The reality experienced by many Africans in Europe, such as South Africans in the United Kingdom, reveals a mechanism of psychological and economic attrition.

Since 1945, Europe has shaped the image of a continent of opportunity, social rights, and individual success. For Africans, this vision has fuelled mass departures, driven by the hope of a better life. But today, the reality is one of social precariousness, institutional racism, professional downgrading, and political invisibility. From post-Brexit Britain to industrial Germany and France with its successive migration laws, the African condition in the West reveals a mechanism of systemic exclusion.

James Durrant’s article published on 15 November on the SA People portal is revealing. In the early 2000s, London was a refuge from power cuts, crime, and uncertainty. Twenty years later, the disillusionment is brutal, with tax increases, a British passport devalued since Brexit, housing difficulties, a constant feeling of strangeness, rising energy costs, and a social climate increasingly hostile to migrants, even skilled ones. With a pint costing £8, six-figure flats, and salaries eaten away by taxes, the dream is crumbling in everyday life.

This situation hits West Africans, Sahelis, and Great Lakes Africans even harder, as they arrive without networks or financial capital and are often confined to underpaid jobs. Many never have the opportunity to live decently, save money, or even make plans for the future. A large proportion live in invisibility. That is to say, they work illegally, live in unsanitary shared accommodation, and are dependent on unstable odd jobs. This institutional logic gives rise to a violent dynamic in which integration becomes an administrative myth and exclusion a social reality.

Migration policies exacerbate this violence. Europe outsources border control and funds third countries (such as the Arab Maghreb) to detain, imprison, and deport migrants. Testimonies documented by Human Rights Watch describe arbitrary arrests, inhumane detention, mass refoulement, and humiliation inflicted on African migrants accused of a single intention: ‘wanting to go to Europe.’ This system creates marginalized existences, condemned even before setting foot on the continent.

This is why returning home, as some South Africans are doing today, becomes a form of liberation. Not for comfort, but because it has become impossible to exist with dignity in societies where Africans remain ‘eternal foreigners,’ watched, controlled, and suspected. Returning home – working remotely, earning pounds but living in Cape Town, Abidjan, or Dakar – is now the only strategy for breathing, asserting oneself, and rebuilding one’s life. This article analyses, over eight decades, the paradoxes of a dream that has become a mirage, and the historical structures that produce the feeling of being eternally foreign.

1945-1990: Postcolonial illusion and the European promise of integration

The immediate post-war period ushered in an era of illusions for South Africans, as for many other populations in the global South, shaped by the belief in a “new universal space” born from the ruins of fascism /Nazism and enshrined in the United Nations Charter. At the same time, the European discourse on integration – and then the construction of the European Community from 1957 onwards – presented itself as an ethical break with the imperial logic that had organised the world since the 19th century.

For many South Africans (traumatised by the apartheid system on the one hand, and by its legacy on the other) seeking education, employment, or political asylum in the United Kingdom, this Europe promised civic equality and a moral horizon free of racial hierarchies. The dominant narrative, particularly at the heart of British ideology after 1948, suggested that the empire was now giving way to the Commonwealth, an imaginary space of equality, movement, and shared citizenship.

However, this promise of integration remains fundamentally unfulfilled. The postcolonial illusion lies in the gap between universalist rhetoric – ‘one humanity, one law’ – and social, legal and economic practices that continue to hierarchise bodies and mobility. In Britain, the settlement of black South Africans in the 1960s-1980s was met with increasingly restrictive migration bureaucracy, discriminatory hiring practices, informal residential segregation, and the emergence of sometimes violent public discourse on ‘preserving the British way of life.’ In fact, integration was never a political reality; it became an administrative fiction that everyone had to negotiate individually, in a context marked by the persistent underground presence of imperial racism.

Between 1945 and 1990, Europe built its narrative of moral greatness by proclaiming the end of empires, but without dismantling the mental structure of white supremacy. For South Africans in the United Kingdom, this contradiction is the daily experience of a postcolonial world that promises inclusion while subtly organizing distancing.

