• Official unemployment rate rose to 33.6% from 32.7%, the highest since 2022, as the number of unemployed climbed 345,000 to 8.48 million and employment fell
• The rise came after sustained anti-migrant campaigns premised on foreigners taking South African jobs
• Zimbabwe’s official unemployment rate sits below 10% on the international definition, far below South Africa’s, because roughly 80% of Zimbabwean jobs are informal and anyone doing any informal work counts as employed.

Harare- South Africa's unemployment rate has risen to 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026, a four year high, after more than 178,000 African migrants reportedly left or were deported during an immigration crackdown and a wave of anti migrant pressure, including about 115,000 Zimbabweans and 56,000 Malawians. About 19,000 of those departures were formal deportations, and the rest were voluntary departures by migrants facing an increasingly hostile environment. The jobs deficit survived their departure.

South Africa's official unemployment rate rose from 32.7% in the first quarter to 33.6% in the second, its highest reading since 2022. The number of unemployed people increased by 345,000 to 8.48 million, employment fell by 16,000 to 16.74 million, and the labour force expanded by 329,000 to 25.22 million.

The economy received hundreds of thousands of additional people seeking work and failed to create enough employment to absorb them. That result lands inside one of South Africa's most politically charged economic debates.

The premise behind years of anti migrant mobilisation has been straightforward. Foreign nationals occupy jobs that could otherwise be held by South Africans, and reducing the foreign workforce should free up vacancies for citizens. The recent exodus is the closest thing South Africa has had to a large scale test of that proposition, and the expected employment dividend has yet to appear. Migrants left in substantial numbers, immigration enforcement intensified, anti migrant mobilisation reached businesses, communities and workplaces, and unemployment climbed to a four year high regardless.

The problem is increasingly difficult to avoid. South Africa has too few jobs for the size and growth of its labour force. The labour force expanded 1.3% during the quarter while employment contracted, and that logic overwhelms arguments centered on who occupies existing positions.

Therefore, an economy that adds potential workers faster than businesses add jobs produces unemployment regardless of the nationality of the people competing for those positions. Removing workers cannot create demand for output. It does not build factories, increase investment, raise household consumption, expand exports or improve the economics of employing another person, and those are the mechanisms through which sustainable jobs are created.

The migrant crackdown has exposed a further problem. Some of the jobs foreigners occupied are proving difficult to transfer. Reuters reported in August that clothing manufacturers in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, were struggling after migrant workers fled amid anti immigrant pressure, with factory owners reporting the loss of between 12% and 19% of their workforces and some vacancies proving difficult to fill locally, particularly where jobs required established skills while offering low wages and difficult working conditions.

That finding changes the economic interpretation of the migration debate. A vacancy and an employable job are not the same thing. A manufacturer can lose a foreign machinist and technically create an opening, but a South African worker still needs the relevant skill, must be willing to accept the wage and conditions, must live close enough to the workplace or be able to relocate, and must produce enough output for the employer to retain the position.

Where those conditions fail, the vacancy stays empty and the business reduces production, automates, relocates or closes. In that outcome, removing the migrant destroys output without creating a durable local job.

The Newcastle clothing industry is an early warning of that transmission. Employers losing experienced migrant workers have reported production disruption while the industry's underlying economics remain difficult. Low retailer payments, weak margins, wage disputes and competition from imported clothing existed before migrants departed, and removing part of the workforce did not remove those constraints.

The same exposure runs through other labour intensive sectors. Construction, agriculture, retail, transport, delivery services and informal commerce employ significant migrant populations, and Reuters reported in July that the exodus was already creating concern across several of these industries. South Africa has around 2.6 million international migrants according to UN estimates cited by Reuters, equivalent to roughly 5% of the population, and earlier OECD ILO research estimated migrants contributed around 9% of GDP.

The economic risk is therefore larger than the employment argument suggests. Foreign workers are also consumers, tenants, taxpayers, entrepreneurs, customers and suppliers. Migrant owned spaza shops purchase from wholesalers, workers rent accommodation from South African landlords, delivery drivers support retail distribution, and agricultural and construction workers contribute directly to production.

Removing them removes labour and part of the demand attached to that labour at the same time, which creates the possibility of an economic feedback loop. A migrant worker leaves, the employer loses productive capacity, the landlord loses rent, local shops lose expenditure, wholesalers lose orders, remittances to neighbouring economies fall, and if the affected business cannot replace the worker competitively, output declines as well. The original assumption that one migrant departure equals one South African job fails as an economic identity.

