South Africa hits back at US plan to favour white Afrikaner ‘refugees’
The South African government has criticized the United States’ decision to prioritize asylum applications from white Afrikaners, saying claims of white genocide have been widely discredited and lack reliable evidence.
He pointed to an open letter published by prominent members of the Afrikaner community earlier this week rejecting that narrative, with some signatories calling the resettlement plan racist.
The limited number of white South African Afrikaners who have registered to settle in the United States indicates that they are not being persecuted, the statement added.
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump’s administration announced its lowest annual refugee cap on record – at just 7,500.
Exact figures for the number of white South Africans admitted under the US program are not available.
The latest crime statistics in South Africa do not indicate that more white people have been victims of violent crime than other racial groups.
Earlier this year, President Trump offered refugee status to Afrikaners – who are mostly descendants of Dutch and French settlers – after South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a law allowing the government to seize land without compensation in rare cases.
Most private agricultural land is owned by white South Africans who make up just over 7% of the population.
Several months ago, South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled after accusing Trump of “mobilizing supremacism” and trying to “project white victimhood like a dog whistle.”
In the Oval Office in May, Trump confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and claimed his country’s white farmers were being killed and “persecuted.”
President Trump held up a photo purporting to show body bags containing the remains of white people in South Africa, but the Reuters news agency later identified the photo as one of theirs – taken thousands of miles away in the war-stricken Democratic Republic of Congo.
Washington has not commented on the claim that the image was misidentified.
The White House also released a video that it said showed grave sites of murdered white farmers. It later emerged that the videos were scenes from a 2020 protest in which the crosses depicted farmers killed over several years.
