Many Mozambicans want to move in and out of South Africa for economic reasons (note: in and out - migration, not immigration). Currently a lot of them end up in the awful Lindela detention centre (part owned by prominent members of the ANC Women's League). A significant number of people in Lesotho think that Lesotho and South Africa should become one country (much of the Free State in SA used to be territory of the Basotho Kingdom) - largely due to a tradition of interpenetration between Lesotho and SA.
Surely this migration - which tends to break down cultural and thus national barriers - is a good thing, even if the reason behind it is bad? Passports, after all, are simply an internationally enforced form of old Apartheid SA's pass laws. In my mind, the potential mass internationalisation of people has always been a good thing - a step towards a truly international proletariat (working with people from Ghana, India, Russia, etc. has simply re-inforced my notion that migration is a good thing).
So in my mind there is indeed a revolutionary silver lining on the cloud of regional economic distress. The Shengen framework in Europe, the militarisation of the US-Mexico border - these are the iron curtains which delimit 'the West' and the 'Western standard of living' from the rest of the world. Precisely in the violation of these borders lies the violation of the (commonly held and propogated) belief that prosperity will always be reserved for certain select people.
Migrants in their home country often live under the whip of a very harsh capitalism - but in the process of becoming migrants, they embrace and develop a resourcefulness that cannot be considered bad simply because of the conditions of its origins. Border-hopping is a particularly productive (in a revolutionary sense) form of mass illegality.
(And the South Africa experience with regards to pass laws proves that the process of collapse of restrictions on movement is one which is generally initiated and supported from below. In the SA case, the imposition of laws specifically designed to fragment the Black population into 'tribal' groupings had the counter-effect of associating tribalism with the Apartheid regime, and thus helping to discredit it)
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B