New Delhi, June 26 -- JOHANNESBURG - Three thousand Malawians, among them hundreds of children, have been sleeping in an open field in Durban through South African winter nights. They fled their homes in the weeks after anti-immigrant vigilante groups began burning foreign-owned businesses across the country, and they are waiting, in the cold, for a government aircraft to take them home.

a June 30 deadline set by Operation Dudula and March and March, two anti-immigrant groups demanding that all undocumented foreigners leave South Africa. The South African government has called the deadline legally meaningless. The families in Durban's open field have decided not to wait and find out.

What is unfolding is not a domestic immigration enfor...