A person should be able to live among people who do not particularly like them and still be safe. That is a modest expectation, until we consider how often arguments about belonging quietly make safety conditional. Have you contributed enough? Do you fit in? Can you explain why you came here, and persuade the rest of us that you deserve to stay?
There are legitimate questions about immigration and how countries organise themselves. Nobody should have to answer them to a crowd threatening their life.
The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has called on South Africa to declare attacks on foreign nationals a crisis, following what it reports as the mob killing of a foreign national in Durban. The supplied report gives no further details about the person killed or the circumstances. There is no need to invent a life story to recognise the gravity of a life being taken.
Yet the absence of that story matters in another way. “Foreign national” tells us something about someone’s legal relationship to a country. It tells us almost nothing about the person. When the category becomes the whole description, it becomes easier to discuss human beings as a problem awaiting a solution.
A familiar response is to point out how much migrants contribute. Often that is a necessary correction to prejudice. But it leaves an uncomfortable possibility hanging: would someone who contributed less be entitled to less protection? Must the unemployed stranger produce a better defence of their existence than the unemployed citizen?
People can have genuine grievances about work, housing or public services. Those grievances deserve serious attention. They cannot establish the guilt of someone selected because they come from elsewhere. An explanation for anger is no warrant for choosing its target.
For ordinary life, this has a consequence that begins well before violence. When a conversation turns a particular frustration into a judgement against an entire group, there is a choice about whether to go along with it. We can ask what actually happened, who was responsible, and what evidence supports the accusation.
That will not replace policing or public action. It may make for an awkward conversation with someone we know. Still, the awkwardness belongs with us. We should not keep passing its cost to the people being talked about.