Trump Proposes Resettling More White South Africans and Blocking Other Refugees

The Trump administration is advancing plans to resettle an additional 10,000 white South Africans in the United States as refugees. Under President Trump’s proposal, which was submitted to Congress on Monday, the U.S. would lift its record-low refugee admissions figure from 7,500 to 17,500, with the additional openings reserved for Afrikaners. This comes as the administration continues to block the entry of refugees from other countries. The U.S. has resettled just over 6,000 refugees between October and April — all except three were from South Africa. Trump has said Afrikaners face racial persecution and genocide in South Africa, claims that have been rejected by the U.N. Human Rights Office, among others. Last year, he cut off aid to the country and boycotted the G20 summit in Johannesburg.

“Whiteness is being recast as endangered,” says Lebohang Pheko, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg. “There is a move towards the alt-right, the MAGA discourse, which is about replacement theory, and which is absolutely about displacing the idea that anything other than whiteness is normative.” Pheko also suggests that Trump’s actions toward South Africa are retribution for the genocide case it brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

“We are processing resettlement cases for white Afrikaners at a record pace,” adds Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, which is currently litigating a class-action lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States refugee program. “This program has never been a fast program, and it’s being expedited for just this one population.” While Afrikaners are being quickly resettled, “thousands of other people who have went through years of vetting, who have went through years of persecution and violence,” are being blocked from entering the U.S., says Aly.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The Trump administration is advancing plans to increase the number of white South Africans it admits to the United States as refugees in the coming months. The proposal would see an additional 10,000 white South Africans resettled into the U.S., even as the Trump administration continues to block the entry of refugees from other countries. The U.S. has resettled just over 6,000 refugees between October and April, and all except three were from South Africa. Under Trump’s new proposal, which was submitted to Congress, the U.S. would lift its record-low refugee admissions figure for the year from 7,500 to 17,500, with the additional openings reserved for Afrikaners. Trump has falsely claimed they face racial persecution and genocide. This is President Trump speaking last December.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about, but it’s a terrible thing that’s taking place. And farmers are being killed. They happen to be white, but whether they’re white or Black makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed, and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.

AMY GOODMAN: The claims of a white genocide and racial violence have been rejected by the U.N. Human Rights Office, among others.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Lebohang Pheko is a senior research fellow and political economist at the Trade Collective think tank and a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, joining us from Johannesburg. And in Washington, D.C., Sharif Aly joins us, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, which is currently litigating a class-action lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States refugee program.

Let’s begin with you, your lawsuit. Explain what it is. It will shock people to know, Sharif Aly, that 6,000 refugees have been accepted, incredibly record-low number of refugees from around the world, but in fact not from around the world, only from South Africa, except for three. Can you explain what’s going on? And now President Trump wants to lift the Trump administration cap, but only to allow in whites, more white South Africans.

SHARIF ALY: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

What I could explain is that on his day of inauguration, he issued an executive order to suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. And we’ve been in litigation since with the Pacito v. Trump case to reopen this program, which is so vital.

What’s happening is not only that they’re allowing just this one population coming into the U.S., but it’s happening to impact the lives of thousands of other people who have went through years of vetting, who have went through years of persecution and violence and trying to find safety. For instance, there’s 12,000 people prior to this executive order that were conditionally approved for travel. Those are people that had sold all of their belongings. They are people who left their home. There are people now that don’t know where they’re going, and, in fact, many of them are not even able to work in the countries of first asylum in which they reside in currently.

There’s also over 100,000 people that were also going forward with the process of resettling in the United States. Now they are stuck, and they’re in limbo, while we are processing resettlement cases for white Afrikaners at a record pace. This program has never been a fast program, and it’s being expedited for just this one population. What I could tell you is this is a very clear racism, where only one group, that tends to be white, is allowed in the country, while you have Black, Brown, people of Muslim origin and other nationalities and religious minorities are being told that they cannot come into this country.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Pheko, if you could respond to this proposal by Trump and actually explain what the situation is in South Africa, this claim of his that there is a white genocide and that white Afrikaners are being persecuted in the country?

LEBOHANG PHEKO: Thank you, and to your guest, as well.

So, I think that we — one of the things that we can agree on globally is that there is no white genocide in South Africa. And I think the irony, that isn’t lost on many of us, is that this comes at a time when there is an actual genocide being purported upon, you know, several people, across the Gaza Strip, Palestine, Iran and so forth.

