To stay here is to suffer, to return home is to perish: Entangled Zimbabwean migrants, precarity, and the crisis of return in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa increasingly articulate a desire to “go back home,” yet few can enact return. This paper investigates why return persists as aspiration while remaining practically unreachable. Drawing on multi-sited qualitative material with Zimbabwean migrants across South African urban spaces, the paper shows how everyday life is organised by internal bordering (bureaucratic obstruction, street-level policing, workplace coercion, and housing exclusions) that renders migrants continually deportable even when deportation does not occur. This dispersed bordering regime is amplified by Afrophobic nationalist mobilisation, in which citizens, landlords, customers, and employers become informal border agents, transforming ordinary public space into a series of checkpoints. The cumulative effect is not only economic vulnerability but a deeper temporal violence: a rightless temporality in which planning collapses under expiring documents, discretionary enforcement, and the constant possibility of expulsion. Against this, migrants sustain “home” as an affective horizon and moral reference point yet describe return as materially unsafe and socially ruinous under Zimbabwe’s protracted economic and political crisis. The article’s central contribution is the concept of a crisis of return: a condition where return becomes simultaneously ethically necessary and practically unlivable, producing a durable state of suspension between abandonment and exclusion. Because this crisis is produced across borders, sending countries like Zimbabwe need durable solutions for rebuilding the political–economic foundations of dignified life at home (macroeconomic stability, livelihoods, credible public services, and political accountability), alongside host-state reforms that end the manufacturing of rightlessness through internal bordering. The paper advances debates on precarious citizenship, bordering within democracies, and the politics of waiting in contemporary Southern Africa.