If there is some unrest, the homes of "those people" will be raided by mobs, their women raped, and property looted. They might even be killed and run out of the area all together. Nine out of ten times in most of Africa they will be the “immigrants”. In most of Africa, this is the principal way in which the question of immigrants manifests itself. These people will have come from a different region: be it the next-door district or a neighboring country.

In the cities, the immigrants will be more distinct: Usually descendants of Indians who arrived at the end of the 19th century to build the Kenya-Uganda Railway, who survived malaria and lions, or those of white settlers who didn’t leave Africa after independence, or Arab traders of centuries gone by.

In any event, while in the rural areas the immigrant’s wealth will be attributed to a powerful evil force, in the urban areas its source is usually alleged to be modern crimes like tax evasion and smuggling.

Defending immigrants everywhere in the word is not a popular cause for politicians with their eyes on the next election. Immigrants sometimes don’t help their cause much, sticking mostly to themselves, setting up separate schools, their own places of worship, and rarely marrying outside their community.

On balance, though, immigrants bring good things, although it might not always be evident. Last year there was a spate of attacks on Somalian refugees and immigrants in South Africa. Over two dozen were killed, and several had their shops ransacked.

Reports claimed local merchants who were being run out of business by the more efficient and enterprising Somalis engineered the attacks. However, not all local merchants felt that way. In some parts of South Africa, the traders said Somali competition had been good for their businesses. They said it shook them out their lethargy, and they too began to look for new and cheaper sources of the goods they used to sell. Immigrants forced them to open longer hours. And they all made more money in the end.

In East Africa, and elsewhere in Africa, I think this is the greatest service that immigrants serve: They force the attentive local communities to look at their environment differently and question the way they do business.

In many parts of East Africa, sometimes I feel we have too irrational an attachment to land. It has its cultural and spiritual value, but it has hobbled progress. Many an African will cling to his land, tilling it year in year out, overgrazing it, and squeezing every little bit he or she can from it. After many years, the land will be exhausted. But he stays on, unable to let go, getting poorer. This worship of land -- though not acknowledged -- is one of the major causes of African misery, I suspect.

On the other hand, apart from the Madhivani and Metha families in Uganda, who created their wealth from growing sugar, the bulk of Asian wealth in East Africa didn’t come from working land, but trade and industry.

Many of them start in the smaller towns, as the giant supermarket Nakumatt did in Kenya. Once they have accumulated enough capital, the younger members usually leave the grannies in the small town and move to the city to create new fortunes.

This move is easy for immigrants because they rarely develop obsessive ties to the places they have settled. For most indigenous Africans, this is not easy.

If he has a successful business in a small town, he can’t pack up easily and go to look for new opportunities in a city. He travels in the opposite direction to the immigrant -- to his farm in the village to check on his bananas and goats.

Gradually, however, more and locals are learning that there is a better way to beat immigrants at business than burning down their stores. And if indeed Asians are tax dodgers, indigenous folks have surpassed them.

And in many parts of East Africa, immigrants have helped reduce or end centuries’ old animosities between neighboring communities. Where village and village had fought for years, the wars stopped when immigrants arrived and turned old battlefields into lush tea plantations and banana gardens.

Ancient warring communities now united against a new enemy. It’s not good for the new victims, but at least it shifted the conflict from complex historical feuds, to an arena where they became solvable. For example, by land redistribution.

At a wider level, in Uganda, agitation against Asian domination of commerce during the 1950s provided regional and tribal parties with a cause that transformed them into national pro-independence organizations.

But it will be a while before attitudes change fully. There still are quite a few East Africans in the cities who believe that the reason they are poor is because the Asians are rich. And if there is a prolonged drought, the culprits in the villages will accuse "those people" of keeping away the rain.