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President Trump’s controversial program expediting the process for white Afrikaners to relocate to the United States has attracted approximately 6,500 people from South Africa so far, but some now want to return home. Afrikaners in South Africa last year, praising Trump for the program. NPR/SCREEN GRAB
Thousands of mainly white South Africans, hoping the grass is greener on the other side of the hill, are taking advantage of President Trump’s dislike of their black-led government by signing up for a contentious “refugee” program that gives them expedited residence in the United States.
Trump announced the US would welcome Afrikaner “refugees” in an executive order issued on Feb. 7, 2025, in which he condemned South Africa’s decision to bring a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and accused it, among other things, of “developing nuclear arrangements with Iran.” But just over a year into the program, with nearly 6,500 South Africans having arrived, cracks are appearing as some of the “refugees” have decided to go back home — where they supposedly face intolerable racist persecution and even genocide.
According to a recent Reuters report, four South Africans who arrived this year in the US have since returned. According to reports on YouTube, another family of nine who were resettled in Florida have expressed willingness to go back to South Africa rather than put up with the problems they are facing in their new home.
Evan Gelobter, an assistant professor at the Southern University Law Center in Louisiana and an immigration lawyer, said the unhappy South Africans, even though they represented a tiny minority, had thrown the entire refugee program into jeopardy, even as Washington, according to the Reuters report, is considering more than doubling the annual intake by raising the cap on total refugee arrivals of South Africans by 10,000 to 17,500.
The New York Times later reported that Trump officials were citing an “unforeseen emergency” as the reason to boost the quota of South Africans, but it remained vague about the emergency.
In January 2025, as one of his first acts in office, Trump froze the entire US Refugee Admissions Program, under which 125,000 refugees a year had been admitted under the Biden administration. But the following month, Trump announced the exception for Afrikaners, and in September 2025 the Federal Register reported that the cap for financial year 2026 would be 7,500, “primarily allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa.”
The State Department reported this month that from Oct. 1, 2025 through April 30, 2026, a total of 6,069 refugees arrived in the US, three Afghans, the rest South Africans. In the final months of the previous financial year, 335 South Africans had arrived. Most of the South Africans, about 770, have been resettled in Texas, followed by Florida and California, with about 450 each.
A feature of the US program that appears to be unique is that would-be participants apply from within South Africa — usually, people fleeing persecution or war apply for refugee status once they arrive in a new host country.
“The 1951 Convention definition of a refugee requires that the person must be outside their country of nationality to be recognized as a refugee,” a United Nations Refugee Agency spokesperson told PassBlue. “Most claims are processed outside refugees’ countries of origin, after they have fled to seek protection.”
The spokesperson added that the UN agency was not involved in the US program and was “therefore not in a position to discuss [it]. Individual cases should be assessed on their merits.”
Gelobter, who posts almost daily YouTube videos directed at participants in the program, said of the discontented “refugees”: “I’m very angry. This refugee program is a gift, but the actions of these people who come here . . . and [then], because it wasn’t the lap of luxury, because conditions might not have been perfect, decide to go back, have the potential to end, or significantly undermine the refugee program.”
Gelobter noted that if the “America first” political movement viewed the program as a a waste of taxpayers’ dollars, Trump could easily sacrifice it to shore up support in an election year. Being willing to return to the country where a refugee had claimed to face persecution was “the kill shot” for asylum applications, Gelobter said.
“Persecution is more than mere discrimination or harassment,” he said. “It is extreme levels of conduct; it is threats to life [and] liberty, physical pain. We do not provide refugee or asylum programs for discrimination or harassment.” Refugee programs were “never meant to be immigration programs.”
But that is exactly how at least some participants appear to view the Trump initiative.
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Christopher Landau, US deputy secretary of state, greeting just-arriving white Afrikaners in Washington, who resettled in the US, May 2025.
Middle class and comfortable
The point man for many of the South Africans who have applied for Trump’s program is a retired US Army colonel, Chris Wyatt, whose YouTube channel routinely derides the South African government and offers advice and support for the migrants.
Wyatt’s interviews with South Africans who have landed in the US under the program make clear that many of them are middle class and led comfortable lives in South Africa, and that the country’s high level of violent crime is a major incentive for them to leave. The South Africans are given air tickets — they must pay back the flight cost in installments once they find jobs in the US — and a $2,000 grant. Resettlement agencies contracted by the federal government help the newcomers to find accommodation and provide other services.
Wyatt expressed outrage on YouTube about the “misbehaving” South Africans who had gone home, calling them “sissypants” who were unwilling to put up with the challenges of starting life in a new country.
“There are people who have used this program to their advantage, to come there as if they are on holiday; shame on you. . . . What the hell’s wrong with these people? If you came here, and you want to go back, why did you defraud my country? Clearly, you’re not suffering from unjust racial persecution, clearly your life is not in jeopardy, clearly you can find work; then why did you come here in the first place?” Wyatt said. “You undermine the credibility of this program.”
Trump initially specified that white Afrikaners — descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers who began arriving in South Africa in 1652 — would benefit from the program, but after it was implemented, members of all racial or ethnic minorities were told they could apply. One such group is known in South Africa as “Coloureds,” who are of mixed-raced descent. Wyatt has interviewed several such “refugees” on his YouTube channel. Members of South Africa’s Indian community are also said to have applied.
Trump’s invitation to Afrikaners to come to the US as refugees fleeing racist persecution is based on fictions — that the African National Congress-led government is seizing their land without compensation and that a “white genocide” is being conducted against them.
