Under the second Trump administration, there is one group of people getting expedited access to refugee status and resettlement in the US.
It’s not citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 6.1 million people have been internally displaced due to decades of fighting among armed groups and widespread gender-based violence. The US is not currently accepting more DRC citizens as refugees under President Donald Trump.
It’s not Afghan citizens either, despite the continued human rights violations, especially against women and girls, perpetrated by the Taliban after the US withdrawal from the country in 2021. Instead, the Trump administration is now revoking temporary protections for many Afghans already in America, which could result in their deportation back to Afghanistan.
And it’s not the Sudanese people, of whom nearly 8.6 million have been internally displaced amid a conflict between military and paramilitary forces.
A subset of white South Africans, known as Afrikaners, are the only people Trump has newly admitted to the US as refugees. Trump has described them, without evidence, as victims of a “genocide that’s taking place” and anti-white discrimination, echoing rhetoric that has long circulated on the far right. And he’s sought to punish South Africa for that by cutting off US aid.
(The US government will have to admit some refugees from other countries who were already in the resettlement pipeline before Trump took office, per a court order issued in late March after the president tried to suspend almost all refugee admissions. But that court-ordered acceptance is a sharp contrast from the administration’s enthusiastic outreach to Afrikaners.)
Trump’s effort to label Afrikaners “refugees” is based on dubious pretenses. The South African government and even some white South Africans argue that, after the end of the apartheid system, which supported white minority rule in South Africa until the early 1990s, white people remain a privileged class. The typical Black household has 5 percent of the wealth of the typical white household. And police data does not show that Afrikaners, many of whom are farmers, suffer from disproportionate levels of violence that would amount to genocide.
As a small minority of the population, white people still own a majority of the country’s land. That hasn’t stopped Elon Musk from criticizing the country’s land ownership laws as “racist” against white people following the signing of a land reform bill earlier this year.
The law allows the government to seize property without compensation only in limited circumstances, including when the land is not in use or has been abandoned and if the owner is merely holding it as an investment in the hope that it will appreciate in value. Afrikaner farmers have argued that the law could be used to seize their land against their will, but the government has contested that claim, and there is no evidence that this is occurring.
Instead, the evidence suggests Trump is selectively plucking a white minority for resettlement, even as nonwhite people facing war and famine around the world have been shut out from protection in the US.
On Monday, the first group of these Afrikaners, 49 people in total, arrived in the US, where they will be offered a “rapid pathway” to US citizenship and receive assistance from a refugee office within the Department of Health and Human Services.
To learn more about the impetus behind Trump’s decision, as well as about the situation in South Africa, I spoke with Jacob S. Dlamini, a Princeton University history professor whose research has focused on South African apartheid. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Do white Afrikaners have a legitimate claim to refugee status?
I grew up under apartheid, literally under signs that said, “Whites only.” White boys chased Black folks for sport when I was growing up. This feels like a real kick in the gut.
There is no substance to the claim that Afrikaners as a group have been persecuted. These are not refugees by any stretch of the imagination. They are people who simply do not want to live under majority-Black rule.
Some of them will talk about crime. I come from a family of small business owners who have suffered because of crime. I’ve lost friends to crime. I’ve lost relatives to crime. Independent stats show that whites as a group are not disproportionately targeted. If anything, it’s poor people who bear the brunt of South Africa’s crime problem — and it is a serious problem.
In his executive order granting refugee status to white Afrikaners, Trump referenced the South African government’s recent land reform bill, which he claims allows the seizure of “ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” and is “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.” Does that square with the reality in South Africa?
The very first piece of legislation that Nelson Mandela signed into law when he became president in May of 1994 was a land reform bill whose job was to correct what is essentially South Africa’s original political sin, and that was the taking away of land from indigenous peoples and allocating it to white South Africans for exclusive ownership. For the past 30 years, the government has actually failed spectacularly on that front. That failure helps explain why today, in May 2025, whites still own more than 70 percent of farmland in South Africa. [Editor’s note: Only 7 percent of the country’s population is white.]
In fact, as white farmers themselves have been pointing out ever since Trump announced his plans to do this, no single white farmer has had land taken away from him, and there is no suggestion that that’s going to change anytime soon.
Do you think Trump’s policy is evidence of Elon Musk’s influence in this administration?
Musk is not the only South African who’s got Trump’s ear. There’s a whole cohort of white men who grew up, for some of their lives, under apartheid in South Africa. That is significant.
The mistake that the media in the US has been making has been to focus on Musk and to assume that it all radiates from him to Trump. In fact, there’s this whole cohort of white men who have yet to come to terms with democracy in South Africa, meaning that a poor Black person who has no prospects in life has as much say politically when it comes to elections as does a very rich white person. That’s what it comes down to.
They’ve lost their power, which is not the same thing as privilege. For example, it’s still the case that when you look at corporate South Africa, 62.1 percent of corporate leaders are white, and most of those are men. Only 17.2 percent are so-called Black African. And that is 30 years since the advent of democracy.
What do Trump’s policies mean for the South African government?
They’re in for four years of hell with Trump. But it is also, I’m hoping, a wake-up call for the current [African National Congress] government to take South Africa’s poor much more seriously. The incompetence and the corruption of the past 30 years have, in some ways, pushed the ANC off the higher moral ground that it occupied when Mandela was president.
Trump’s decision to treat the chief beneficiaries of apartheid as victims of a genocide taking place only in his head gives the ANC a chance to get back on that moral high ground by reminding the world just how criminal apartheid was.
The single biggest mistake that the ANC made at the moment of transition in 1994 was to assume that all that you needed to do to correct the injustices of apartheid was to create a Black capitalist class. All that this did was create this massive patronage system that had government contracts at its center. This made the Black bourgeoisie dependent on government business and encouraged corruption.
Looking back over the last 30 years, we can see that thinking that you could use government contracts to create a Black business class was just a terrible idea. Ironically, the ANC copied the idea from successive apartheid governments, which used government patronage to build an Afrikaner business class. There is not a single Afrikaner [billionaire in US dollars] in South Africa today who did not get their start on the back of apartheid government contracts.
Corruption is endemic, and it’s a huge problem. Of course, the thing about corruption in South Africa that we forget is that it’s non-racial, it cuts across racial lines. Because you need these cross-cultural and racial networks to move money around, to launder money. It’s a national enterprise.
Who has suffered because of the incompetence and the corruption? It’s all South Africans, especially the poor. White Afrikaners as a group have not suffered exclusively.
How should we think about Trump’s decision to welcome white Afrikaners as refugees in the context of his gutting of US refugee admissions broadly?
It is bitterly ironic that he has stopped the processing of refugee applications for everyone except this group of privileged white South Africans.
Marco Rubio kicked out South Africa’s ambassador to the US for pointing out the basis of Trump’s animus toward South Africa, but there is no mistaking the white supremacist underpinnings of this. There is no mistaking the crude racism at the heart of this. You have here an administration that has and is punishing people who really need all the help they can get, who are coming here or are here for better opportunities for their kids and for themselves, but it will stop at nothing to take this very privileged group of white South Africans and turn them into refugees, when, in fact, they’re anything but refugees.
I grew up under apartheid. My mother went to her grave without having voted in the country of her birth. I grew up fighting the system.
I now find myself in 2025 having to relitigate whether apartheid was wrong. That is what this amounts to: taking people who benefited and continue to benefit from this awful system called apartheid and turning them into victims and refugees. What Trump is communicating is that apartheid was right. That is morally repugnant and just plain obscene.
