Benign Neglect or Active Destruction? A Critical Analysis of Refugee and Informal Sector Policy and Practice in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To fully comprehend the disabling policy environment in which refugees in South Africa attempt to carve out a livelihood, it is important to analyse two largely independent but overlapping streams of policy-making. This paper first examines the post-apartheid refugee protection regime and traces how and why a generous right-based approach has been progressively comprised by growing restrictionism, exclusion and bureaucratic ineptitude. The 2017 Refugees Amendment Act and White Paper on International Migration represent the culmination of this process. While both are probably unimplementable and will be the subject of numerous court challenges, they can be seen as a major retreat and an increasing failure to protect. The second part of the paper traces the history of national and municipal informal sector governance since the early 1990s. Since so many refugees are forced or choose to work informally, the uncertainty and confusion this history has produced is of particular relevance. Refugee entrepreneurs have regularly been the victims of general and targeted informal sector eradication campaigns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".