Transplants and transients: Nativism, nationalism, and migration in inner-city Johannesburg

As these groups meet and compete, they are developing new idioms for relating to each other and the space they both inhabit. South African citizens and politicians regularly appeal to a nativist discourse that finds commonality among the city's diverse South African population while making rights to the city contingent on one's national origins.

While this discourse is shaped by fear of foreigners transplanting themselves into their native soil, nonnationals' attitudes towards South Africa's people and territory reveals a different trajectory. Whereas non-indigenous plants must take root to survive, Johannesburg's alien population has developed an idiom of permanent transit through which they position themselves in an ephemeral, superior, and unrooted condition.