Underneath the second Trump administration, there may be one group of individuals getting expedited entry to refugee standing and resettlement within the US.
It’s not residents of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the place 6.1 million folks have been internally displaced attributable to a long time of combating amongst armed teams and widespread gender-based violence. The US just isn’t at the moment accepting extra DRC residents as refugees beneath President Donald Trump.
It’s not Afghan residents both, regardless of the continued human rights violations, particularly towards girls and women, perpetrated by the Taliban after the US withdrawal from the nation in 2021. As an alternative, the Trump administration is now revoking short-term protections for a lot of Afghans already in America, which might consequence of their deportation again to Afghanistan.
And it’s not the Sudanese folks, of whom almost 8.6 million have been internally displaced amid a battle between navy and paramilitary forces.
A subset of white South Africans, referred to as Afrikaners, are the one folks Trump has newly admitted to the US as refugees. Trump has described them, with out proof, as victims of a “genocide that’s happening” and anti-white discrimination, echoing rhetoric that has lengthy circulated on the far proper. And he’s sought to punish South Africa for that by reducing off US support.
(The US authorities should admit some refugees from different nations who have been already within the resettlement pipeline earlier than Trump took workplace, per a court docket order issued in late March after the president tried to droop nearly all refugee admissions. However that court-ordered acceptance is a pointy distinction from the administration’s enthusiastic outreach to Afrikaners.)
Trump’s effort to label Afrikaners “refugees” relies on doubtful pretenses. The South African authorities and even some white South Africans argue that, after the tip of the apartheid system, which supported white minority rule in South Africa till the early Nineteen Nineties, white folks stay a privileged class. The standard Black family has 5 % of the wealth of the everyday white family. And police knowledge doesn’t present that Afrikaners, lots of whom are farmers, undergo from disproportionate ranges of violence that may quantity to genocide.
As a small minority of the inhabitants, white folks nonetheless personal a majority of the nation’s land. That hasn’t stopped Elon Musk from criticizing the nation’s land possession legal guidelines as “racist” towards white folks following the signing of a land reform invoice earlier this yr.
The regulation permits the federal government to grab property with out compensation solely in restricted circumstances, together with when the land just isn’t in use or has been deserted and if the proprietor is merely holding it as an funding within the hope that it’s going to recognize in worth. Afrikaner farmers have argued that the regulation may very well be used to grab their land towards their will, however the authorities has contested that declare, and there’s no proof that that is occurring.
As an alternative, the proof suggests Trump is selectively plucking a white minority for resettlement, whilst nonwhite folks going through warfare and famine all over the world have been shut out from safety within the US.
On Monday, the primary group of those Afrikaners, 49 folks in whole, arrived within the US, the place they are going to be supplied a “fast pathway” to US citizenship and obtain help from a refugee workplace inside the Division of Well being and Human Companies.
To study extra in regards to the impetus behind Trump’s choice, in addition to in regards to the state of affairs in South Africa, I spoke with Jacob S. Dlamini, a Princeton College historical past professor whose analysis has targeted on South African apartheid. Our dialog has been edited for size and readability.
Do white Afrikaners have a official declare to refugee standing?
I grew up beneath apartheid, actually beneath indicators that mentioned, “Whites solely.” White boys chased Black people for sport after I was rising up. This seems like an actual kick within the intestine.
There isn’t a substance to the declare that Afrikaners as a gaggle have been persecuted. These should not refugees by any stretch of the creativeness. They’re individuals who merely don’t wish to reside beneath majority-Black rule.
A few of them will speak about crime. I come from a household of small enterprise house owners who’ve suffered due to crime. I’ve misplaced pals to crime. I’ve misplaced relations to crime. Impartial stats present that whites as a gaggle should not disproportionately focused. If something, it’s poor individuals who bear the brunt of South Africa’s crime drawback — and it’s a major problem.
In his government order granting refugee standing to white Afrikaners, Trump referenced the South African authorities’s current land reform invoice, which he claims permits the seizure of “ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property with out compensation” and is “fueling disproportionate violence towards racially disfavored landowners.” Does that sq. with the fact in South Africa?
