Of all the huddled masses of tired and poor people in the world yearning to breathe free, Donald Trump has rejected those who are most in need of welcome. Haitians who escaped endemic gang violence, which included pervasive sexual violence against children, and have revitalised American towns while taking on some of the country’s hardest and grimiest jobs? Trump ended deportation protections for half a million of them. What about brave Afghans who risked their lives to aid the US against the Taliban and were given refuge in America? Trump ended their protected status, and is now planning to deport thousands of them. Women and children fleeing ravaging wars in DR Congo, Sudan and Somalia? No longer welcome on America’s shores.
One group, though, has been welcomed: white South Africans fleeing what they claim is anti-white discrimination and violence in their country.
South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa has travelled to Washington to meet with Trump after the US in March slashed aid to South Africa and expelled the South African ambassador, in May has resettled a handful of Afrikaners. In a visit to the White House on 21 May, Ramaphosa will try to convince Trump that South Africa remains an important trading partner and ally to the US. The US government has described white South Africans as victims of “racial discrimination”. Trump has been obsessing about the alleged plight of white South Africans since at least his first term, and he is a man often unpersuaded by facts or widely agreed-upon reality.
The president is also a man obsessed with power, dominance and hierarchy. His electoral success has partly stemmed from policy promises that will restore the old racial and gender orders which were once legally enforced in America and remain embedded social realities. Trump was elected in part thanks to male resentment, and he blatantly courted misogynist podcasters and other content creators who have disturbing influence over young men.
Trump was also elected in part thanks to white voters who responded positively to his anti-DEI campaign, in which he has made corporate and academic efforts to achieve diversity and equity his chief grievance. Despite claims of restoring meritocracy, his administration is instead staffed by people who are among the least qualified and most incompetent ever to set foot in the White House. For all their maligning of identity politics, it seems the Trump team believes “merit” is largely defined by identity – that some people are simply born more deserving than others and that white men are the nation’s most deserving. They also believe that any challenge to or change in that status is a grievous injustice.
Trump is a showman who knows how to tell a story, even if it’s a fabrication. And the story he’s telling about what it means to make America great again is that America was great when it was a racial hierarchy.
These resettled Afrikaners were once the beneficiaries of South Africa’s own racial hierarchy – its violent system of apartheid, which separated people by race and put whites at the top. Yet even 31 years after apartheid ended, white South Africans still have a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth and its top jobs. Whites make up just 7 per cent of the population, but half of South Africa’s land belongs to white-owned farms.
Pretoria-born Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is probably the most visible proponent of the claim that white South African farmers are the victims of a “genocide”. And while it is true that South Africa generally struggles with problems including corruption and crime, there’s no evidence that white farmers face greater violence. These claims are almost universally rejected – except by a handful of once-fringe right-wing movements and by X’s AI bot Grok, which for a brief period shoehorned facts about “white genocide” into totally unrelated queries on X. The “white genocide” conspiracy theorists not only had a popular AI tool amplifying their claims, they now have the ear of the Trump administration – and they seem to be one of the few groups this administration believes is facing sufficient persecution to merit resettlement in the US.
“Farmers are being killed,” Trump told reporters on 12 May, the day the first group of Afrikaners arrived in the US. “They happen to be white. Whether they are white or black makes no difference to me.”
Except, well, the fact that they are white seems to be the only thing that makes a difference here. Congolese farmers (and many others) are being killed. Sudanese farmers (and many others) are being killed. Somali, Palestinian, Afghan, Honduran, Venezuelan and Salvadoran farmers (and many others) are being killed.
America has long been a nation that opened its doors to those in need. We have rarely been a country that balanced our enormous power with adequate goodness, but in our best moments we at least extended the generosity that should come with tremendous good fortune. Historically, we resettled more refugees than any other nation, and have rightly taken in people fleeing destructive wars. Branches of my own family tree came to the US from Europe soon after the Second World War, a family story as American as apple pie. As the US wound down its disastrous war in Vietnam, we also evacuated thousands of desperate people; a similar dynamic played out in Afghanistan (although in both cases, these resettlements did far too little to make up for egregious wars). We established systems to aid newcomers and to help those in need who remained far away. Trump has ended so many of these efforts, planning to deport Afghans and Haitians who were resettled under Joe Biden and almost entirely cutting off in-progress resettlements from the rest of the world. He has replaced a functional if imperfect refugee resettlement system with internationally provocative displays of racial preference (and racial animus).
This is all taking place against the backdrop of brutal and often illegal arrests and deportations of non-white people, often on spurious allegations, often without due process. Young people legally in the US on student visas have been snatched up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ferried to detention centres hundreds of miles away, their only “crime” being protesting the war in Gaza. Immigrants from south and central America have been deported without hearings to a notoriously violent prison for terrorists in El Salvador, based on questionable evidence such as alleged gang tattoos. At least one man was wrongfully deported, but the Trump administration refuses to bring him back. Enormous resources have gone into these efforts.
While white South Africans are being welcomed to America, and while the Trump administration violates basic due process to kick migrants out and warehouse them in a hellish foreign prison, desperate refugees remain stuck in squalid camps and war-torn nations, watching the door slam shut on their prospects for a life of safety and opportunity. These are people who are by any measure more in need of refuge than the Afrikaners whose resettlement Trump has ensured.
They just don’t happen to be white.
[See also: Trump’s third term is coming]
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This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain’s Child Poverty Epidemic