President Donald Trump’s basis for offering white South Africans refugee status due to “genocide” stems from dubious claims, highlighting racist beliefs.
On Monday (May 12), President Donald Trump took questions from reporters after a White House event, and was pointedly asked about welcoming white South Africans as refugees through a February executive order despite the administration’s feverish agenda of detaining and deporting migrants and others from the United States. “Why are you creating an expediting path into the country for Afrikaners but not others?” he was asked.
“Because they’re being killed and we don’t want to see people be killed,” Trump responded. “But it’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about. Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white. Whether they are white or Black makes no difference to me. White farmers are being brutally killed and the land is being confiscated in South Africa.”
But the data, and further research, disproves those claims. According to Willamette University Professor of History Seth Cotler, such claims have only been sourced to neo-Nazi publications which have promoted the claim for decades. An expert on right-wing propaganda, he detailed the instances that fueled the myth in a thread of posts on BlueSky, noting that conservative William F. Buckley was the lone exception, writing about it in a column. White South Africans, while victims of violence in the country, experience it far less than those who are Black.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Afrikaners (who compose two-thirds of South Africa’s white population) possess half of South Africa’s land and produce 90% of its agricultural products, which amounted to be worth $13.7 billion in exports last year alone. Only 1% of white South Africans are in poverty as opposed to two-thirds of Black South Africans, due in large part to the historic system of apartheid in that nation which was abolished in 1994.
When interviewed, some Afrikaners expressed their gratitude to Trump for the offer of resettlement but weren’t keen on going to the States. “But it’s good to know that [Trump] will back us … if sh*t happens,” farmer Maritz Gobler said. He also nixed the idea proposed by one Trump official that it would be easier for them to assimilate. “I don’t want to speak English for the rest of my life,” he said, highlighting that most Afrikaners primarily speak Afrikaans, a version of Dutch influenced by the indigenous peoples of Namibia and South Africa.
