Small-scale, kin-based firms thrive in impoverished African economies where profit margins are narrow, credit is tight and conditions are risky. Their flexible structure and ability to self-regulate allow them to enter markets which larger, better-capitalised multinational firms find either too marginal or too hazardous to enter.

Yet “stranger” status is a double-edged sword. As members of a distinct and highly visible minority, immigrants are susceptible to abuse by host country citizens and governments. Hosts typically harbour negative stereotypes about foreigners, insulting them as “illegal aliens” and parasites who take advantage of local consumers and expatriate their profits.

Such perceptions can fuel xenophobic violence, as happened in May 2008, when mobs attacked immigrants in South African townships, leaving at least 62 dead and thousands homeless. In 2013, two Somali shopkeepers were hacked to death in Limpopo province, and a third stoned to death in Port Elizabeth. A video of the stoning was posted to the internet, a graphic reminder of the perils that accompany foreigners.

More often, hosts’ negative perceptions amplify everyday social tensions and discrimination. Congolese public officials levy all manner of bogus fees on foreign African shopkeepers in Brazzaville, knowing that these immigrants are resigned to such treatment and unlikely to protest. Ordinary Congolese perceived west African merchants as “free riders” who profited from local communities without giving back. Merchants canvassed during my fieldwork, however, felt they paid far more than formal taxation and other legal payments, thanks to routine petty extortion.

At times, tensions have led to the mass expulsion of foreign Africans. Dozens of such evictions were carried out from the 1950s through the 1990s in countries including Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Uganda and Zambia. Most of these operations entailed a few thousand deportations. The largest – in Nigeria in 1983 – uprooted 2m people, mostly from Ghana and other neighbouring countries, according to a 2002 paper by Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos of the Institute of Policy Studies in Paris. Nigerians still use this operation’s unofficial moniker, “Ghana must go”, as a nickname for the type of cheap plastic-fibre bags used by deportees to haul away their belongings.

Expulsion orders tend to be politically popular in the short term, as immigrants make convenient scapegoats for high unemployment and rising prices. Yet expulsions never solve host countries’ economic problems. The social factors underlying the foreigners’ economic success remain unchanged. Nationalised businesses eventually fail. Deportees slowly resume their activities and the whole affair is gradually forgotten.

Perhaps African governments have learned from their mistakes, as large-scale deportations have become less frequent over the past two decades. Extensive expulsion operations have continued, however, in a few countries. Since 2009, Angola has deported tens of thousands of Congolese and west Africans, according to a 2012 report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. South Africa deported more than 2.5m Zimbabweans between 1988 and 2010, according to Department of Home Affairs figures, quoted in “Contemporary Migration to South Africa: a Regional Development Issue”, by Aurelia Segatti and Loren Landau.

Despite this sometimes sordid history, the relationship between African immigrants and their hosts is often mutually beneficial. By converting their outsider status into entrepreneurial success, foreigners provide goods and services for the host country’s consumers, and formal and informal revenue for its public officials. They frequently perform labour their hosts are unwilling to do. In Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, for example, locals view driving taxis, pushing hand trucks or any form of manual labour as degrading, suitable only for outsiders, as described in anthropologist Sasha Newell’s 2012 book, “The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire”.

Immigrants, coversely, work in jobs they would have been unwilling to do at home: many Malian immigrants in Cameroon, for example, manufacture metal cooking pots for local consumption – even though taboos in their villages of origin bar them from working with metal.

The ability of “strangers” to operate in high-risk environments has helped reinvigorate stagnant, conflict-ravaged economies, such as in the Republic of Congo or Mozambique, where traders from several west African countries have operated.

Governments can strengthen the symbiotic nature of host-immigrant relations by earning foreigners’ confidence. To do this, they must fortify the rule of law: wise entrepreneurs will not invest where they fear losing their property to greedy officials or mob violence, or where their official permits do not prevent extortion against them. As long as migrants feel discriminated against and unable to enjoy equal protection under the law, they and their hosts will view each other with suspicion and the full potential benefits of their interaction will not be realised.

This article was first published by Good Governance Africa.