First white SA ‘refugees’ arrive in the US as diplomatic feud deepens

Washington/Johannesburg — The Trump administration on Monday welcomed 59 white South Africans it has granted refugee status in the US for being deemed victims of racial discrimination, a move that has drawn criticism from Democrats and stirred confusion in SA.

US President Donald Trump has blocked mostly non-white refugee admissions from the rest of the world but in February offered to resettle Afrikaners, the descendants of mostly Dutch settlers, saying they faced discrimination.

The eligibility criteria has been expanded to include “disfavoured racial minorities”. 

Asked on Monday why white South Africans were being prioritised above the victims of famine and war elsewhere in Africa, Trump said, without providing evidence, that Afrikaners were being killed.

“It’s a genocide that’s taking place,” Trump told reporters at the White House, going further than he has previously in echoing right-wing tropes about their alleged persecution.

He was not favouring Afrikaners because they are white, Trump said, adding that their race “makes no difference to me”.

SA maintains there is no evidence of persecution and that claims of a “white genocide” in the country have not been backed up by evidence.

Treating white South Africans as refugees fleeing oppression has drawn alarm and ridicule from SA authorities, who say the Trump administration has waded into a domestic issue it does not understand.

US deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau greeted the first 59 Afrikaners to arrive in a hangar at Washington’s Dulles airport on Monday. He compared their journey to that of his own father, a Jew from Austria who fled Europe in the 1930s, first to South America and then to the US.

Landau did not repeat Trump’s claims of killings, but said many of the South Africans were farming families who had worked land for generations but now faced the threat of that land being expropriated, as well as threats of violence.

Trump’s February order on resettling Afrikaners cited a land law introduced by SA this year that aims to make it easier for the state to expropriate land in the public interest, which has caused concern among some white South Africans although no land has been seized.

Charl Kleinhaus, who arrived on Monday and was set to be resettled in Buffalo, New York, with his daughter, son and grandson, said his life was threatened and people tried to claim his property as their own. Reuters was unable to verify his account.

“We never expected this land expropriation thing to go so far,” he told Reuters.

Some of the Afrikaners were heading to Democratic-leaning Minnesota, which has a reputation for welcoming refugees, while others planned to go to Republican-led states such as Idaho and Alabama, sources said.

State department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the move “sends a clear message, in alignment with the administration’s America First foreign policy agenda, that America will take action to protect victims of racial discrimination”.

The US would welcome more Afrikaner refugees in the coming months, Bruce said in a statement.

US senator Jeanne Shaheen, the most senior Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, called the move “baffling”.

“The decision by this administration to put one group at the front of the line is clearly politically motivated and an effort to rewrite history,” she said in a statement on Monday.

Speaking at a conference in Ivory Coast, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the white Afrikaners had ostensibly left because they were opposed to policies aimed at addressing racial inequality persisting since apartheid, or white minority, rule ended three decades ago.

“We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick here, but we'll continue talking to them,” he said.

Trump said SA’s leadership was travelling to see him next week, and that he would not travel to a G20 meeting there in November unless the “situation is taken care of”.

People interviewed by Reuters in Cape Town on Monday said they bore no ill will to their departing compatriots but doubted they would find life much better in the US.

“I don’t believe in running away from problems, you know, we’ve got a lovely country, and we make it work,” said Robert Skeen, an Afrikaner selling boerewors rolls.

Since Nelson Mandela won SA’s first democratic elections in 1994, the once-ruling white minority has retained most of its wealth amassed since colonial times.

Whites still own three-quarters of private land and have about 20 times the wealth of the black majority, according to international academic journal the Review of Political Economy.

Less than 10% of white South Africans are out of work, compared with more than a third of their black counterparts.

Yet the claim that minority white South Africans face discrimination from the black majority has become an established trope in right-wing online chat rooms, and been echoed by Trump’s white SA-born ally Elon Musk.

Those who claim white South Africans face persecution cite employment laws, violent attacks on white farmers and the new land law.

Out of 26,000 murders in SA last year, 44 were linked to farming communities, according to police statistics. Crime researchers say the overwhelming majority of murder victims are black.

Since his return to the White House in January, Trump has cut all US financial assistance to SA, citing disapproval of its land policy and of its genocide case at the International Court of Justice against Washington’s ally Israel.

A spokesperson for the US department of health and human services said on Friday it was working with the state department to support the South Africans’ resettlement, without giving details about what kind of assistance they would receive.

The spokesperson added that more arrivals were expected in the coming months. The state department paid for Monday’s charter flight, according to someone familiar with the matter. 

Reuters