Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
2.5 Conclusion: Situating Social Work with Cross-border Migrants in South Africa
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Image 2.1: A Person Looting a Foreign-owned Shop
2.5 Conclusion: Situating Social Work with Cross-border
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and whose welfare was defined as lying outside of government responsibility. Patterns established during this period prefigured both contemporary migratory movements and South Africa’s efforts to govern cross-border migration in the post-1994 period.
While the causes of contemporary migration in Southern Africa are complex, I found that responses from post-apartheid South Africa, like those of other migrant-receiving countries, can be defined in terms of two distinct sets: one that focuses on ‘economic’, with the other focusing on ‘forced’ migration. In both regards, legislative and policy responses are not fully synchronous with public discourse and practices. Importantly, South Africa’s formal economy no longer absorbs migrants into its mainstream labour markets as was the case under previous regimes. This function is largely fulfilled by informal economies in urban areas where population is dense, rental markets are exploitative, and structural degeneration is widespread. In this context, the question of how, and the extent to which, the socio-economic needs of residents are met is a precarious one. In all these respects, the South African state appears institutionally weaker than necessary to respond adequately to the challenges facing both local and foreign residents. Finally, I argued that the interplay between received, colonial and apartheid ideologies, and the present state’s difficulties in managing in-migration consistently and assisting residents in meeting their day-to-day social and economic needs effectively, is an important contributor to the exceedingly high levels of xenophobia and the sustained incidence of violence against foreign nationals in post-apartheid South Africa.
Focusing on the May 2008 pogroms, I suggested that these were preceded by the onset of a major global recession, with crisis-like effects in the lives of many. I interpreted xenophobic discourses as a means of projecting onto foreign nationals much of what may be experienced as uncertain, unsettling and threatening in contemporary South Africa. Xenophobic practices, of which pogroms represent an extreme form, can be seen therefore as a both a symbolic, exorcist and a practical, antropoemic3 strategy.
3 Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (cited in Bauman, 1993) identifies two strategic alternatives which, he claims,
‘primitive’ societies used in dealing with strangers. Bauman contends that these two strategies are endemic to all societies, including contemporary ones. One, referred to as antropophagic strategy, derives its meaning from the biological use of the term that is, incorporating and assimilating. The other, referred to as antropoemic strategy, means throwing ‘the carriers of danger up – and away – from where orderly life is conducted’ (Bauman 1993:163).
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This then is the context of social work with cross-border migrants in South Africa. Historic and contemporary, economic, political, social, and ideological processes interact so as to limit a state’s capacity to serve as a regulative, ameliorative and redistributive agency in the face of widespread unemployment, inequality and socio-economic hardship. Where the same processes lead to the stigmatisation, marginalisation, exclusion and violation of cross-border migrants, social workers and other practitioners of care are likely to receive complex, potentially unattainable and possibly contradictory mandates. They can, for these reasons, be expected to face considerable ethical challenges. To the extent that South Africa is typical of other migrant-receiving countries, such challenges might be comparable to those experienced by practitioners in the field of cross-border migration elsewhere. This, and the ways in which mainstream ethical discourses and instruments serve to facilitate and constrain ethical practice, forms the subject of the following chapter.
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Chapter 3
The Ethics of Social Work with Cross-border Migrants
Having outlined key features of the study’s economic, political, social, cultural, and ideological contexts, the purpose of this chapter is to delineate its discursive and practice contexts. To this end, I review a selection of writings on social work with cross-border migrants, published in the decade 2004 to 2014 and discuss the extent to which mainstream discourse on social work ethics – as represented by the document, Ethics in Social Work, Statement of Principles (IFSW/IASSW 2004) and the Global Definition of Social Work (IFSW/IASSW 2014) – is helpful in informing and guiding social justice-oriented practice in this field. I begin by locating social work with cross-border migrants within the larger field of international social work (Section 3.1), before engaging with the kinds of tasks, roles and challenges that appear to be specific to the field. This I do in two sub-sections. In Section 3.1.1, I focus on challenges pertaining to service provision, considering both the kinds of services that are provided and the way in which they are provided. Thereafter, in Section 3.1.2, I concentrate on work contexts and working conditions, relating these to practitioners’ affective responses to the tasks and roles they perform and the challenges they experience in their daily work. At the end of this section, it will be apparent that even though the reviewed literature represents a great variety of national contexts, practice situations and intervention types, the ethical challenges which emerge as characteristics of the field are remarkably similar.
In Section 3.2, I engage with the question of ethics in the field of social work with cross-border migrants, focusing on the issue of social justice. To this end, I interrogate how the question of ethics, and specifically the issue of social justice, are framed in the reviewed literature (Section 3.2.1). It becomes apparent that in order to inform a moral evaluation of the practices they describe, many of the reviewed texts draw on social work’s global statement of ethical principles (IFSW/IASSW 2004) and the profession’s global definition (IFSW/IASSW 2014). While the literature is quite successful in delineating some of the origins, nature and dynamics of the ethical challenges in the field, and the ways in which social work practice falls short of meeting the profession’s aspirations of countering social injustice and promoting
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social justice, it is less clear how practitioners might be enabled to do greater justice to these aspirations. Yet, the purpose of the global definition, the statement of ethical principles and the debates the two documents are meant to inspire is not merely to provide reference points for evaluating practice: the documents should also be able to inform and guide practice.
To explore this latter concern, I discuss, in Section 3.2.2, some of the assumptions that seem to underlie the global definition and the statement of ethical principles about how social workers are meant to know what to do to promote social justice, and about what might prompt and enable them to do so. The discussion reveals the extent to which the two documents have been influenced by two dominant schools of ethical thought in social work:
deontology and utilitarianism. It is in keeping with these two traditions that the documents supply overall points of orientation for practice. However, I am concerned that they do seem to fall short of providing adequate guidance for practitioners wishing to promote social justice in complex social, economic, political and ideological terrains – as is the case in the field of cross-border migration. I conclude that in the interest of social justice, interlocutors need to attend more to the intricate inner, relational and structural processes through which practitioners become involved in unjust practices in the first place. One of my key propositions in this regard is that perhaps, the questions of knowing and doing what is required in relation to social justice need to be supplemented with attention to the human reality of being – particularly the condition of being entangled in multiple structures and processes of injustice. Short of exploring this issue of entanglement in-depth, the ethical debate risks vacillating between moral prescription and moral condemnation – an unhelpful approach for social workers facing difficult practice situations.