There is something crazy about Mauritius and its attitude to immigration. Just how strange the situation is becoming was highlighted last week when foreign workers illegally taking up jobs in restaurants and bakeries made headlines in the news. Why is this happening? And why are Mauritian attitudes towards immigration starting to sound increasingly irrational? 

On the one hand, it’s not surprising that immigration is increasingly being talked about in an ageing society. Capitalism as an economic system based upon constant expansion in both output and profit is simply not designed to cope with societies in demographic decline. For capitalism, a shrinking workforce translates into a double-whammy of a shrinking market and a higher wage bill (fewer workers means more bargaining power for workers). Like societies elsewhere, in Mauritius too, immigration is coming to be seen as a way of bailing Mauritian capitalism out of this demographic vice. 

This is where the wheel starts coming off the cart. The truth is that the enthusiasm for immigration is coming at precisely the time when private sector investment is increasingly becoming unproductive, consisting as it does in flipping real estate or simply doubling-down on mercantilist (‘buy-low-sell-high’) redistributive trades. It’s not simply a question of how much the private sector is investing, but rather what it is in investing in. This means that Mauritius is increasingly having a hard time retaining the skills it does produce. Annually, an average of 1,800 of the most skilled, working-age Mauritians are emigrating. 

What’s happening now is quite different from previous bouts of immigration: slaves did not want to continue working in sugar, so indentured labourers were brought in. When the textile industry entered into a death spiral after 2000, thousands of Mauritians were traumatised when they lost their jobs and with factory closures becoming a regular occurrence, few were willing to enter the sector whose future is looking bleak. So immigration was not much of an issue: it was either concentrated in textiles that few Mauritians wanted to work in (they moved to the services sectors) or in specialised high-skilled managerial positions in tourism and financial services. In neither did they compete directly with Mauritians. Now what is happening is that as textile factories are closing down, foreign workers are now being hired within the services sector (restaurants, bakeries, supermarkets etc.) where unscrupulous employers hire them illegally without having to worry about labour laws and being able to pay them less with worse working conditions, depressing wages in these sectors. No productive investment from the private sector that could absorb them means that now foreign workers are competing directly with Mauritian workers in the same sectors. So where do Mauritian workers go? There have been indications that the pot is coming to the boil, as happened in the riots in Roche Bois against Bangladeshi workers in 2012, but these have been ignored. In the meantime, the idea of restricting the entry of foreign workers is simply met with knee-jerk accusations of xenophobia, as if everything would proceed swimmingly otherwise. 

In dealing with immigration in Mauritius, the private sector lobbies have been shockingly tone-deaf. They simply articulate for more immigration without at the same time critiquing the investment model that the private sector is embarked upon. Why they think immigration in a deindustrialised Mauritius would not roil politics in the same way that it has in the deindustrialised West or neighbouring South Africa recently is one of those enduring mysteries. And merely calling for more immigration without asking the private sector to start getting its own act together first is a shocking bit of naiveté in a country whose political history is essentially one of successive waves of immigration followed closely by social cleavages and political conflict. 

Sometimes even xenophobes have a point.