The Real Reason Those White South Africans Are Here

The 59 white South Africans who landed at Dulles Airport on Monday arrived on a private jet chartered and paid for by the American government. They were welcomed, like foreign dignitaries, by high-ranking officials from the State Department and Homeland Security.

They’d been classified by the Trump administration with “Priority 1” refugee status, normally reserved for those fleeing the most horrific conditions, often with just the clothes on their back. But these globe-trotters lugged carts that groaned under the weight of their overstuffed luggage, serving less as evidence of escape than of unhurried, unbothered preparation. In news footage and widely circulated photos, the group of Afrikaners—descendants of Dutch and German settler colonizers of South Africa—appeared indistinguishable from the most well-fed white denizens of Idaho, North Carolina, or Iowa, the very same states where they are slated to be resettled.

To be clear, white South Africans—and this really cannot be reiterated enough—are not being persecuted. That might explain why the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which normally vets the status of potential refugees, was conspicuously absent from the process that brought these particular huddled masses to our shores. Instead, having repeatedly been unable to find credible justification for designating white South Africans a persecuted class under international refugee law, the Trump administration circumvented that system, unilaterally declaring the group refugees. But the administration’s resettling of Afrikaners shouldn’t be confused with humanitarian concern.

The red carpet is being rolled out for them, showily and deliberately, I might add, as a political signal. Consider it a statement of allegiance to whiteness; a full-throated declaration of where, and with whom, this administration’s priorities lie. The importation of Afrikaners to the United States—even as legitimate refugees and immigrants are shut out, detained, and deported—is a way to register the administration’s objection to the very principle of racial equality, an ideal the South African government is taking slow, tentative steps to realize. It’s part protest, part ideological stunt, announcing white grievance as a more pressing concern than Black suffering. By halting all US refugee resettlement, cutting off life-saving funds to resettlement agencies, and ending support for HIV treatment in South Africa, the Trump administration has assigned a greater value to white supremacy than to millions of human lives. This is an unequivocal affirmation of this administration’s commitment to white nationalism, and it should be read as such.

To even suggest that Afrikaners are persecuted conflates the loss of absolute white power with oppression. South Africa’s white minority constructed, and for more than 300 years, maintained entrenched systems of enslavement, settler colonialism, and violent racial apartheid. Though white supremacy the world over conveniently argues that history bears no weight on the present, the end of apartheid in 1994 did not end the vast racial inequalities those systems created. The spoils of that oppression remain very much in the possession of whiteness.

Despite being just 7 percent of the population, white South Africans still fill more than 62 percent of corporate leadership positions. Roughly two in every three Black South Africans are impoverished, while just 1 percent of white South Africans are. The white minority still holds a staggering 75 percent of the country’s land, thanks to a 1913 law that drove Black farmers off 93 percent of the country’s lands, hastening a process of dispossession that began long before. In other words, life is pretty good if you’re white in South Africa. No matter: As any American could tell you, white grievance is more powerful than any material reality.

Earlier this year, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law a provision permitting, in rare cases, eminent domain of farmland for public use. As Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch has noted, the legislation doesn’t even reference “a landowner’s race, though patterns of land ownership are inextricably bound up with the legacy of racial apartheid in South Africa.” What’s more, not a single square acre of land has even been seized. Musk and Trump, it seems, with their shared freak-out, are kind of telling on themselves. But per the revisionist, white-supremacist mind virus, Black suffering is natural and irrelevant.

It is a lie that “white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated,” as Trump claimed this week. Nor is the country’s government aligned with forces “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” as Elon Musk, a white South African product of the country’s apartheid era, has repeatedly insisted—a fantasy recently amplified by Trump. In fact, genocide looks a lot more like what the Trump administration is backing with billions of dollars in Gaza, while it guts funding for refugee resettlement programs. It bears a far greater resemblance to an administration blocking real refugees—trapped amid war, famine and other threats to life—while bending over backward to accommodate a group that President Ramaphosa rightly pegs as longing “to see South Africa go back to apartheid.” The new arrivals may have technically traveled to the US via plane, but they are best understood as running, kicking and screaming, from even the concept of racial equality. MAGA’s Southern Hemisphere chapter is now at headquarters to unite with the home team.

(And while South Africa does have high levels of crime, Trump’s first-term State Department reported that “farm killings represented only 0.2 percent of all killings in the country.” The New York Times also points to police data indicating that most of those killed in farm murders are Black. And those attacks have been trending downward since 2010.)

Meanwhile, nearly 100,000 legitimate refugees—from Latin America, the Middle East and plenty of other African countries—approved for resettlement when Trump took office now remain in perilous limbo. On the same day the administration pulled out all the stops for the Afrikaners, it removed protections for thousands of Afghans, many of whom aided in America’s war efforts. And it has callously deported multiple young children, native-born US citizens, suffering with late-stage cancer.

Since halting all (non-white) refugee resettlement with an executive order essentially stating the country is full up with “migrants, and in particular, refugees,” this White House has made a practice of violating constitutional due process rights, and ignoring judicial orders. “[V]ulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” the South African government pointed out in a February press release, yet Trump provides “refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged.” Did I mention that the administration has announced that it plans to buy the new arrivals “groceries, weather-appropriate clothing, diapers, formula, hygiene products and prepaid phones”? And here we are.