1990-2015: economic crisis, security policy, and rise of structural racism

During the period 1990-2015, Europe entered a phase of profound economic, social, and identity readjustment that radically changed the situation of migrants, particularly those from Africa. With the acceleration of globalization, economic liberalization and successive crises, European states gradually adopted increasingly restrictive migration policies. The initial openness to immigrant labour was transformed into a strategy of control and social sorting. Migration ceased to be seen as a contribution to reconstruction or growth and became a ‘problem’ and a ‘burden’ requiring security management.

This transformation is accompanied by tougher immigration laws, stricter residence conditions, reinforced border controls, and an increase in ‘ethnic profiling’ in government agencies, law enforcement, and the labour market. For many African migrants, this means access to housing, employment, public services or social protection is marked by constant institutional obstacles, refusals, delays or hidden discrimination.

On a social level, the 1990s to 2010s saw the rise of nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric, increasingly promoted by political movements and the media, which linked immigration with insecurity and cultural threats. This climate fuelled structural racism, which was less spectacular than open attacks but more insidious: residential segregation, invisible barriers to employment, marginalization in public spaces, and a constant feeling of being ‘tolerated’ rather than accepted.

As a result, the ‘European dream’ – equality, mobility, a better life – is turning into an unfulfilled promise for many migrants. For these populations, integration remains a utopia as Europe’s legal, social and economic structures are being reshaped around a paradigm of control, selection and hierarchy based on origin. This historic upheaval, which began in the 1990s, ushered in a model of ‘differentiated inclusion’: it is no longer a question of welcoming others, but of assessing their value – and often relegating them.

2015-2025: the shattered dream – inflation, Brexit, measurable discrimination

From 2015 onwards, the Western dream for many African migrants, particularly South Africans in the United Kingdom, began to crumble under the combined effects of rampant inflation, the economic shock of Brexit and the rise of now documented discrimination. The 2016 vote and the effective exit from the European Union initiated a structural transformation: the economic fabric, employment opportunities and the property market were profoundly disrupted. According to estimates, Brexit contributed to a lasting decline in business investment and a slowdown in productive growth. This had a direct impact on employment and migrants’ ability to stabilize their lives.

Added to this is a surge in the cost of living: rents in London and other major British cities, rising energy prices and increased daily expenses. For many African families, wages are no longer enough to cover basic needs; saving, investing and building a future are becoming illusory. In this context, the precarious status of expatriates is taking hold – the promise of social mobility abandoned, relegated to the level of monthly survival.

At the same time, perceptions and experiences of discrimination are increasing. Recent studies conducted among populations of African origin in Europe show that between 2016 and 2022, the proportion of those who have experienced discriminatory treatment in access to housing, employment or education has increased exponentially. In the United Kingdom, foreign-born migrants – and even more so Black people and Africans – frequently report feelings of social exclusion, profiling, and implicit or explicit denial of access to certain spaces, as if administrative belonging were never enough to erase difference.

In this context, many South Africans understand that the British dream – stability, social advancement, welcome – was nothing more than an ideological mirage. Their trajectories bear witness to a shift: hopes dashed, commendable efforts… but a reality of survival, invisibility and institutional rejection. For them, the United Kingdom ceased to be a promised land; it became a place of tension, constraints and constant waiting. And it is in this gap between promise and experience that the disillusionment of migration is rooted today.

In short, from 1945 to 2025, history shows a constant paradox: Europe promises integration, but organizes exclusion. Africans experience a double punishment: material precariousness and denial of identity. However, the Western dream is not dead; it has been transformed into an ideological product, sold as an escape but experienced as confinement. Documenting these realities is not an exercise in denunciation, but a duty to truth: without recognition of structural injustices, no reform is possible. The demand is simple, irrefutable, universal: dignity, justice and recognition of African humanity, everywhere.

The harsh truth is this: one can travel thousands of kilometres and remain trapped in a state of eternal and invisible foreignness in Western Europe.

Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan-African University. Courtesy

https://journal-neo.su/2025/12/12/the-european-dream-broken-promises-for-african-migrants/