Understanding the Foreign-Born Population Living in South Africa: In the Time of the Demographic Dividend

Princelle Dasappa-Venketsamy, Statistics South Africa

Although human mobility has gained increasing international attention in recent years, migration by young people has been mostly absent from global policy debates and national policies. Hence, this paper adds to discourse, focusing on the spatial, sociodemographic and housing profile of foreign-born adolescents in South Africa, using data from Community Survey 2016.About 51% of all foreign-born adolescents were female, and the majority of foreign-born adolescents in South Africa were black African (88,3%). Almost three-quarters of foreign-born adolescents were not South African citizens. Only 66,2% of migrants in this cohort were attending an educational institution at the time. Almost three times as many foreign-born adolescents (21,1%) as SA-born adolescents lived in informal dwellings. Almost ten per cent of migrant adolescents were concerned about violence and crime in the municipality they lived in. In this stead, 10,54% of migrant adolescents had been victims of crime in the year before the survey.