A critical review of the Zimbabwe special temporary residence permits, 2010–2021

This article reviews the Zimbabwe special temporary residence permits to demonstrate how these permits have, over the past 13 years, been used to limit Zimbabwean migrants from accessing permanent residency and South African citizenship. For instance, we illustrate in this article how the Zimbabwe special temporary residence permits effectively marked Zimbabweans as perpetual outsiders with no rights to reside indefinitely in South Africa, even though some Zimbabwean migrants have been living in the country on an ongoing basis for the past two decades. The Zimbabwe special temporary residence permits keep Zimbabwean migrants in a ‘temporary migration status’ as ‘guest workers’ who are expected to eventually ‘go back home’. We further argue that although the Zimbabwe special temporary residence permits are not racist tools per se, they are exclusionary tools that embody analogous, exclusionary and othering logic as the twentieth-century migrant labour system that the White South African government used to banish all Blacks from the category of citizenship.