Surviving the City: Refugees' livelihoods in Cape Town, South Africa

• In Event: 3244 - Precarious Work in Cross-national Perspective

Abstract

Post-apartheid South Africa is often held up as a global example: it welcomes refugees, allowing them to travel and work freely, instead of limiting them to refugee camps and denying work permits. But the reality of refugee experiences is complicated: many are pushed into precarious livelihoods, limited to specific corners of already-overstressed urban labor markets. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town in 2017, this paper explores how, instead of finding new opportunities, refugees seeking livelihoods in the context of South Africa's high unemployment rates and segmented labor markets, many refugees find themselves trapped in precarious and dead-end work, dependent on co-ethnics and vulnerable to xenophobic violence.

Author

• Gay W. Seidman, University of Wisconsin-Madison