Africans move for many reasons. Some leave in search of better economic opportunities; others flee insecurity, exclusion, or despair. Whether they move legally or irregularly depends not only on personal choice but also on the immigration laws of the countries they enter.

The clandestine conditions in which many African migrants arrive and live expose them to abuse. Those who find work are often paid informally because their papers are not in order. They are vulnerable to exploitation and treatment from which regular workers are, at least in principle, protected.

What is often lost in the immigration debate is the journey itself: the long, brutal passage many Africans endure before they reach a foreign workplace, a detention centre, or a hostile neighbourhood.

Those travelling north through the desert in the hope of reaching Europe encounter a range of predatory actors. If they escape traffickers, they may fall into the hands of corrupt police officers, criminal networks, or abusive officials in transit countries. Rape, torture, forced labour, slave-like conditions and other forms of inhuman treatment have been documented along North African routes.

Those who survive these ordeals and attempt to cross the Mediterranean face another danger. According to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project, more than 35,000 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014, making it one of the world’s deadliest migration routes. For too many Africans, the sea has become a cemetery, even as others perish on the Atlantic routes towards the Spanish islands.

The silence that often follows these deaths makes the tragedy worse. Many sub-Saharan governments say little about those who die, or about the measures needed to dissuade their citizens from taking such perilous journeys. In some cases, the work is left to international organizations such as IOM, which partners with popular artists and survivors to publicize the dangers of irregular migration. Some of the most powerful warnings have come from those who narrowly escaped the desert passage, smugglers’ prisons, or drowning at sea.

In parts of West Africa, the European Union has also implemented projects intended to keep young people productively engaged at home. These initiatives are presented as life-saving measures, but they also respond to political pressures in European countries, where immigration has become a rallying cry and, too often, a convenient scapegoat for domestic failure.

The intensity of the reaction to the recent xenophobic incidents in South Africa is striking when set against the limited official attention given to African deaths in the Sahara Desert, the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. These incidents are painful, first, because of their vigilante character. Ordinary citizens have, at times, presumed to enforce immigration laws illegally, violently, and to the detriment of state authority. Such conduct is incompatible with any polity governed by law. They are painful, second, because many Africans understandably struggle with the idea that an African can be treated as “illegal” in another African country.

The sentiment is powerful. Yet Africa is made up of sovereign states with their own legal systems, including immigration laws. Efforts by regional organizations and the African Union to ease movement, residence, and establishment do not mean that laws can be ignored. Africa cannot build unity by weakening the rule of law.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent intervention is therefore worth taking seriously. Speaking on Monday, July 27, 2026, at the opening of the First Ordinary Session of the Seventh Legislature of the Pan-African Parliament in Midrand, South Africa, he urged African countries to act collectively on the conditions that propel migration: conflict, instability, governance failure, poverty, and social discord. At its core, he was urging his peers to confront the structural pressures that lead citizens to take enormous risks, undertake dangerous journeys, and settle irregularly in neighbouring countries or farther afield.

People leave because economies fail them, politics excludes them, or insecurity makes ordinary life impossible. South Africa’s admonition is therefore worth heeding, even as South Africa itself must reckon with its failure to prevent attacks by private citizens who have usurped the state’s lawful role.

Prudent economic policy matters. It must respond to the aspirations of young people, create jobs, and make countries more livable. Employment is not generated by decree, nor do economies become inclusive overnight. But governments can take credible steps to restore hope, strengthen confidence, and reduce the impulse to gamble one’s life on dangerous roads, deserts, and seas.

There is also a need to forge more inclusive national identities, reduce ethnic tensions, restore peace, and make citizens feel valued in their own countries. Peace helps economies function; stable economies create work; work gives young people a reason to stay. Together, they reassure citizens that they can imagine a future at home and create opportunities for themselves and others.

Politics, too, must be inclusive. Divisive politics, sometimes organized along ethnic lines, invariably push people out. Where states are genuinely built around citizenship rather than ethnicity or party affiliation, politics becomes less combustible. It also reduces the impulse to leave simply in order to live.

Africa should therefore take President Cyril Ramaphosa’s injunction to his peers seriously. It should not be dismissed as a belated appeal. At the same time, South Africa must ensure that migrants on its territory are protected by the rule of law, and that the enforcement of immigration rules remains the responsibility of the state—not of mobs.

African integration will advance faster if governments deal honestly with the pressures that push citizens out. That means governing better, managing economies more carefully, and building states that give citizens compelling reasons to stay.

Africa’s future lies in freer movement and the right of residence. But that future must rest on law, dignity, and mutual responsibility. Only then will integration also mean dignity.

Anthony Ohemeng-Boamah is an international development and socio-economic transformation specialist with a focus on Africa.