Trump Shrinks Refugee Inflow to 7,500 for 2026, Includes White South Africans
President Donald Trump is reducing the refugee influx to 7,500 refugees in 2026, which will help ordinary Americans earn higher wages from their employers and also afford better housing.
That 7,500 figure, however, has been furiously denounced by pro-migration groups who support the massive influx of refugees under President Joe Biden.
“This decision not only lowers the cap on refugee admissions. It lowers our moral standing,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, Sri Lankan-born president of one of several groups paid by the federal government to import and settle refugees in American communities. She added:
For more than four decades, the U.S. refugee program has provided a lifeline to families fleeing war, persecution and repression. At a time of crisis in countries from Afghanistan to Venezuela to Sudan and beyond, focusing the vast majority of admissions on a single group undermines the program’s purpose as well as its credibility.
Criticism was aimed at Trump’s decision to include white Afrikaners from South Africa in the annual influx of guest migrants, which previously favored Muslims from Muslim countries and black people from war-ravaged African countries.
“Since the U.S. refugee program was established in 1980, it has admitted more than two million people fleeing ethnic cleansing and other horrors,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, advocate for the American Immigration Council. “Now it will be used as an immigration route for whites. What a fall for a jewel of America’s international humanitarian programs.”
The refugee program selects and transports migrants from favored locations and provides them with special federal assistance for several years. Once arrived, refugees are also eligible for almost all social programs, ensuring an abundance of consumer spending and rents for nearby businesses and employers.
Trump’s directive, due to be released tomorrow, said:
Admission numbers will primarily be assigned to Afrikaners from South Africa, pursuant to Executive Order 14204, and other victims of illegal or unjust criminal discrimination in their respective countries of origin… [The order] requires refugees to receive the most stringent identity verification of any category of aliens seeking admission to or entry into the United States.
Many progressives would rather help dependent foreigners than Americans who refuse to be pitied by their fellow citizens. In 2024, Biden’s agencies set the refugee count at 125,000 and began using it to offer potential migrants from South America a legal, safer and cheaper path to American communities.
A 2024 federal study indicates that the federal government benefits from the influx of refugees, even though state and local governments are forced to spend more than they earn through local taxes from poor migrants.
Migration advocacy groups have long ignored and hidden the enormous harm done to ordinary Americans by the policy of rejecting many guest migrants — most of them poor and poorly educated — into American communities, including in Buffalo, New York, and Springfield, Ohio, where Biden aides helped settle thousands of Haitian migrants.
“I would speak to the voters of Springfield, Ohio,” Vice President JD Vance told the New York Post for an interview published on October 29:
This is the situation they would describe to me that happened in Springfield, Ohio. So you’re a landlord and you’re renting a three-bedroom house to a family of four or five. A few years ago, they were paying, say, $1,000 a month… And all of a sudden, four families of Haitian migrants arrive, each of them receiving $1,000 per family. [in federal aid] and they are prepared to accommodate 20 people in a three-bedroom house. What does it do? This deprives all American citizens of these homes. This drives up rents for everyone, because now you have a three-bedroom house that you can rent for $4,000 a month or $3,000 a month instead of $1,000 a month.
“It completely destroys Americans’ ability to live the American dream, and that’s what these open border policies have done,” Vance added.
But refugee programs have also reduced Americans’ ability to negotiate livable wages with many businesses, particularly meatpackers. Once Trump cut off the arrival of refugees and illegal migrants, Americans’ ability to make workplace deals surged.
On June 6, knlvradio.com reported from Nebraska that the massive meatpacking company JBS had signed an agreement providing wage increases, paid sick leave and a pension plan for 26,000 meatpacking workers. The article was titled “Groundbreaking Union Contract Brings Major Gains to JBS Workers Across the United States.”
“I’ve worked at JBS for 10 years and when I heard the news about the pension, I was excited,” said Thelma Cruz, who works at the JBS Pork plant in Marshalltown, Iowa. “My husband also works here, and when we retire, we will both receive pension checks every month. »
Before Trump stopped the supply of refugees, meatpacking companies were able to employ several thousand refugees and migrants to fill difficult, dangerous, and low-paying jobs that Americans avoided because of the dangers and low wages.
The loss of cheap labor is also forcing meatpacking companies to spend more on high-tech equipment. In June, FoodDive.com reported:
Cargill said it will invest nearly $90 million in computer vision and other cutting-edge technologies over the next few years at a Colorado beef plant, which will allow the food giant to get more meat from each animal.
…
Cargill has sought to automate some of its processes to improve production efficiency and make operations safer for employees. The company has implemented more than 100 projects at 35 facilities across North America as part of its Factory of the Future initiative.
“In addition to technology improvements at the Fort Morgan plant, Cargill is investing to address workforce constraints by supporting a $40 million employee housing development project,” the site reported.
Greater productivity and higher wages for Americans will indirectly help poor countries that are deprived of their young people because of migration. These gains will come from new trade agreements that allow foreign countries to produce and sell products in the United States to America’s prosperous people.
For now, the loss of new refugee workers is forcing employers to look for new Americans to hire, including some Americans abandoned to the drug market.
This month, FBI Director Kash Patel led the first major police raid on the infamous drug market in Kensington, Pennsylvania, and arrested dozens of people. foreign traffickers that have kept many Americans addicted to fentanyl and other deadly drugs.
