Transcript: Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

NARRATOR: Resentment towards the migrants is on the rise. A recent poll shows that 95% of Botswanans support heightened border security.

MAN ON STREET 1: There are too many Zimbabweans in Francistown.

I mean you can tell there's a Zimbabwean because mostly they look dirty somehow.

Sometimes they smell, you know.

MAN ON STREET 2: You know, I had a friend who was sometimes joking saying that there are more Zimbabweans here than in Zimbabwe.

MAN ON STREET 3: Botswana people are angry.

They're unemployed.

They're very angry.

Each and every morning somebody wakes up in the morning to go out and look for a job, and only to find that a Zimbabwean guy with cheap labor has taken over the job.

MAN ON STREET 1: People employ Zimbabweans because they believe they're hard workers. They prefer them than the Batswana. So somehow they feel threatened, you know, yeah.

MAN ON STREET 4: They will do lesser jobs just to, you know, just to work. I mean it's, they need a job, so they need to work.

So they'll do anything. Regardless of their references or CVs or whatever, they'll do work.

NARRATOR: The question of how to cope with the influx of illegal immigrants regularly makes headlines.

Nomsa Ndlovu is a journalist with the Francistown Voice. She has been reporting the growing tensions between her countrymen and the border jumpers.

Ndlovu recently reported one sensational case. A Botswanan woman suspected Zimbabweans of stealing food from her kitchen. So one night she laced it with rat poison.

NDLOVU: Then, as usual, these Zimbabweans ate the food but then three of them died and one managed to survive.

Many people were saying 'Oh, we are sick and tired of the Zimbabweans stealing, And if people can just do this.' You know, everybody was applauding the old woman for doing that. So there was nobody who was regretting that maybe it resulted in the loss of a human being.

But everybody was like, 'Oh, if everybody could just copy this woman then we will have no problems of these Zimbabweans stealing in our houses.' Nobody sympathizes with them any longer.

NARRATOR: Still, Ndlovu grew up in Zimbabwe and is alarmed by the rising hostility of her fellow Botswanans.

NDLOVU: If I didn't have anything to put on my table, if I didn't have money to pay my -- my children's school fees, to pay rent and everything, then the first person that I can look at is my neighbor.