The very first piece of laws that Nelson Mandela signed into regulation when he turned president in Could of 1994 was a land reform invoice whose job was to appropriate what is basically South Africa’s unique political sin, and that was the taking away of land from indigenous peoples and allocating it to white South Africans for unique possession. For the previous 30 years, the federal government has truly failed spectacularly on that entrance. That failure helps clarify why immediately, in Could 2025, whites nonetheless personal greater than 70 % of farmland in South Africa. (Editor’s observe: Solely 7 % of the nation’s inhabitants is white.)
In reality, as white farmers themselves have been mentioning ever since Trump introduced his plans to do that, no single white farmer has had land taken away from him, and there’s no suggestion that that’s going to alter anytime quickly.
Do you suppose Trump’s coverage is proof of Elon Musk’s affect on this administration?
Musk just isn’t the one South African who’s bought Trump’s ear. There’s an entire cohort of white males who grew up, for a few of their lives, beneath apartheid in South Africa. That’s important.
The error that the media within the US has been making has been to give attention to Musk and to imagine that all of it radiates from him to Trump. In reality, there’s this complete cohort of white males who’ve but to return to phrases with democracy in South Africa, which means {that a} poor Black one who has no prospects in life has as a lot say politically in relation to elections as does a really wealthy white particular person. That’s what it comes right down to.
They’ve misplaced their energy, which isn’t the identical factor as privilege. For instance, it’s nonetheless the case that once you have a look at company South Africa, 62.1 % of company leaders are white, and most of these are males. Solely 17.2 % are so-called Black African. And that’s 30 years for the reason that creation of democracy.
What do Trump’s insurance policies imply for the South African authorities?
They’re in for 4 years of hell with Trump. However it is usually, I’m hoping, a wake-up name for the present (African Nationwide Congress) authorities to take South Africa’s poor way more critically. The incompetence and the corruption of the previous 30 years have, in some methods, pushed the ANC off the upper ethical floor that it occupied when Mandela was president.
Trump’s choice to deal with the chief beneficiaries of apartheid as victims of a genocide happening solely in his head provides the ANC an opportunity to get again on that ethical excessive floor by reminding the world simply how legal apartheid was.
The one greatest mistake that the ANC made for the time being of transition in 1994 was to imagine that each one that you just wanted to do to appropriate the injustices of apartheid was to create a Black capitalist class. All that this did was create this huge patronage system that had authorities contracts at its middle. This made the Black bourgeoisie depending on authorities enterprise and inspired corruption.
Wanting again during the last 30 years, we are able to see that pondering that you might use authorities contracts to create a Black enterprise class was only a horrible thought. Mockingly, the ANC copied the concept from successive apartheid governments, which used authorities patronage to construct an Afrikaner enterprise class. There’s not a single Afrikaner (billionaire in US {dollars}) in South Africa immediately who didn’t get their begin on the again of apartheid authorities contracts.
Corruption is endemic, and it’s an enormous drawback. After all, the factor about corruption in South Africa that we neglect is that it’s non-racial, it cuts throughout racial strains. Since you want these cross-cultural and racial networks to maneuver cash round, to launder cash. It’s a nationwide enterprise.
Who has suffered due to the incompetence and the corruption? It’s all South Africans, particularly the poor. White Afrikaners as a gaggle haven’t suffered solely.
How ought to we take into consideration Trump’s choice to welcome white Afrikaners as refugees within the context of his gutting of US refugee admissions broadly?
It’s bitterly ironic that he has stopped the processing of refugee functions for everybody besides this group of privileged white South Africans.
Marco Rubio kicked out South Africa’s ambassador to the US for mentioning the idea of Trump’s animus towards South Africa, however there isn’t a mistaking the white supremacist underpinnings of this. There isn’t a mistaking the crude racism on the coronary heart of this. You may have right here an administration that has and is punishing individuals who actually need all the assistance they will get, who’re coming right here or are right here for higher alternatives for his or her youngsters and for themselves, however it is going to cease at nothing to take this very privileged group of white South Africans and switch them into refugees, when, in reality, they’re something however refugees.
I grew up beneath apartheid. My mom went to her grave with out having voted within the nation of her beginning. I grew up combating the system.
I now discover myself in 2025 having to relitigate whether or not apartheid was fallacious. That’s what this quantities to: taking individuals who benefited and proceed to profit from this terrible system referred to as apartheid and turning them into victims and refugees. What Trump is speaking is that apartheid was proper. That’s morally repugnant and simply plain obscene.
