South Africa has one of the largest pools of unemployed workers in the world. In the second quarter of 2026, 33.6% of the labour force was out of work. That was about 8.5 million people, according to Statistics South Africa. Include discouraged jobseekers and the rate rises to 46.3%.
Yet many businesses in Africa’s most industrialized nation still struggle to find workers.
That contradiction has deepened as migrants leave South Africa en masse. Estimates from Agence France-Presse (AFP) show that at least 100,000 foreign nationals have fled the country since anti-migrant protests intensified in mid-2026.
Many worked in jobs that employers have long struggled to fill with local talent. From Limpopo’s citrus orchards to clothing factories in KwaZulu-Natal, businesses say the loss of foreign labour is disrupting harvests and forcing production cuts. The exodus has added to the pressures facing an economy already constrained by infrastructure shortages, rising costs and weak growth.
Foreign workers have often been blamed for taking jobs from South Africans. Their departure is now showing how difficult it can be to replace them.
Empty fields, delayed harvests
Some of the earliest signs of disruption are appearing in South Africa’s fields.
Commercial agriculture in Africa’s largest economy has long depended on seasonal labour from neighbouring countries, especially Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho. As migrants left farming districts, growers began reporting acute labour gaps during the harvest season.
In KwaZulu-Natal’s north-coast sugar belt, one farmer told local media that he had lost 80% of his cane-cutting workforce almost overnight. Harvesting slowed sharply, raising doubts about whether some mills would receive enough cane to operate efficiently.
Similar problems are emerging in Limpopo, where citrus producers say they are struggling to recruit enough workers to pick fruit on time.
South Africa’s fruit industry is one of the country’s most important export earners. Citrus exports generated about R45 billion ($2.7 billion) in 2025, making the sector the country’s largest agricultural export industry by value.
That scale makes timely harvesting critical. Citrus is highly perishable and moves through a tightly coordinated export chain. When farms cannot pick fruit on schedule, produce reaches packhouses, refrigerated warehouses, trucking fleets and ports later than planned. Export volumes fall; storage and transport costs rise.
Exporters are confronting these disruptions in an already difficult operating environment. In recent months, rising geopolitical tensions have pushed up freight and fuel costs, while hampering access to one of South Africa’s biggest citrus markets.
According to the Citrus Growers’ Association of Southern Africa, the Middle East accounts for about 19% of the country’s citrus exports, second only to Europe.
Should harvesting delays persist, the effects could spread beyond farms and exporters and into households. Lower volumes reaching wholesalers and retailers could tighten supplies and increase the risk of higher food prices for South African consumers.
Factories struggle to replace experience
In Newcastle, the impact is visible beside rows of idle sewing machines. Factories in the KwaZulu-Natal manufacturing hub have lost migrant workers who supplied skills that are not easily replaced. Owners of three clothing factories told Reuters that they had lost between 12% and 19% of their employees during the protests. The Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union estimates that about 15% of Newcastle’s 15,000 textile workers have left.
Numbers are only part of the problem. Many of the departing workers had spent years operating industrial sewing machines and other specialised garment-production equipment.
“We can’t immediately replace these skills with locals,” said Alex Liu, a Newcastle factory owner.
Training a new machinist takes months, and productivity usually remains lower until workers gain experience. Several firms have begun training South African workers, but new recruits cannot replace experienced machinists quickly. Factories must still meet orders with fewer skilled operators, increasing the risk of delays and quality problems.
The consequences extend beyond current production losses. Factories that fail to fulfil contracts risk losing future orders, while smaller firms operating on thin margins may be forced to cut shifts, reduce investment or close altogether. The jobs at risk include not only those vacated by migrants, but also positions held by South African workers across the manufacturing supply chain.
Township commerce feels the shock
Meanwhile, South Africa’s migrant exodus is also reshaping the businesses that supply its townships. Foreign nationals own a large share of spaza shops, the small convenience stores that sell everyday goods in residential communities. In KwaZulu-Natal, research presented to the provincial government in July put foreign ownership at 57.8% of spaza shops, rising to 84.4% in eThekwini.
Hundreds of foreign-owned shops have since closed across KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and the Western Cape as owners leave or move their businesses elsewhere. The effects are beginning to show up in the communities those shops serve. In Durban townships including Chesterville and KwaMashu, some residents have reported higher prices for basic goods. Others say trading hours are less after some foreign-owned shops were replaced by South African-owned businesses.
But the significance goes beyond who owns the shops. Spaza stores form part of a wider network linking wholesalers, manufacturers, transporters and households. Migrant traders have spent years building relationships within that network. When they leave, a replacement operator may inherit the premises without inheriting the same suppliers, credit arrangements or distribution links.
Okunade argues that the disruption reaches further into township economies. Their departure, he wrote, “weakens neighbourhood food security, interrupts informal credit systems and removes an entrepreneurial workforce that has become deeply embedded in local economies.”