Although there is legislation in South Africa allowing for expropriation of property without compensation in limited circumstances, it has never been applied, and no farmer has claimed to have been the target of such action. Trump’s claim about “white genocide” has grown out of tweets he posted in 2018, when he referred to large-scale murders of white farmers, apparently after watching Tucker Carlson’s reports on Fox News.
Farm invasions
Conservative groups representing white farmers in South Africa have long complained about the failure of police to curb the robbery gangs who invade isolated farms and kill their owners, in some cases after torturing them. These groups have suggested the crimes are politically motivated, because the culprits in almost all reported instances have been black. But even these groups shy away from using the term “white genocide.”
Farm invasions make up only a tiny proportion of South Africa’s broader crime picture of widespread murder, rape, robbery, vehicle hijacking, assault and kidnapping. The police are failing all South Africans, not just white farmers. According to UN data, the murder rate per capita in 2022 was 43.7 per 100,000 people. In the US that year, the rate was 6.5 per 100,000 people.
Most of the violent crime happens in predominantly poor, black areas, such as the ghettolike zones known in South Africa as townships, said Hermann Pretorius, head of communications at the South African Institute for Race Relations (IRR) nongovernmental organization, adding that the white genocide narrative was “in no way true.”
South Africa has a long history of waves of emigration by people with skills and financial means who feel the country has too many social and political problems. Government statistics say about 900,000 citizens had taken up residence overseas, mainly in North America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, by 2020. The major reasons for leaving included crime, economic stagnation and poor public services.
The same factors are cited by many of the “refugees” interviewed on Wyatt’s YouTube channel. But they also cite the black populist leader Julius Malema, who has called on his supporters to “slit the throat of whiteness” and regularly leads them in singing a song with the lyrics “kill the Boer [Afrikaner].”
The white South Africans complain, too, about the government’s affirmative action legislation, known as black economic empowerment (BEE), which seeks to address the legacy of apartheid by promoting the employment of blacks over other race groups and sets black ownership quotas for private companies. (It is this policy that is at the heart of Elon Musk’s refusal to launch Starlink in South Africa.)
Genocide “fiction”
Pretorius, a white Afrikaner, told PassBlue in a call that BEE was one of two “strands of truth” that the far right conflated to come up the white genocide fiction.
“The doubling down of the African National Congress [ANC government] on things like BEE has a quite decidedly pro-black leaning, and that is often interpreted, I think accurately, as an anti-white leaning. So on the one side, you have these policies that are racially discriminatory; on the other hand, you’ve got the truth that South Africa is a country with horrendous levels of violent crime.
“These two strands, in the perception of those who believe in a white genocide, overlap to combine anti-white discrimination with South Africa’s high crime rate, so it takes two truths and comes to a falsehood,” Pretorius said.
The Institute for Race Relations has compiled an index of 145 race-based laws in South Africa that it says are inconsistent with the nonracial dispensation envisaged by South Africa’s constitution. But the index “doesn’t say that there are 145 anti-white laws on the books,” Pretorius stressed. “It just says there are 145 statutes that seek to ensure either racial benefit or racial detriment.” Some of them survived from the apartheid era, when they were introduced by a white minority government.
The BEE legislation introduced by the ANC had unwittingly been more detrimental to black South Africans than to whites, Pretorius said. It had enriched a black elite but left most blacks as badly off as ever, or even worse.
“Generally speaking, white South Africans have experienced exclusion from certain opportunities, but their socioeconomic standing overall hasn’t really suffered as much as that of the poorest black South Africans, who are really bearing the brunt of the failures of BEE,” Pretorius added.
“White South African households on the whole are about as well-off as the average Danish household. So, it’s not like BEE has caused vast white unemployment or vast erosion of white wealth,” Pretorius said.
He added: “The animus of having exclusionary effects towards white South Africans is a reality, yet discrimination is a far cry from persecution. Persecution is, to the reasonable person, the basis for a refugee program, rather than discrimination.”
Asked about reports that some of the South Africans had returned home, and whether this would jeopardize the program, a spokesperson for the US State Department said in an email: “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on the details of specific refugee cases. President Trump has explained why we are resettling Afrikaner refugees in the US. The US position on this humanitarian initiative has not changed.”
Joshua Meservey, a senior analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said the four returnees “indisputably” undermined the rationale for the program, but it was unlikely to be scrapped because of them.
“It’s become such a political issue, that I don’t see the hard-core MAGA people turning against it. I don’t see the MAGA activists ever doing a public mea culpa, ‘We got it wrong, the Libs were right,’” Meservey told PassBlue in a call. “I just don’t think many people think about this, or talk about this, other than a very small, online group of people.”
A spokesperson for South Africa’s department of international relations, Chrispin Phiri, told PassBlue that “the assertion that white Afrikaners, in particular, endure systemic persecution [is] entirely without foundation. This truth is only further corroborated by the individuals who, having availed themselves of this preferential policy, have since resolved to return to these shores.”
Phiri said it should be noted that the South African government had placed no obstacles in the way of the program, “provided such processes are conducted with proper adherence to our nation’s legal and regulatory prescripts.”
In early April, the South African government named a new ambassador to Washington, Roelf Meyer, a white Afrikaner who was the leading negotiator for the apartheid government in the 1990s as it held discussions with the ANC and others on transitioning to multiracial democracy.
Gelobter and Wyatt did not respond to emails from PassBlue.