The United Nations Refugees Agency, UNHRC, says the number of people forcibly displaced worldwide stands at 65.5 million, the highest it has ever been.
According to their 2016 annual report, South Africa hosted over 300 000 refugees and asylum seekers. This was revealed at the Reporting Race and Migration Conference in Johannesburg this week, hosted by the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in partnership with United Nations Information Centre and the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation.
The principles of co-existence and tolerance can build mutually acceptable relationships between diverse communities, says Veronica Modey-Ebi from UNHRC.
Modey-Ebi says most people flee their countries of origin because of conflict or persecution. "We are in the middle of a dismantle crises that has already uprooted millions of innocent families, and seen too many lose their lives trying to reach safety."
"South Africa hosted 309 000 refugees and asylum seekers at the end of 2016, the largest number of person of concern in the Southern African region.Behind all of these statistics are mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons."
Modey-Ebi says South Africa has progressive refugee legislation, but as a country, also faces its own challenges.
"Giving refugees the right to freedom of movement, the right to walk and access to social services. South Africa also faces challenges with unemployment, poverty and economic inequality and service delivery, which puts refugees and asylum seekers in conflict with the host population thereby aggravating xenophobia."
A researcher with the African Centre of Migration and Society at Wits University, Dr Jean Pierre Misago says xenophobic violence is just one of many manifestations of xenophobia.
"When we deny services to migrants because of where they come from, that's xenophobic behaviour. When we selectively enforce our by-laws in our cities targeting foreigners doing businesses on the streets and leaving their counterparts."
Head of the department of Journalism, film and television in the school of communication, University of Johannesburg, Professor Dumisani Moyo says the media plays an important role in how the information about migrants is disseminated.
Moyo says the media has also been blamed for fanning xenophobic violence.
"They strive to represent the reality of migration to the rest of society. The media has the power to select who to interview, whose voices to use in their reporting and so on. In a number of recent studies on migration, the media has been accused of fanning hatred and xenophobic violence through their various ways of portraying migration."
Journalist Azad Essa says South African media tends to reproduce the many stereotypes and fears paddled in international media.
"The shortage of our own correspondents elsewhere means that our biases are formed and created by other people's biases. We become the oppressors in our own backyard through our thoughts. Alien is an extreme word, but we are still using words or descriptions like illegal versus legal migrants."
SOURCE: SABC
