The Right Kind Of Refugee

The fast-tracking of admission for white Afrikaner farmers sure seems like an outrageously racist policy.

When I was a college student at Tufts University on the outskirts of Boston in the 1980s, the popular subject of protest concerned South African Apartheid. It was an easy pick. Apartheid was morally despicable, there was a plausible campus connection—demanding the university trustees divest from companies doing business there—and if you showed up there was a good chance you’d get to see Tracy Chapman perform. (Chapman overlapped with me at Tufts.) Some very dedicated students attempted, unsuccessfully, to occupy the administration building and periodically camped out in “shantytowns” on the quad. All the cool colleges had students doing the same; the “kids on the left” were “locked in some kind of Sixties battle re-enactment,” as Frank Turner would later sing.

Ah, how things come back around. This week, in what to me is one of the most bizarre and blatant twists of the second Trump administration, 50-some white Afrikaners—the ruling minority ethnicity of the old system—arrived in the United States as refugees. Trump, who is actively shutting down nearly all other refugees and asylum-seekers, invited these individuals to the U.S., carved out an exception for them to be granted refugee status, and even arranged a chartered jet to get them here.

It sure seems like outright racism, in which our country is giving very, very preferential treatment to a group of white people over many, many people of other hues. But I do not claim to be an expert on the current situation in South Africa. So, let’s try to assess the question: How friggin’ racist is this policy?

Let’s first note that Trump’s concern with the supposed maltreatment of white Afrikaners, particularly farmers, dates back to his first administration, so this can’t all be blamed on the personal animus and bias of Elon Musk.

Three weeks after re-taking office this year, Trump issued a missive entitled “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa” The alleged egregious behavior, as concerns the Afrikaners, consisted solely of a 2024 law that allows, in some cases, the seizure of agricultural property. Because of this law, supposedly aimed solely at white Afrikaners (who own most, but far from all, farms in the country), “the United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination” such as having their farms confiscated under the new law. Trump directed the State Department to give them “admission and resettlement through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (US RAP).”

Even granting the premise of the South African government snatching white people’s lands (we’ll return to that though), this seems to have given a remarkable fast lane to these claimants. Others go through a long vetting process starting with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and typically taking between 18 and 24 months. And that’s not even accounting for Trump crackdowns on accepting those from Afghanistan, Sudan, the Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and other places where non-whites are in the mix looking to relocate under duress. (This is different from the asylum process, which is for those declaring their request while already on U.S. soil.) Since the UN has said it was not working on any such Afrikaner applications last year, and these first refugees arrived just three months after Trump’s February order, we can pretty safely assume that Trump waived the usual process and greenlit admissions with minimal, expedited vetting.

This is exactly why the Episcopal Church is refusing to assist in resettling the white Afrikaners—ending a 40-year program, It was being asked, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe said to NPR, to resettle Afrikaners “over other refugees who have been vetted and waiting in refugee camps for months and even years.”

Regardless of how they were vetted, we can be quite sure that none of these refugees suffered the one criterion specified by Trump’s February 7 order. That’s because, according to all reports, exactly zero farm confiscations have taken place under the 2024 law I mentioned above.

That’s presumably why the administration and its supported didn’t talk much about that law as the Afrikaners began arriving. Instead, they have focused on claims of racially motivated violence against white farmers. “Farmers are being killed,” Trump said. “They happen to be white,” but that makes no difference to him, he continued. He also described this as a “genocide,” echoing extreme language previously used by Musk.

That terminology is clearly unjustified; MAGA types dismiss the denials of the South African government, but no independent agency says that anything in the realm of genocide is going on there. Indeed, the South African government has released data showing that a small number of white Afrikaners have been murdered, as part of the generally awful violent crime problem in the country, with no indication of racial targeting. Even if the government is in fact abetting and covering up the truth—a purely speculative theory as far as I know—there just isn’t much evidence for a spate of white Afrikaner farmer murders that require explanation. We're just choosing to believe the wildest of claims by white people and choosing to disbelieve the claims of mostly Black government officials.

Which is really where lies the rub, isn’t it? We are choosing to disbelieve the frightful asylum claims of brown-skinned women at our Southern border, and to believe claims that black foreigners steal and eat neighbors’ pets. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau (a former clerk for both Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia) told reporters Tuesday that the arriving Afrikaner farmers “tell quite harrowing stories of the violence that they faced in South Africa that were not addressed by the authorities.” Apparently we believe those stories, without even bothering with customary vetting. I guess they can be trusted not to be terrorists, or murderers and rapists as well. What could account for this disparity in trust, other than the color of their skin?

Landau helpfully also gave an entirely different explanation—aside from the never-used confiscation law, and the unevidenced genocide-- for accepting and fast-tracking these particular refugee applicants, while refusing so many thousands of others. That reason: the interest of the United States, as when the refugees in question “could be assimilated easily into our country.”

I am unaware of any studies or evidence demonstrating that the Afrikaners living here—thought to be fewer than 100,000—assimilate better than, say, the 850,000 or so Haitian immigrants here, or the 150,000 Somalis. Many Afrikaners do speak English in addition to their primary language, Afrikaans, but that’s hardly unique among refugees applying to the U.S. If this assimilation claim is based on anything other than assumptions based on the color of their skin, I do wish Landau and others would provide that basis.

I’ll note here that many right-wing thought leaders claim that those calling this policy racist are—you guessed it—themselves the real racists. That’s because, they point out, the left wants to allow in only refugees of color, and balks only at the arrival of any whites. This conveniently elides recent and ongoing advocacy for admitting and resettling massive numbers of Ukrainians, among others, but regardless misstates the objections. I have heard few if any calls for barring white Afrikaners who demonstrate that they deserve refugee status; just complaints, like those from the Episcopal Church, that they haven’t demonstrated anything, and instead gotten wildly preferential treatment over others who have.

And that sure seems to stem from classic American racial prejudices. Few things have driven more injustice in this country than the fear of dark-skinned people committing violence against whites—especially retributive violence against whites who racially oppressed them. (I happened to have just read the Pulitzer-winning novel “James,” which depicts this fear well.) That injustice invariably relies on believing the claims and testimony of white people over that of Black ones.

As I said, things do seem to come back around. We can’t seem to stop reliving and relitigating Reconstruction, even if by proxy in a country halfway around the world. The Blacks are apparently always coming to kill white men, rape their women, and take their property, whether the McCloskeys in S. Louis, Missouri (how do you like that call-back) or Afrikaner farmers in South Africa.