Constrained Agency Under Existential Threat: Immigrant Entrepreneurship and Expulsion

Structural and sociocultural constraints have long shaped African immigrant entrepreneurship in South Africa. The organised anti-foreigner campaigns of 2025–2026 echoed the earlier expulsions in Ghana (1969) and Nigeria (1983). What made the South African campaigns different was that the host society itself became the organised source of existential threat. This article aimed to develop a theoretical framework accounting for how entrepreneurial agency changes when organised political mobilisation simultaneously threatens physical safety, legal presence, and venture survival. The framework was developed as a conceptual model by drawing on constrained agency theory alongside scholarship on institutions, social movements, scapegoating, and moral panic. Rather than being tested with primary data, it was illustrated through historical and contemporary African cases. CAT-ET suggests that when constraints become existential, agency tends to shift towards either adaptive persistence or strategic exit. Two interacting mechanisms were specified: functional institutional inaccessibility under violence, whereby protective institutions remained operational but selectively inaccessible, and the entrepreneur-as-symbol dynamic, whereby immigrant ventures became politically constructed as emblems of economic grievance. CAT-ET reframed organised expulsion as a recurring political-economic process and offered a basis for comparative research across the Global South.