When dozens of refugees from Africa arrived this week at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., they were greeted warmly by a pair of Trump appointees — and shunned by the political Left.
This was not a typical group of refugees from the continent. The color of their skin — white, due to their European ancestry — and the historical racial struggles in their home country of South Africa have helped shift the political battle lines being drawn around their arrival.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in February that prioritized the admission of Afrikaners “who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” Critics complained that the Afrikaners skipped to the front of a line of refugees from other countries who have been waiting years for a chance to be resettled in the United States. They noted that Trump closed the country to virtually all other refugees but cracked open the door for a group of white ones.
Progressive Democrats insisted there is no evidence that white South Africans have faced any kind of persecution that would qualify them for entry under refugee programs that Democrats have typically pushed to expand.
SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT CALLS REFUGEES ‘COWARDS’ AFTER ARRIVAL IN US
Advocates of the Afrikaners say white farmers are facing violent attacks from black South Africans and that the South African government has enacted policies that permit the disenfranchisement of Afrikaners.
South African government officials, meanwhile, maintain that the violence Afrikaners have experienced isn’t racially motivated or limited to white victims but is a reflection of a crime problem the whole country is battling.
“The thing that the Afrikaners are trying to explain is that this isn’t just crime. They’re being deliberately targeted,” Dr. Wanjiru Njoya, the Walter E. Williams research fellow at the Mises Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “The reason they’re being deliberately targeted is because they are Afrikaners.”
Systematic persecution in South Africa
The Afrikaners’ ancestors arrived in modern-day South Africa in the 1600s, roughly around the time the pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The Dutch settled initially in the Cape of Good Hope after the Dutch East India Company in 1652 built a station there where ships could refresh their supplies before sailing around the other side of Africa.
Germans and French Protestants fleeing religious persecution settled in the Cape as well and, together with the Dutch, formed the ethnic group later known as the Afrikaners, who developed a distinct culture and their own language, Afrikaans.
Centuries later, “they are not connected to Europe at all,” Njoya said.
“Turning them to go back to Europe, which country would they go to?” she said.
That was the solution floated by one Democratic commentator this week, however.
“The people who are native to that land deserve their rightful land back,” Ashley Allison, a former Obama administration official, said on CNN.
“If the Afrikaners don’t actually like the land, they can leave that country,” Allison added. “They can actually leave and go to where their native land is, which is probably Germany.” A fellow panelist chimed in to suggest their native land is Holland, which is also incorrect.
But whether the current black majority in South Africa is more native to that land is also a matter of debate amid the international attention on the plight of the Afrikaners.
“These are not the people who actually were at the Cape when the Boers arrived in 1652. They, too, are immigrants, from West Africa,” Njoya said. “So even when they say, ‘What about our historical grievances?’ Anybody who knows the story of Africa will laugh.”
Still, the legacy of apartheid, a South African system of government that legalized segregation and discrimination against black citizens, has led the country’s current government to pursue radical policies that proponents describe as an effort to rebalance the historical scales.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who has called the persecution of white South Africans a “false narrative,” signed into law earlier this year a policy that allows the state to seize farmland from private owners without compensation if the government determines that doing so is “just and equitable and in the public interest.” The concept, known as expropriation, could be taken even further if the South African government passes another bill under consideration. The Equitable Access to Land Bill, proposed in February, would require all South African landowners to register their race with the government so that race could be used as a factor in land redistribution programs.
Another law, known as the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, requires white business owners to transfer partial ownership of their companies to black people in order to access many economic opportunities.
“It’s not that the government is doing anything illegal. They’ve actually passed laws allowing them to persecute the Afrikaners,” Njoya said.
Afrikaners say they also fear becoming the victims of violent attacks that the government refuses to recognize. South African officials stopped keeping track of “farm attacks,” which became a polarizing term due to its association with white farm owners, in 2007 and now lump those incidents in with general crime data.
South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world. And in some parts of the country, police can take more than an hour to respond to a call about a violent crime in progress.
“It’s the murders, it’s the being targeted by these people chanting, ‘Kill the Boers,’ but it’s also these other laws that have been passed to exclude them from the economy,” Njoya said of why Afrikaners are fleeing from their home country.
“Kill the Boers,” an anti-apartheid song often sung or chanted in Zulu, was for years considered illegal hate speech in South Africa. But the country’s highest court ruled last year that “Kill the Boers” is no longer considered hate speech. Julius Malema, the leader of one of the country’s top political parties, publicly chanted “Kill the Boers,” which the pro-Afrikaner group AfriForum has said incites violent attacks against white farmers, at a public rally in March.
A chilly reception
The roughly 50 Afrikaners who arrived in the U.S. this week on a State Department-chartered flight quickly learned that their race made them a controversial group of refugees in a country that has proudly accepted thousands of other refugees every year.
One of the 10 nonprofit groups that work with the federal government to resettle refugees announced it would rather sever its partnership with the government than help the Afrikaners. The Episcopal Church said its commitment to “racial justice” prevented it from fulfilling its obligations under a federal grant agreement to resettle the white South Africans.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen, in my 30 years of doing this, an organization reject a specific population to resettle,” Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “Does racial justice only go in one direction?”
The Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe said this week that he does not believe the Afrikaners have faced genocide or racial discrimination.
“In this case, it seems to be that people who are white seem to be more valuable than those who are people of color,” Rowe told NPR.
The Biden administration raised refugee caps to 125,000 from the low of 18,000 that Trump had set during the final year of his first term. In fiscal 2024, the Biden administration admitted more than 100,000 refugees, hitting a three-decade high, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
Not one was from South Africa, however.
Trump suspended refugee admissions when he took office in January. A federal judge in Seattle had ordered the Trump administration to admit 12,000 refugees who had planned to travel to the U.S. prior to Trump’s inauguration, but the judge rescinded the order on Friday and said the administration was obligated to admit just 160 of them.
Democrats expressed outrage that the white South Africans were granted refugee status while all other groups were not.
“It’s so deeply and morally wrongheaded and repulsive,” Richard Stengel, former undersecretary of state under President Barack Obama, said on MSNBC this week. “These are the descendants of the people who created the most diabolical system of white supremacy in human history, apartheid.”
“It’s taking places away from people who are really being crushed by authoritarian governments … for these folks who have never had anything happen to them,” he added.
Ries said the situation the Afrikaners are facing has gone “beyond reparations” and has involved “too many instances of actual violence.”
“It doesn’t matter what color skin you are, anyone can be persecuted,” she said. “It’s pretty galling to see this church organization, which has made billions of dollars off the federal government, say, ‘We’re not going to do it for this white population.’ You know, they’re judging someone, [a] population, by the color of their skin.”
Jack Birle contributed to this report.