An administration official’s attempt to explain Donald Trump’s decision to allow white South African “refugees” as an exception to his ban on asylum-seekers revealed just how racist the policy really is.
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau was greeting the group of 59 Afrikaners who arrived in Washington Monday, when he told a reporter that Afrikaners had received an exception to the president’s order because they could be “assimilated easily” into the United States.
The reporter had asked why Trump had chosen to prioritize Afrikaners, white descendants of mainly Dutch colonizers in South Africa, over other refugees from countries such as Afghanistan.
Landau explained that Trump’s ban on virtually all refugees “was subject, from the very beginning, to exceptions where it was determined that this would be in the interest of the United States.
“One of, some of the criteria are making sure that refugees did not pose any challenge to our national security, and that they could be assimilated easily into our country,” Landau said.
The deputy secretary’s language indicates that the Trump administration is willing to admit refugees who are more culturally and ethnically cohesive with the predominantly white U.S. population.
Trump has repeatedly attempted to blow up perceived cultural differences between U.S. citizens and immigrants as a basis for installing blatantly racist immigration policies.
Laundau’s comments come just months after Trump and his campaign team attempted to smear Haitian immigrant populations, baselessly claiming that a group of refugees in Springfield, Ohio, had begun cooking up their neighbors’ pets. JD Vance even targeted the children of undocumented immigrants across the country for not being fluent in English, claiming they were a strain on the American education system—which the administration obviously cares so much about, given that they gutted the federal agency that funds it.
In reality, Haitian migrants in Springfield created an economic revival in the struggling industrial city, and local officials in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, another of the towns Trump had targeted with racist smears, insisted that Trump was lying and that the language barrier for immigrant students was not an issue.
Trump’s blatantly racist rhetoric has gone on to inform his administration’s sinister immigration agenda, which seeks to strip immigrants, both documented and undocumented, of their legal protections and deport or exile them to foreign countries.
In short, any claims about wanting to ease assimilation are just as pathetic as Trump’s claims about immigrants eating cats and dogs.
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