South Africa's employment crisis sits much deeper in the economy. The country has struggled for years to generate growth fast enough to absorb new labour market entrants. Electricity constraints, logistics failures, weak municipal infrastructure, low private investment across parts of the economy, crime, skills mismatches and slow expansion of labour intensive industries have constrained the rate at which businesses create positions. The second quarter numbers show the consequence. An additional 329,000 people entered the labour force in three months while total employment fell by 16,000, and even an aggressive redistribution of existing jobs cannot solve a labour market imbalance of that scale for long. South Africa needs the stock of jobs itself to expand.

Youth unemployment shows where the structural deficit accumulates. Unemployment among people aged 15 to 34 reached 47.4%, and the rate among those aged 15 to 24 reached 62.8%, meaning nearly two out of every three labour market participants in the youngest group cannot find employment. Those young South Africans are entering the market for the first time, and their central problem is the absence of sufficient entry level positions capable of absorbing them.

This shifts the policy discussion from nationality toward production. South Africa needs businesses that employ large numbers of relatively low and medium skilled workers. Manufacturing, construction, agriculture, tourism, business services, mining supply chains and small enterprises all provide routes into employment when investment and demand expand, and the economy needs significantly more of them.

The composition of employment during the quarter makes the deterioration more revealing. Informal sector employment increased by about 34,000 while overall employment fell, so the economy continued pushing labour toward the same survivalist activity often associated with neighbouring economies. That matters because South Africa has traditionally maintained a substantially deeper formal employment base than much of the region.

When formal employment weakens and informal work expands, part of the labour market begins adjusting through self employment, casual activity and microenterprise, and people remain economically active while the quality and security of their work deteriorates.

South Africa's 33.6% unemployment rate is severe because the labour market leaves millions of people visibly outside employment. The expanded unemployment measure, which counts people who want work but have become discouraged from searching, points to an even wider pool of unused labour capacity. South Africa exposes its labour market failure directly in the unemployment column, and that should not be read as evidence that neighbouring countries have solved the same problem.

Zimbabwe is the clearest example, and it is also a measurement trap. Zimbabwe's own statistics agency sharpens the point rather than softening it. The Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency reported an official unemployment rate of 20.7% for those aged 15 and above in the second quarter of 2025, well above the roughly 8.6% modelled figure often quoted for the country, and even that higher official rate coexists with an informally employed share of 65% of all employed persons.

The agency's Quarterly Labour Force Survey classifies 58.5% of the employed as working in the informal sector, and in the non-agricultural economy alone, informal workers make up 61.1% of the employed. A labour market where two in three workers are informally employed is not described by any single unemployment rate, whether the 8.6% modelled figure or the 20.7% official one, because the number that carries the meaning is the share of work that offers no security, and in Zimbabwe that share is the majority

The education data underneath the headline shows how deep the informality runs. On the same survey, formal employment reached 80.4% only among Zimbabweans with higher education, while those with no schooling recorded the highest informality, and secondary-education holders, the largest single group in the workforce, carried both the largest employment share and the highest unemployment risk. The labour force participation rate for the higher-educated reached 76.8%, and the employment absorption rate for that group was 70%, against far weaker outcomes for everyone below it. A formal job in Zimbabwe is, in effect, reserved for the minority who complete tertiary education, and the rest of the workforce is channelled into informal work by the simple absence of formal posts, which is the structural reality the low headline unemployment rate conceals.

The Southern African labour problem increasingly divides into two forms. South Africa carries mass open unemployment alongside a relatively deep formal economy. Zimbabwe carries extensive informal employment alongside a much smaller formal wage economy. Both systems leave substantial productive capacity unused. In South Africa, the person stands outside the workplace looking for a job. In Zimbabwe, the same economic pressure can push the person into own account commerce or other informal activity. The statistics classify those outcomes differently, and household welfare can remain weak in both.

The measurement gap between the two countries is now openly acknowledged rather than hidden. It makes little sense for Zimbabwe to report unemployment near 8%, a quarter of South Africa's level, when both countries claim to use the same international methodology, and the reconciliation lies entirely in the informal economy. South Africa's survey captures informal work through tax-registration and enterprise-size tests and still records most of its jobless as unemployed, whereas Zimbabwe's informal economy, at 65% or more of all employment, absorbs the same people into the employment count. The two national statistics offices are measuring the same regional failure to create formal jobs, and they arrive at opposite headline numbers because one economy has a formal sector large enough to leave its jobless exposed and the other does not.

