Why Trump Is So Obsessed With White South Africans

Yahoo

24-05-2025

Even as President Donald Trump has attempted to block thousands of refugees from places like Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan from entering the U.S., he's made a unique and pointed exception for one particular group: Afrikaners.
Last week, Trump welcomed 59 Afrikaners to the U.S. as refugees, alleging that they'd suffered racial persecution in their home country, a claim the South African government has vehemently denied. The group — one of two white minorities in South Africa — are descended primarily from Dutch colonists and are known for their role in establishing apartheid, a system of segregation that oppressed Black South Africans for decades.
Trump — and incoming Afrikaner refugees — say they've been targeted because of their race, and that they now face violence and government land seizures as a result. Experts and South African officials, meanwhile, counter that there's scant evidence for such allegations, and that the group remains one of the wealthiest and most economically privileged in the entire country.
Trump's admission of Afrikaners marks a sharp contrast with how refugees from other parts of the world have been treated: In January, the White House suspended refugee admissions indefinitely, arguing that the U.S. didn't have the capacity to absorb more people. More recently, Trump's secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has defended singling out Afrikaners by saying that the 'US has the right to prioritize … who [it wants],' and that the administration is focused on admitting people who can be 'assimilated easily.'
The blatant double standard underscores how this policy ties into Trump's broader messaging, which has long focused on stoking white grievances and resentment. Specifically, Trump has framed the incoming Afrikaner refugees as white victims who have been mistreated by a majority-Black South African government – and population – that's out to take what's theirs. That echoes longstanding fears conservatives have propagated about the racist and conspiratorial 'Great Replacement Theory' — the idea that there's a calculated plan to displace white people with people of color.
To put it bluntly: Trump's plans and priorities regarding refugees and immigration are steeped in white supremacy.
The president is 'positioning himself as a sort of savior of white America and of white Christianity globally,' said Loren Landau, a migration expert at the University of Oxford and South Africa's University of Witwatersrand.
Afrikaners first settled in South Africa in the 1600s and more recently came to power when the right-wing Afrikaner-led National Party won the country's elections in 1948.
During that contest, the National Party – which was desperate to maintain a system of cheap, Black labor – ran on a platform of institutionalizing segregation and went on to impose the system of apartheid. That included a series of racist laws that segregated basic services like public bathrooms and buses, regulated where Black South Africans could live and travel and denied Black South Africans the right to vote.
After nearly four decades of economic sanctions and protests, the Afrikaner National Party was removed in 1994 when South Africa held its first democratic election and chose Nelson Mandela as its president.
' Afrikaners and other white people were allowed to stay in South Africa. They were allowed to keep almost all of their property and most of their privilege,' said Landau of the conditions that Afrikaners experienced in the years since.
Today, Afrikaners comprise roughly 5% of South Africa's population and are still considered one of the most successful groups in the country. They're economically well-off, hold prominent positions in government and own significant swaths of the country's farmland. (While white South Africans collectively make up about 7% of South Africa's population, they continue to own roughly 70% of commercial farmland.)
'I had to leave a five-bedroom house, which I will lose now,' Charl Kleinhaus, one of the Afrikaner refugees who arrived in the U.S. told the BBC, though he emphasized that he feels safer now that he's been resettled in Buffalo, New York.
Right-wing Afrikaner groups like AfriForum and recent Afrikaner refugees to the U.S. are among those who've raised concerns about crime and discrimination, alleging racial targeting of white farmers. Many Afrikaners, though, have said they'd rather stay and push for better conditions within South Africa than leave for the U.S.
'The vast majority of Afrikaners are going nowhere, and they have expressed themselves …So even within Afrikaner circles, this is a small group of people,' Piet Croucamp, an associate professor in political studies at South Africa's North West University and an Afrikaner himself, told the BBC.
Since apartheid ended in 1994 and Afrikaners lost their hold on the country's government, conspiracy theories have proliferated about how they're now the targets of oppression.
Such theories, which have been advanced by groups — including AfriForum — tap into enduring fears that some members of the country's white minority have had about being overtaken by members of the Black majority.
Steve Hofmeyr, an Afrikaner musician who Landau described as akin to 'South Africa's Kid Rock,' was among the most prominent voices to spread these claims, Landau said. 'No longer will we be silent about the oppression of the White South African Ethnic Minority! No longer will we silently endure the killing of our people on our farms and in our towns and cities,' reads a 2013 petition from a movement called Red October, which Hofmeyr endorsed, and which centered white Afrikaner claims of persecution.
In the years since, AfriForum lobbied for meetings with the Trump administration during his first term, meeting with then-National Security Adviser John Bolton in 2018, as well as staff for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Ernst Roets, one of the group's leaders, also appeared in a segment with Tucker Carlson, who further elevated its cause that year.
'White farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land,' Carlson wrote in a 2018 social media post. 'And no one is brave enough to talk about it.'
