ABSTRACT
South Africa is the most advanced economy in Africa, and as people have learned the world over, economies are like magnets: positive economic poles attract people, and negative economic poles repel them. In contrast, South Africa is literate, industrialized, democratic, and relatively stable since the formal end of apartheid. The largest immigrants groups are from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, the Congo, and Somalia. Neighboring Zimbabwe has suffered economic and political conflict for years and Zimbabwean immigration to South Africa has increased dramatically. Since 2008, violence against Zimbabwean immigrants has been vicious and practically constant, constituting in some accounts an outburst of deadly xenophobia among native South Africans. The post-apartheid South African constitution is a model of liberal democracy but contains several passages referring to "citizens," and on that basis, it has been concluded that benefits to noncitizens can be "limited," thus the "limitation clause".
