Hundreds of Burundians have recently gathered outside their embassy in Nairobi, not to protest, but to seek documents that would allow them to leave Kenya.
That detail matters.
It came after Kenyan President William Ruto directed authorities to crack down on small-scale businesses operated by foreign traders. The government later clarified that the directive concerns foreigners who do not have the necessary permits and licenses and announced a 90-day window for undocumented East Africans to regularize their status.
The government has also warned against harassment, intimidation and xenophobia, insisting that registered foreigners will be protected.
But the fear did not disappear with the clarification.
Some Burundians have continued seeking a way home, with people telling Reuters they feel unwelcome and unsafe. Some reportedly spent days at the embassy waiting for assistance.
That is where the story becomes bigger than immigration paperwork.
There is a difference between enforcing immigration and business laws and creating an atmosphere in which someone begins to wonder whether being a foreigner itself has become a liability.
And Kenya is not alone in confronting that question.
Xenophobia is not a new disease.
It existed long before social media, smartphones and the internet. Whenever economies become difficult and opportunities become scarce, societies have often looked for someone to blame. The outsider is an attractive target because the explanation is simple: there would be enough for us if they were not here.
But something is different about xenophobia today.
We can hear it. Constantly.
A generation ago, an angry conversation in a marketplace might have remained in that marketplace. A rumor might have travelled from one person to another, slowly losing or changing its details along the way.
Today, somebody can record it, post it and give it an audience of thousands within minutes. Social media did not invent xenophobia.
It gave it a microphone.
And sometimes, an enormous one.
That distinction matters because it is tempting to look at hateful comments appearing online and conclude that society itself has suddenly become more hateful.
Perhaps some of it has.
But perhaps we are also seeing something that was always there, only less visible.
The internet has changed the distance between a private prejudice and a public movement.
A person who once had five people willing to listen can now find 50,000.
A rumour that once stayed within one neighbourhood can cross a border before breakfast.
A video from Nairobi can be watched in Bujumbura, Kigali, Kampala or Dar es Salaam within minutes. A claim does not have to be true to travel. It only has to be emotionally convincing.
And economic fear is particularly powerful.
When people are struggling to find jobs, when small businesses are under pressure, when the cost of living rises and when citizens feel that opportunities are disappearing, frustration needs somewhere to go.
The foreigner can become an easy explanation for a difficult economic reality.
This is where Kenya’s current situation deserves more than a simple argument about whether the government is right or wrong.
There can be legitimate questions about immigration status, business permits and competition.
But the conversation becomes dangerous when the question changes from:
“Is this person operating legally?”
to:
“Why are foreigners doing this business at all?”
The first is a question of law.
The second begins to make nationality itself the problem.
That is the line worth watching. And Kenya’s case carries an uncomfortable regional dimension.
The people at the centre of the current anxiety are not strangers from a distant continent.
Burundians and Kenyans are part of the same East African neighbourhood.
The East African Community has spent years promoting regional integration, cross-border trade and the movement of people.
Yet the reality of integration is tested not when economies are comfortable, but when opportunities become scarce.
It is easy to celebrate open borders when everyone believes there is something to gain.
It is much harder when one person’s opportunity begins to look like another person’s loss.
That is where xenophobia becomes politically useful.
It can turn a complicated economic problem into a story with a villain.
Instead of asking why citizens cannot access enough jobs, capital or markets, the conversation can become about who should be allowed to compete for what already exists.
And social media can accelerate that transformation.
Algorithms do not know the difference between a carefully researched economic argument and an angry accusation simply because one is better informed. What matters online is often what keeps people watching, commenting and sharing.
Anger travels.
Fear travels.
Outrage travels.
Nuance usually takes longer.
This does not mean every Kenyan criticising foreign businesses is xenophobic. It would be unfair and analytically lazy to suggest that.
Nor does it mean every foreign trader is automatically a victim.
The more difficult truth is that both economic grievances and xenophobic reactions can exist at the same time.
A government can have legitimate reasons to enforce its laws.
Citizens can have legitimate economic frustrations.And foreigners can still experience discrimination because of how those frustrations are expressed.
All three things can be true.
That is why the Burundians gathering at their embassy are more than a migration story.
They are a measure of how quickly fear can become real.
Kenya has now tried to slow the situation down with a 90-day regularization period and assurances that foreigners should not be harassed. But for some of the people already standing outside an embassy with their belongings, the reassurance may have arrived after something more difficult had already happened: their sense of belonging had been shaken.
Perhaps we are not necessarily living in a world with more xenophobia than before.
Perhaps we are living in a world where xenophobia has finally found a permanent loudspeaker.
The challenge, then, is not simply to silence the loudspeaker.
It is to ask why so many people are willing to listen.