Trump recently echoed many of these points verbatim as justification for the Afrikaner refugee program and for punitive measures toward South Africa itself. He's pointed specifically to attacks on white farmers and a 2024 land expropriation law as evidence of these allegations.
High-profile violence toward white farmers, like the 2010 killing of white nationalist Eugene Terreblanche and the 2023 killing of teenager Jayden Louw, have fueled this scrutiny. But officials and experts emphasize that the cases don't show disproportionate violence against white South Africans.
'[Terreblanche] is often held up as this sort of quintessential example of the white farm murders, but all the evidence suggests, I mean, I hate to say it, they're killed like everybody else in South Africa,' Landau said.
Experts note that South Africa broadly has a high rate of violent crime, but that it affects both white and Black residents. White farmers' murders account for fewer than 1% of annual killings nationwide, according to Politifact. And a BBC review notes that of 6,953 people murdered in South Africa between October and December 2024, 12 people were killed in farm attacks — and a majority were likely Black. Such analyses are complicated, though, by the fact that South Africa doesn't consistently disclose data on the race of victims.
Claims of genocide, however, have been firmly disputed by officials and a South African Court, which called them 'clearly imagined and not real' in February.
Trump and allies like Elon Musk, who is an immigrant from South Africa, have also cited anti-apartheid chants like 'Kill the Boer' as evidence of the targeting of Afrikaners since 'Boer' is derived from the Afrikaans term for 'farmer.' The current South African government, however, has distanced itself from the song and emphasized that it's not indicative of 'government policy.'
Similarly, Trump has alleged that the South African government intends to use a 2024 law to seize the land of white farmers.
That law would enable the government to redistribute land from private owners if it's for the public interest, including in some cases, without compensation. Proponents say it seeks to remedy brutal seizures of land that Black South Africans experienced under apartheid. The law does not allow the government to simply take a person's land, however: Ramaphosa noted in February that no land has been confiscated thus far, and that the process of obtaining land would require a court review.
'The way it's spoken about now in our government, it's as if the South African government is going to expropriate productive family farms owned by Afrikaners. That's not it at all,' Brown University historian and South Africa expert Nancy Jacobs said. 'There's no part of the law that says land that's being productively farmed by anybody can be taken.'
Not only are Afrikaners being admitted to the U.S. as others are not, their applications are also being uniquely expedited. While processing refugee applications typically takes one to two years, Afrikaners who were recently admitted saw that theirs were approved in just a few months. And while other immigrants are being detained for their public support of Palestine due to the White House's claims that such positions are antisemitic, an Afrikaner refugee who has a history of antisemitic posts was among those recently welcomed to the U.S. (He told The New York Times that he is not antisemitic and described one post as a mistake and said others had been written by other people.)
Many refugees who were waiting for their applications to be processed when Trump ordered admissions suspended are from countries like Afghanistan, where U.S. allies face retribution in the form of imprisonment and violence. Others have sought to escape starvation and famine in Sudan and the Congo, where ongoing civil wars have decimated food, water and medical supplies.
Those who are enduring such conditions now are being forced to bide their time as courts weigh Trump's executive actions.
'Many people are left in dangerous situations, sometimes life-threatening situations, as they're waiting for their resettlement,' said Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.
Trump's also prioritized white immigrants over people of color before.
During his first term, Trump prioritized resettling a larger share of refugees who were Ukrainian and evangelical Christians, Gelatt said, over those who were from Muslim-majority countries like Syria.
Trump has had a contentious relationship with South Africa, both due to his stated concerns about Afrikaner treatment and due to the country's political stances.
Both were cited in the February executive action when Trump cut off U.S. aid to South Africa, a move that's caused a $430 million budget shortfall for the country. South Africa's decision to bring allegations of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice is among the decisions that have drawn Trump's ire, along with its close ties to Iran.
Rubio said this week that Trump intends to skip the upcoming G20 summit — an annual gathering of world leaders — which will take place in South Africa in light of some of these positions.
'We chose not to participate in this year's G20, hosted by South Africa, either at the foreign ministers' level or the presidents' level,'Rubio said. 'They clearly, on the global stage and in multiple multinational organizations, have consistently been a vote against America's interests time and again.'
It's doubtful a recent Trump meeting with South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa did much to smooth over these tensions, though the latter claimed that it went 'very well.'
Trump has focused on activating white victimhood in campaign messages and with his immigration policies – and this move is effectively the latest version of that.
He's gone after South Africa's land expropriation act just as he's criticized diversity, equity and inclusion policies, which are designed to enable equal access to various opportunities for minority groups who've faced discrimination.
And just as his immigration policies have framed minority groups as a threat and 'invasion' in the U.S., his claims about white farmers' persecution in South Africa seek to harp on the same fears.