When President Donald Trump welcomed dozens of white South Africans into the United States this week after granting them refugee status, reporters reasonably asked him to square this with his suspension of refugee resettlement from, well, every other country in the world. Trump denied any racial motive. “Farmers are being killed,” he said. “They happen to be white. Whether they are white or black makes no difference to me.”
That’s obvious nonsense, which some news accounts noted, albeit obliquely. As The New York Times politely put it, the decision to resettle “white Afrikaners has raised questions about who the ‘right’ immigrants are, in Mr. Trump’s view.”
Indeed it does. But there’s an even more glaring absurdity here that emerges if you compare the plight of these Afrikaners with that of another distinct population of refugees. I’m talking about the refugees from all over the world, likely in the thousands, who had already received approval to come here under President Joe Biden, but have seen their resettlement interrupted as it was happening, in an act of extraordinary cruelty from Trump and fascist sidekick Stephen Miller. They are now waiting abroad, in limbo, uncertain whether they will ever attain refuge in the United States.
This particular contrast makes the whole saga even more vile. Here’s why: In February, in a lawsuit brought on behalf of refugees granted protections under Biden, a court temporarily ruled against Trump and directed the government to continue resettling some of them. Trump officials have delayed acting on this for months. One of their excuses has been that the resettlement infrastructure has badly decayed on their watch (which is their own doing).
Now contrast this with what happened to the Afrikaners. Trump issued an executive order on February 7th directing the government to resettle those suffering humanitarian hardships back at home. Now dozens of them have undergone the entire process—from originally applying to getting settled in the United States—in barely more than three months.
How is this possible, if the resettlement bureaucracy is in shambles? Given that quick action, why can’t the administration also resettle those other refugees already granted protections by the U.S. government?
There is no begrudging the resettlement of any Afrikaners who genuinely face persecution, and some have attested to real suffering. Nonetheless, this whole process stinks from top to bottom. It likely has been infected by deep corruption, not just naked racism, and should be understood as such.
First, it’s not clear how these Afrikaners were designated a refugee class. Trump has claimed that “white farmers are being brutally killed” in a “genocide” while claiming their “land is being confiscated.” But as the Times reports, crime data debunks the narrative of systematic racial killing in South Africa, and Trump is badly distorting the situation surrounding land ownership there, which remains dominated by whites.
But even if you accept that some of these folks are suffering persecution, the whole process still looks deeply dubious.
Several sources at non-governmental organizations tell me they’ve heard directly from administration officials that the government’s refugee resettlement agencies were prodded by top administration people to fast-track the resettlement of Afrikaners in particular. “They have been under intense political pressure to pull out all the stops to get Afrikaners here as rapidly as possible,” one of the sources says.
That dovetails with reporting by The Lever showing that the administration has aggressively recruited outside refugee organizations to assist in resettling Afrikaners, an odd posture for officials otherwise suspending refugee programs entirely. All this suggests that Trump and Miller were eager to mount the spectacle of resettling Afrikaners—and rushed to find willing subjects—while denying it to all other refugees.
You can see this sordid game in their public theatrics. “What’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created,” Miller said. “This is race-based persecution.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, meanwhile, lamented the “suffering” of “Afrikaner refugees,” describing them as a “long-persecuted minority group.”
It’s true that the refugee program is for people who face “race-based persecution,” as well as persecution based on religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion. But why do white South Africans merit resettlement on this basis while other persecuted groups do not?
Consider the plight of those who have already gained refugee status but are now in limbo. A bunch of them represented by the International Refugee Assistance Project are suing the administration. Read the court papers and you’ll see they’re enduring a plight very much like the one Miller and Leavitt treat as so heart-rending when endured by white South Africans.
One of them is “Alyas,” a Yazidi religious minority who testified to seeing horrific violence and murder carried out against his people in Iraq. He finally gained refugee status just recently. He was set to travel to the U.S. in February after waiting for years, until this was abruptly suspended under Trump, leaving him, his wife and young son waiting, adrift. Many of the others describe similarly awful hardship, then their elation at winning the opportunity to come to the U.S.—and now their shock and sadness at having it snatched away at the last minute.
The court has directed the administration to resume resettlement of at least 160 people who have won refugee status. Why won’t officials do so? “If the administration can process Afrikaners in three months,” says Yael Schacher, a director at Refugees International, “it’s inconceivable they can’t process people who have already been vetted, having applied years ago.”
It’s unclear when Trump decided that white Afrikaners are suffering “genocide.” But the Times reports that Trump has been privately saying since the 1990s that South Africa is a cautionary tale for the United States, which should avoid letting nonwhites become the majority. In 2018, after Tucker Carlson did a segment on South Africa, Trump tweeted that “white farmers” face rampant discrimination, land seizures, and “large scale killing.”
Here Trump is trafficking in a kind of internationalized version of great replacement theory. It’s an obsession, one that has long festered on the white nationalist far right, with the fate of supposedly embattled white populations around the world that must rally to each other’s aid to avoid eventual extinction. South Africa’s “white farmers” have become a kind of totem for this cause, a symbol of this broader demographic “plight.”
It’s hard to know how deeply bought into this Trump, Miller, and Leavitt truly are. But when they use smarmy, cooked-up emotional language describing white South Africans as a “persecuted minority” class enduring terrible suffering, while rubbing our faces in their gleeful abandonment of genuinely persecuted minorities, they’re sending a clear message: the only victims of mass persecution who count are white ones. They are inventing a special new category—white world-historical victimhood—while taunting us with their power to erase actual historical crimes and replace them with massive historical lies, simply by declaring it so.
Let’s get real: Trump and his fellow travelers are actively putting on the show of admitting white Afrikaners while simultaneously slamming the gates on all other refugees from elsewhere in Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East. The repugnant inconsistency of this is itself the intended message. Which is exactly why they are flaunting it for all of us to see—deliberately, aggressively, and proudly.
