Hours after being sworn in, President Donald Trump began targeting migrants seeking refuge or asylum. He brought the entire refugee system to a halt, preventing the resettlement of tens of thousands of already screened refugees and stopping the admission of thousands of Afghan refugees. He also ended humanitarian parole for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, “leaving more than 500,000 already living here in legal limbo,” according to ProPublica.
But there’s one group of “refugees” Trump is ready to welcome.
I bet you can guess.
Last week Trump signed an executive order stating that his administration would “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” Many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the world are fleeing state-related persecution and would love to come to the United States. Hundreds of thousands of them are already here, working and contributing to their communities. Some of them have already been victims of vicious slander from Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance. The Trump administration has closed its door to all of them, except for one white ethnic group in South Africa.
Land reform is a complicated issue in South Africa. Since the 1994 end of apartheid—a system of forced racial separation and domination that granted full rights only to South Africa’s white minority while categorizing nonwhite South Africans as inferior—racial inequality in South Africa has barely budged. The 7 percent of the South African population that is white remains much wealthier than the rest of the population. Black South Africans own only 4 percent of the land while white South Africans own about three-quarters, a consequence of the apartheid government’s half-century-long practice of forcibly seizing land from Black South Africans and displacing millions into “homelands” used to maintain the fiction of a white South African majority. Laws also prevented Black South Africans from owning land outside the cramped territory allotted to them.
Last month, South Africa passed a law that allows the expropriation of land if it is unused or the public has a need for it. In some cases, it would allow the government to do so without compensating the owners. Afriforum, an Afrikaner group, called the government’s policy “irresponsible.” But the South African government insists that it is not seeking large-scale expropriation. Its foreign minister compared the policy to eminent-domain laws in the United States. Neighbouring Zimbabwe, whose government confiscated much of its white farmers’ land, has suffered from dire economic consequences, and South Africa clearly isn’t interested in redistributing wealth in a way that collapses the economy. A coalition of organizations representing white South Africans stated categorically that their members are not interested in Trump’s offer: “We may disagree with the ANC, but we love our country.”
Trump’s executive order also stopped aid to South Africa, which was already dealing with the devastating aftermath of the USAID freeze. The order may, in part, have been the result of the influence of his wealthy donors, who include far-right billionaires with roots in South Africa, such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks. But the idea that white South African farmers have been targets of state oppression and ethnic violence has been a cause célèbre on the American right for a while now.
It was a focus of Tucker Carlson’s now-defunct Fox News program, where he claimed that land reforms meant to address apartheid-era injustices were the “definition of racism.” (He also complained about efforts to address discrimination against Black farmers, which is apparently fine.) Carlson’s coverage led Trump, the last time he was in office, to order then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into “farm seizures” and already disproved reports of “large scale killings” of white farmers. Experts on the topic dismissed these inflammatory allegations as white-nationalist propaganda; one former ambassador to South Africa called Trump’s rhetoric “dangerous and poisoned” and accused him of spreading “a white-supremacist meme from the darkest place he can find.”
Violence against white people in South Africa is certainly not unheard of—the country’s murder rate is very high. But white South Africans, including farmers, are much less likely to be murdered than Black South Africans. Living standards for white South Africans also remain very high, with only 1 percent in poverty, compared with 64 percent of Black South Africans.
Whether or not any white South Africans take Trump up on his offer to come to the United States, the offer itself tells us a great deal about the Trump administration.
Even if one accepted the idea that white South Africans were being persecuted, and that as a result they deserved special dispensation as refugees, it does not follow that they are the only people in the world who do. The Trump administration has withdrawn protections from people fleeing leftist regimes in places such as Venezuela and Cuba, as well as from people fleeing right-wing ones in places like Afghanistan. It has stated that its policy is to accept as few refugees as possible. It then chose to roll out the red carpet for one particular set of white people. That, itself, is functionally an apartheid immigration policy: One set of lenient rules for white people, and another merciless set for everyone else.
The Trump administration insists that it wants to “forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based,” but this immigration policy shows that is obviously false. When the administration says decisions are “color-blind and merit-based,” it most likely means We see you as white, and therefore worthy. And that is a sweeping ideological worldview, not a narrow rubric that can be confined to immigration.
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