Why the Afrikaners?
Give me your tired, your poor …
The Trump Administration recently did something uncharacteristic: it decided to let in a bunch of refugees. This was quite a reversal. On his first day in office, the president signed an executive order suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, under which thousands of already-approved applicants, including Afghans who aided the U.S. during the Afghan War, were slated to enter the United States. Those Afghans, along with many other people in dire straits, are out of luck: there’s no room at the American inn. But one group has hit the jackpot: South African Afrikaners.
For those who don’t know, Afrikaners are descendants of South Africa’s original White Dutch settlers. They’ve lived in South Africa since 1652, wresting land by force from native populations and, during the Boer War, fighting fiercely, although unsuccessfully, against being absorbed into the British Empire. Afrikaners have always comprised the majority of South African Whites, and, after World War II, formed the heart of South Africa’s apartheid government. When apartheid ended in 1994, Nelson Mandela took over from an Afrikaner president, F.W. De Klerk.
If you don’t know about apartheid, look it up; I don’t think it’s unfair, or even controversial, to say that “apartheid” and “white supremacist” were synonyms, and that the apartheid regime used exceptional brutality to terrorize a non-White majority into submission. Mandela made a point, however, of not taking revenge against South African Whites, and the transition to Black rule in the 1990s was, to a remarkable and even inspiring extent, largely bloodless, an outcome for which De Klerk as well as Mandela deserves credit.
Mandela is gone, however, and his successors, I think it is fair to say, have not unfailingly emulated his integrity and largeness of spirit. Plus the country still has stubborn inequalities. Although Blacks, with 80% of the population, now dominate South African politics, their incomes average one-quarter to one-third those of Whites, and the combination of a poor Black majority and a rich White minority, along with the legacy of the apartheid years, have inevitably led to racial tension. They have also led to White Flight. Since 1993, Whites have fallen from about 14% of the South African population to about 7.3%, largely because of White emigration to places like Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., and Canada.
Why has the Trump Administration taken a sudden interest in South Africa? Whites there, in spite of their wealth, have for years been complaining about discrimination and harassment, but the recent trigger seems to be a new law that, according to the New York Times, “[in rare instances allows] the government to seize land from private owners without providing compensation.” The justification appears to be that for a long time, Whites were free to take land from Blacks, so it’s fair to take some of it back. Whatever one thinks of this argument morally, such a policy, if widely applied, could be disastrous: when the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe tried something similar on a large scale, they destroyed Zimbabwean agriculture, bringing about economic collapse, hyperinflation, and, in some parts of the country, famine. In any case, Afrikaners own a lot of large South African farms, and they are, unsurprisingly, upset about this law.
I’m not sure their difficulties, however, explain why they were suddenly jumped to the head of the refugee line. In terms of the U.S.’s moral obligations, we probably owe the most to the Afghans, who aided the American military and are now subject to reprisals from the Taliban; or perhaps to the Ukrainians, who, with NATO’s aid and to NATO’s benefit, have helped their country resist a Russian invasion; or perhaps to the 12,000 refugees who have already been carefully vetted and approved for entry, and who federal courts have ordered be let in. In terms of sheer suffering, Concern Worldwide, a refugee-focused non-profit, estimates the worst refugee crises in the world to be, in order, the following:
Syria
Ukraine
Afghanistan
South Sudan
Sudan
Myanmar
The Democratic Republic of the Congo
Somalia
The Central African Republic
Eritrea
South Africa, as you may have noticed, has not made this top ten. All of those countries face unspeakable carnage, and their populations would undoubtedly be glad to swap their circumstances for those of Afrikaners. So what’s going on? Why is the Trump Administration making exceptions to its sweeping no-refugee policy, and fast-tracking this one particular group? What do Afrikaners have that those other nationalities don’t?
Take a good look. Maybe you can figure it out.
A group of white South Africans rallying outside the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria this year. (New York Times, 5/9/25)
STUDEBAKER (Studebaker@studebakerguy.bsky.com)
