much of the contemporary literature on immigration in South Africa has posited either explicitly or implicitly that this gap between de jure rights and de facto reality has a fundamentally attitudinal explanation, whether framed as xenophobia, ethnocentrism, or nationalism. By looking closely at refugees' and asylum seekers' experiences in the South African labor market, I suggest an additional hypothesis for the exclusion of refugees from the South African labor market that does not attribute these experiences to discrimination. I argue that refugees' experiences can be understood not only in terms of anti-immigrant attitudes but also in terms of institutional barriers. Other scholars of immigration in South Africa have alluded to these institutional barriers in the context of xenophobia. But, unlike these accounts, I do not assume their existence is a consequence of systemic anti-immigrant sentiment. Failure to secure employment plausibly can be interpreted as a mismatch between the administrative practices of the state who issues the legal status (and documentation) and employers' need to hire low-cost employees. Specifically, current affirmative action and immigration policies, along with administrative practices, lead potential employers to perceive refugees and asylum seekers as undesirable, unreliable, or risky candidates despite their qualifications for employment. I do not discount discrimination, however. Instead, I suggest a research agenda that thinks about the marginal costs of hiring refugees and asylum seekers as complementary to the existing literature in that (a) high marginal costs to employers of hiring refugees and asylum seekers may reinforce anti-immigrant sentiment, (b) high marginal costs of hiring refugees and asylum seekers may provide a convenient disguise for labor market discrimination, and/ or (c) high marginal costs of hiring refugees and asylum seekers may act as an additional independent force of labor market exclusion that operates parallel to labor market discrimination. I conclude by suggesting that future research on discrimination in the labor market against immigrants must explicitly account for the institutional costs to employers of employing immigrants as well as discrimination, and, finally, the interaction of these factors.
Notes:: Thesis (A.M.)--Brown University, 2017

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Pheiffer, Chantel Ferreira, "'P.S. no foreigners. South Africans only': institutional barriers to employment for refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa" (2016). Sociology Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:698018/

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Sociology Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Sociology department.
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"P.S. no foreigners. South Africans only": institutional barriers to employment for refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa