WORKING PAPER SERIES WP 2026/04 | August 2026
Namibia is entering a resource moment. Deep-water oil in the Orange Basin and a continental-scale green hydrogen build-out will draw foreign labour into an economy with among the highest unemployment and inequality in the world, and they will do so as its largest neighbour, South Africa, turns decisively against migrants.
This article asks how Namibians regard migrant workers, what drives those attitudes, and what they portend for a country on the cusp of a labour-importing boom. Drawing on Afrobarometer Round 10 (N = 1,200) with full survey weighting, and benchmarking Namibia against fifteen Southern African neighbours, it makes a central argument: opposition to migrant workers in Namibia is not the grievance of a threatened minority but a broad national consensus, largely unpatterned by class, education, employment, or region.
Namibians endorse continental trade and regional free movement in the abstract, and they largely accept migrants as neighbours, yet roughly three-quarters want fewer or no foreign job seekers.
Namibians endorse continental trade and regional free movement in the abstract, and they largely accept migrants as neighbours, yet roughly three-quarters want fewer or no foreign job seekers.
Factor analysis shows this gap between principle and practice to be the coexistence of two empirically distinct dimensions, economic restrictionism and social tolerance. Across the region these dimensions scarcely correlate, and Namibia occupies a position, restrictive on labour but socially tolerant, that sets it apart from South Africa, which is hostile on both.
Because the attitude is consensual rather than deprivation-driven, growth alone will not soften it; the burden falls instead on migration governance and the credibility of local-content policy.
The findings expose the thin mass consent beneath Africa’s elite-level integration commitments, and they carry a pointed historical irony for a nation forged in resistance to a coerced system of migrant contract labour.