White South Africans Are the Only Refugees Trump Welcomes

Even for Trump, it’s an egregiously racist gesture. Photo: Eric Lee/The New York Times/Redux

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump painted refugees from war-torn or impoverished countries as a dire and immediate threat to national security, and to every U.S. community in which they sought shelter. He more generally accused the Biden administration of having created an “open border” in order to flood the country with illegal immigrants, many with criminal backgrounds. Two specific mechanisms for this alleged Biden-generated “invasion” were the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program (begun in 1990) that gives safety from immediate deportation for migrants from 17 countries and the asylum and resettlement opportunities granted to individuals through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (initiated in 1980).

Sure enough, one of Trump’s first-day executive orders suspended asylum and resettlement via USRAP indefinitely, stranding some refugees already on the way. And on February 3, newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem canceled an extension of TPS status for 348,000 Venezuelans (the first to expire with an extension) beyond April. That’s over half the migrants protected by TPS, and no one doubts others will be canceled when they expire as well. There’s a new sheriff in town, Team Trump wants the whole world to know, so that no one, however oppressed, will dare to head our way in the hope of sanctuary.

But there is one group of oppressed people whose plight is so heart-rending, and whose desperate situation is so compelling, that the 47th president wants to roll out the red carpet: Afrikaner landowners in South Africa. That’s right: As CBS News explains, on February 7 Trump issued an executive order that “directed government officials to prioritize the resettlement of South Africans of European descent through the U.S. refugee program, which he suspended during his first day in office.” The order justified this offer of asylum as a reaction to the “egregious” persecution represented by a South African law that allows some expropriation of land without compensation to the prior owners, most if not all of whom secured their privileged position under the apartheid regime that finally ended in 1992. To Trump, this makes “Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination” sort of long-distance MAGA brothers.

Trump’s order also rambles off into attacks on South Africa’s position on the Israel-Hamas war, which hardly seems germane to an offer of refugee status to some of its citizens. And the emergency nature of this rather incredible contradiction of the new administration’s crackdown on any sort of immigration other than through normal legal channels is belied by the fact that the beneficiaries of this great act of empathy basically said “thanks but no thanks,” as Reuters reports:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s offer to rehouse white South Africans as refugees fleeing persecution may not spur quite the rush he anticipates, as even right-wing white lobby groups want to “tackle the injustices” of Black majority rule on home soil. …

Afrikaners are mostly white descendants of early Dutch and French settlers, who own most of the country’s farmland. …

[The Afrikaner rights group AfriForum], which lobbied Trump’s previous administration on their cause, said it was not taking up the offer.

“Emigration only offers an opportunity for Afrikaners who are willing to risk potentially sacrificing their descendants’ cultural identity as Afrikaners. The price for that is simply too high,” AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel said on Saturday.

Separately, the Solidarity Movement - which includes AfriForum and Solidarity trade union and said it represents about 600,000 Afrikaner families and 2 million individuals - expressed commitment to South Africa.

“We may disagree with the [governing] ANC, but we love our country. As in any community, there are individuals who wish to emigrate, but repatriation of Afrikaners as refugees is not a solution for us,” the Movement said.

So Trump is more than willing to deport and reject refugees from “shithole countries” (as he once described Haiti, El Salvador, and African — presumably Black African — countries) no matter how authentically frantic they are for asylum. But without even being asked, he wants to reach out to an overseas white-identity group in a political battle over property and give them privileges they don’t even want. He once wistfully said he wished the U.S. had more immigrants from Norway. Perhaps in the Afrikaners he saw a great white hope for an infusion of what he likes to call “high-quality persons.” Perhaps as a follow-up to his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, Trump will order that the Statue of Liberty’s famous inscription now read, “Give Us Your Rich, Your White, Your Landowners Yearning to Be Separate!”