That is why the migration debate matters beyond South Africa. For decades South Africa has acted as part of the regional labour market adjustment mechanism, with Zimbabweans, Malawians, Mozambicans, Basotho and other Africans moving south because the continent's most industrialised economy offered deeper labour demand. The current exodus reverses part of that mechanism.

About 115,000 Zimbabweans are among those reported to have returned or left during the recent wave, and those workers return to economies whose formal sectors are considerably smaller. The consequence can travel north. Zimbabwe receives additional labour supply, remittance flows can weaken, household incomes previously supported from South Africa come under pressure, informal competition can increase as returning migrants seek livelihoods, and skills acquired abroad can also return to the domestic economy where local businesses are capable of absorbing them. South Africa's employment crisis therefore becomes a regional economic transmission channel.

The strongest conclusion from the recent period is narrower and more defensible than saying migration has no labour market effect. Migrants can compete with citizens for particular jobs. Undocumented labour can weaken bargaining power where employers exploit immigration status to pay below legal wages. Employers can substitute cheaper foreign workers for South Africans in particular industries, and immigration enforcement has a legitimate role in ensuring lawful employment and enforcing labour standards. The Newcastle evidence contains this dimension too. Government inspections uncovered labour law problems, while unions disputed employers' claims about shortages and pointed to wages and working conditions as reasons locals may reject some positions.

That problem should be enforced at the employer level. Company paying below statutory requirements gains an unfair labour cost advantage regardless of the worker's nationality, and labour inspection, wage enforcement, immigration compliance and prosecution of exploitative employers directly address that distortion. Expelling workers while leaving the economics of exploitation intact does not.

The second quarter unemployment result shows the limits of treating migration as the governing explanation for South Africa's labour crisis. More than 178,000 migrants have reportedly departed or been deported amid the recent wave, factories have lost foreign workers, some vacancies have opened, and national unemployment has still climbed to 33.6%. South Africa had 8.48 million unemployed people in the second quarter. Even 178,000 migrant departures equal only around 2% of that unemployed population, before accounting for children and other non workers among those leaving, skills mismatches, geography, wages, business closures or the economic demand migrants themselves supported. South Africa cannot deport its way out of an 8.48 million person jobs deficit. It has to produce its way out.

Manufacturing capacity must expand. Infrastructure investment must translate into construction employment. Logistics must become reliable enough for exporters to grow. Small businesses need an operating environment in which hiring another worker is commercially viable. Education and vocational training need to connect young workers to actual industrial demand, and labour intensive industries need sufficient investment to absorb people at the scale at which they enter the workforce. Immigration enforcement can determine who legally participates in that labour market. It cannot substitute for creating the labour market itself.

The read on South Africa's second quarter is that the migration crackdown has begun separating two questions that were repeatedly treated as one. The first is whether South Africa should enforce immigration and labour law. It should. The second is whether foreign workers caused South Africa's mass unemployment.

The available evidence does not support treating migration as the principal explanation for an economy carrying 8.48 million unemployed people, a 33.6% official unemployment rate and youth unemployment approaching two thirds among the youngest labour market participants. The latest migrant departures have occurred alongside rising unemployment, and some employers have discovered that vacancies created by departing foreigners do not automatically convert into sustainable jobs for citizens.

The next 90 days should be read through employment creation rather than migration numbers alone. South Africa's third quarter labour data will show whether the four year high persists. Formal and informal employment should be separated to establish whether new work is moving back toward payroll jobs. The vacancies created in migrant intensive industries should be monitored for evidence that South Africans are filling them, that wages are adjusting upward, or that businesses are reducing output because the underlying economics of the positions remain unattractive. Youth unemployment should be measured against the 47.4% rate for ages 15 to 34, since that remains the clearest test of whether the economy is creating opportunities for new entrants.

For Zimbabwe, returning migrants and weaker South African labour demand should be monitored through remittances, border movements, informal employment and domestic labour force participation, since South Africa's migrant crackdown could ultimately export part of its labour market pressure into neighbouring economies.

The migrant exodus has delivered a useful economic test. Workers left, The unemployment crisis remained. Some businesses then discovered they still needed the workers who had gone. The jobs South Africa needs are substantially larger than the jobs migration policy can redistribute. The real problem is the productive capacity of an economy that has 25.22 million people in its labour force and jobs for only 16.74 million of them. Until that gap begins closing through investment, production and employment creation, changing who is permitted to stand in the labour queue changes the composition of the queue, it does not make the queue disappear.

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