Delivery services show a similar dependence on foreign workers. Shoprite says fewer than one in four of its Sixty60 drivers are South African. When protests disrupted movement in June, the effects were immediate: riders stayed off the roads and deliveries were delayed or suspended in affected areas.
That episode offered a glimpse of the problem these providers now face on a larger scale.
With many foreign workers now leaving South Africa, delivery platforms will have to find replacements for a labour force that has become integral to their operations. Until they do, fewer available riders could mean longer waits, reduced coverage and higher operating costs.
Why fewer migrants do not necessarily mean more jobs
South Africa’s growing labour shortages are testing one of the central assumptions behind the anti-immigrant debate. If foreign workers were the main reason millions of South Africans remain unemployed, their departure should make recruitment easier. Instead, labour shortages and the joblessness rate have worsened.
Stats SA data shows the number of unemployed people rose by 345,000 in Q2 2026 alone, pushing the unemployment rate to its highest level since 2022.
Still, labour m economists argue that the contradiction is less surprising than it appears. South Africa’s exceptionally high unemployment is widely seen as a structural problem rather than the result of immigration alone. Weak growth, low investment, skills mismatches and deep spatial inequality have played a much larger role in driving the labour-market crisis.
What matters is not simply how many workers are available. It is whether they have the skills, mobility and experience required for particular jobs.
That does not mean tensions are imaginary. It means the relationship is more interdependent than zero-sum. When migrant workers leave, businesses do not suddenly gain access to a pool of equally suitable replacements. Recruitment delays, training costs and productivity losses can persist long after the workers themselves have gone.
A recent University of the Witwatersrand study reached a similar conclusion. It estimated that even if all jobs held by foreign workers could somehow be transferred to unemployed South Africans, the unemployment rate would fall by only about six percentage points.
“This is a relatively modest reduction given the scale of South Africa’s unemployment crisis,” the researchers wrote.
Their analysis also argues that a one-for-one transfer of jobs is unrealistic. Immigrants contribute not only labour, but also entrepreneurship, investment and skills. Their departure could therefore lead to net job losses for South Africans rather than net gains.
That conclusion echoes findings from the World Bank which estimated that each immigrant could generate roughly two jobs for locals.
Analysts have also pointed to poor wages, difficult working conditions and limited prospects for advancement as barriers to replacing departing migrant workers especially in manufacturing and agriculture.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that removing migrants is not the same thing as creating employment. Labour shortages in farming, manufacturing and township commerce point to a deeper problem. South Africa’s labour market is segmented by skills, geography and opportunity in ways that simple immigration restrictions cannot easily fix.
A small shock with larger implications
An economy as diversified as South Africa is unlikely to suffer a collapse because migrant workers have left particular sectors.
According to official data, foreign-born workers accounted for less than 10% of total employment as of September 2022. However, that does not mean the shock from mass departures is irrelevant.
Africa’s largest economy is still struggling to match the growth rate of its peers. The South African Reserve Bank expects economic growth of about 1% in 2026, reflecting weak business confidence, electricity and transport bottlenecks, and subdued private investment. In such an environment, even a modest reduction in effective labour supply can weigh on productivity.
More worrying is the risk to investment. Investors pay close attention to social stability, labour availability and policy predictability.
Kaan Nazli, an emerging-markets debt portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, said investors had long viewed migration tensions as a social problem with limited economic consequences. “Now, with these protests, this is a risk,”he told Reuters. The concern, he argued, is less the immediate disruption than what repeated episodes of instability signal about the broader operating environment for businesses and investors.
Pretoria competes with Egypt, Morocco, Kenya and Nigeria for manufacturing, logistics and technology investment. Perceptions matter in that competition. Countries that appear more predictable often attract capital more easily, even when their underlying economic fundamentals are not dramatically stronger.
Regional spillovers could become significant. Southern Africa’s economic hub is a major source of remittances for households in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho and Malawi. If migrants earn less or leave the country altogether, those income flows will weaken. Lower spending across neighbouring economies is unlikely to meaningfully change the country’s growth outlook. It would, however, add friction to a regional economy linked through trade, labour and finance.
Tourism may provide an early signal of how perceptions are shifting. The country recorded a 30.3% year-on-year decline in arrivals from Nigeria in June 2026 and a 17.8% fall from Ghana, while total arrivals from West Africa fell 23.8%. First-half arrivals from both countries remained higher than a year earlier, suggesting the monthly drop may prove temporary. Still, the figures have revived questions about whether concerns over safety and social tensions are beginning to influence travel decisions.
For now, Pretoria has responded by emphasising a “locals first” approach through an expanded Trusted Employer Scheme.
The revised programme is intended to encourage both local hiring and investment in skills development. Whether it can address labour shortages as quickly as businesses need remains an open question.
