A foreign national was beaten to death by a crowd of around 50 people in South Africa, amid months of tensions over immigration across the country. The man, believed to be in his late 30s or early 40s, was killed in the coastal city of Durban on Thursday, when a group was demonstrating against illegal immigration in the city center, according to the South African Police Service (SAPS). Police said two men broke away from a group and approached a man on the side of the road.
The victim has not been identified, and his nationality has not been revealed. SAPS has stressed that the motive for the killing has not yet been established, warning people “not to spread unverified information.” Like many countries in the West, immigration has become a contentious issue in South Africa, which attracts people from all over Africa, especially Zimbabwe and Malawi, as the continent’s biggest economy. But South Africa faces staggeringly high unemployment rates, overburdened public services and longstanding economic inequality, fuelling the growing anger over an influx of people looking for work.
Tensions there have repeatedly led to riots in recent years, with the violence sometimes turning deadly—at least four people were killed during anti-foreigner protests in Durban earlier this year—but things have escalated dramatically in recent months. Tens of thousands of migrants have left South Africa in one of the biggest mass exoduses in years, with many citing the threat of violence from angry locals, although the government has said that many have also been deported for being in the country illegally. Nigeria, Mozambique, Malawi and other countries have said some of their citizens have been killed in xenophobic attacks linked to the anti-immigration protests.
South African authorities have disputed some of those claims and said some deaths were related to criminal activity and not the protests. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has denounced violence related to immigration but has also acknowledged failures in the border control system over years that have allowed migrants to travel to and stay in South Africa without documentation. Newsweek has contacted SAPS, Ramaphosa’s office, and South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs via email for comment.
Below, Newsweek has examined what is behind South Africa’s growing anti-migrant anger. South Africa’s official government figures from 2023 show there are around 3.1 million foreign nationals among the country’s population of 62 million, but protesters say there are many more without documentation who haven’t been counted. The country had the second-highest unemployment rate in the world in 2024, when it was 32.6 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
It climbed to 33.6 percent in the second quarter of 2026, reported by Statistics South Africa, meaning there are currently around 8.5 million people without work. Some 66.7 percent of South Africans (40.8 million people) live below the country’s upper-bound poverty line, equivalent to approximately $142 per person per month, while 37.9 percent (23 million people) live below the lower-bound poverty line, equivalent to about $70 per person per month, according to official figures from 2023. Every day, streets in South Africa are lined with people sitting on the sidewalk with construction tools such as hammers and bricks, to indicate that they are looking for work, in the hopes that a driver will stop and give them a cash-in-hand job.
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