(Dobbs) Refugees No Longer Welcome. Unless They Are White Afrikaners From South Africa.
The program is no longer for people in need. It is only for people in favor.
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Between President Trump’s mercurial moves on Iran, his crusade to defeat fellow Republicans whose loyalty he deems insufficient, his unapologetic corruption like Dell getting an almost $10 billion government contract not long after he bought more than a million dollars of Dell stock, and his drive to rebuild Washington DC as if he owns the place, other news stories sometimes sink to the bottom of the page. The president’s announcement at the beginning of the week that he is raising the number of foreign refugees to be admitted to the United States is one of them.
To be clear, he’s not raising the cap for people from nations where their very survival is at stake. In a refugee program that he has decapitated for every other nation on earth, he is only raising the cap for South Africans. White South Africans. The people who perpetuated the racist and brutal policy of apartheid. The people known as Afrikaners.
It’s the second time he is welcoming them to the U.S.A. The first ones came last year.
This sentence in a Washington Post report about it floored me: “The State Department has already approved more than 6,000 people through the refugee program since the beginning of the fiscal year in October, according to official data. All of those were from South Africa except for three people from Afghanistan.”
6,000 from South Africa, three from Afghanistan. And that’s it. Nobody else. Nobody else from nations devoured by violence and war and existential political oppression. Nobody from Ukraine, nobody from Lebanon, nobody from Syria, nobody from Myanmar, nobody from El Salvador, nobody from Sudan, nobody from North Korea, nobody from Congo. And nobody else from Afghanistan, as if the political persecution there isn’t some of the worst on this planet.
But now there will be more Afrikaners. More white South Africans. 10,000 more. A White House spokeswoman said they are “no less deserving of help than the thousands of refugees admitted under the Biden administration.” Sorry, but the question that follows has to be, “But are they more deserving of help than the others?”
Yes they are, according to Trump. In his announcement last Tuesday in the Federal Register, he said that because of “an unforeseen emergency refugee situation” which he didn’t define, more South Africans would be let through our gates. He said South Africa’s government was responsible for “recent increases in the incitement of racially motivated violence,” which he also didn’t define. In April he told a conference of Turning Point USA, “There’s a very horrible thing going on. They kill people if they’re white.” In his telling of course, “they” are the blacks.
He’s been pushing this narrative since last year when he came back into office. Not even three weeks into his second term, he issued an executive order: “The United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take appropriate steps, consistent with law, to prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”
Although still without evidence, he now calls it genocide.
There is, of course, and without making a pun, some “pot calling the kettle black” going on here. For 46 years, although they made up the vast majority of South Africa’s population, blacks were the “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” They were segregated into sprawling slums with no electricity, no paved streets, no running water. They needed permission to walk the streets of South Africa’s cities. Their jobs were menial, their schools were deprived.
A reformed university professor I interviewed once near Capetown, born and raised in the Afrikaner community, explained to me how, after military victories over a superior number of Zulus in the 1800s, his people could cavalierly oppress the black natives of their land: “We are a God-elected people, we knew that God were on our side and therefore what we do is in order, is justified.”
When covering a story once on the edge of Johannesburg and interviewing families who survived in squalid conditions, hauling water in buckets from a communal well and some even living in sweltering steel containers, I saw firsthand how even with apartheid in their rear view mirrors, black South Africans haven’t escaped the poverty they suffered at the hands of the “God-elected people” who ruled them for generations.
Nor in most cases have they escaped their second class status. I interviewed an Afrikaner there who was part of a new political party, meant “to work and to fight for the rights of the Afrikaner community,” called the Freedom Front. As we sat in his living room, a black maid served us coffee. His wife tried to introduce the maid to the camera crew and me. But it turned awkward fast. She didn’t even know the woman’s last name.
A telling statistic: according to South Africa’s “Land Audit Report,” which calculates private land ownership by race, gender, and nationality, white people there, who constitute only about 10% of the nation’s population, own most of the nation’s farmland. But when they apply to come to the United States as refugees, what they complain about by and large isn’t their standard of living, it is crime. The fact is, the murder rate in South Africa is six times as bad as it is in the U.S. But it is almost all black on black.
And is it as bad as Sudan’s, or Somalia’s? Not even close. They are among what President Trump calls “shithole countries.” Just last week he described Somalis who have emigrated to Minneapolis, the biggest Somali immigrant community in America, as “all crooks.”
It’s a different story with the Afrikaners. They are like us, as Trump defines “us.”
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The former director of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, hearing of the exclusive access of South Africa’s Afrikaners, said, “They’re not looking across the world for people who are truly in need.” No they’re not. The program is no longer for people in need. It is only for people in favor.