And it also has to do, really — we need to situate this within a few things. One is the rehabilitation of white victimhood. This is also to do with the delegitimization of African sovereignty and Black majority rule. It’s also important that this is also linked to demographic panic and the global shift to the right, the alt-right, replacement theory and so forth. And this leads to the kind of hostility of migration from the majority world, as my co-panelist has already illuminated.

I think the danger of this is also that this links to very strong anti-Black politics and anti-Blackness, even though President Trump claims that he wouldn’t care if these were white — if they were Black farmers. The truth is that in this country there is crime, and there are, you know, killings and murders, like in any country and anywhere in the world.

One of the crises that we do have is certainly one of criminal justice and of criminal — you know, of crime statistics and high rates of different sorts of social ills and social violences. Those are not racialized. Those are to do with the economies of scale. Those are to do with exclusion. Those are to do with unemployment. Those are to do with people being desperate. And those are also to do with structural failures that we have inherited from the pre-1994 dispensation, which has meant that there are millions of people in this country who are not only unemployed, but unemployable, who have never found a place for themselves in this economy.

We also have a history of violence, which was state-sanctioned violence, by the way, and the way that our own personal politics, inter-party politics, reproduced that violence, and it was also oftentimes fomented by the invisible hand of the state. So, to say that this is now coming down to a white genocide is also trying to rewrite history and trying to — trying to reinscript the moral authority of our victory over settler colonialism as one that is something that is sinister. And that’s the most egregious form of white revisionism.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go to what the administration, what the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said, refuting Trump’s claims that white people are being persecuted in his country, calling it a, quote, “completely false narrative.” Speaking at the Africa CEO Forum in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Ramaphosa recounted a conversation he had with Trump about the situation in his country.

PRESIDENT CYRIL RAMAPHOSA: I had a conversation with President Trump on the phone. And I — he asked, he said, “What’s happening down there?” And I said, “President, what you’ve been told by those people who are opposed to transformation back home in South Africa is not true.” And I added to him, I said, “We were well taught by Nelson Mandela and other iconic leaders, like Oliver Tambo, on how to continue to build a united nation out of the diverse groupings that we have in South Africa. We’re the only country on the continent where the colonizers came to stay, and we have never driven them out of our country. So, they are staying, and they’re making great progress. It’s a fringe grouping, that does not have a lot of support, that is anti-transformation and anti-change, that would actually prefer to see South Africa going back to apartheid type of policies.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that’s President Ramaphosa speaking last year. You mentioned, Dr. Pheko, the ongoing genocide, the genocide that is in fact occurring and has occurred. If you could talk about the context in which the U.S., the Trump administration has made this decision, namely South Africa’s move in December 2023 to the International Court of Justice initiating a genocide case against Israel? Was that relevant?

LEBOHANG PHEKO: It’s extremely relevant. I mean, I think we agree that there is no white genocide in South Africa. There is, however, a global machinery that continues to normalize imperial wars, occupation and the suffering of Black and Brown people. And what we are seeing is that whiteness is being recast as endangered, while Palestinians and Syrians and Sudanese and Congolese and other people who are facing massive violences and displacement and dispossession are denied equal global sympathy.

And clearly, what this — what South Africa’s, you know, stand at the ICJ does is it tries to rehumanize and to recenter a moral and a judicial ethic around what humanity should be centering. And that is really to state that if we say “never again,” as people ourselves who were dispossessed, who were occupied, who were the first settler — you know, the first apartheid state, per se, formally inscribed judicially — it is no doubt that certainly this seems to have come at a time when, in the same breath, there is a move towards the alt-right, the MAGA discourse, which is about replacement theory, and which is absolutely about displacing the idea that — the idea that anything other than whiteness is normative.

President Trump and the Trump administration have made it very clear that they are very unhappy with our stand at the ICJ, which has now, of course, been accompanied with — now been accompanied by several other countries. However, this will not be the end of it, because this is not just about South Africa versus the U.S. It is really about a human ethic. It is really about an anti-imperial ethic. And it’s really about an ethic that should really place us at the center of a new form of internationalism and a new form of compassion, and also to really move away from the kind of bullying, imperial bullying, that seems to be taking place as reinscripted by President Trump, and trying to then weaponize the stand that countries like South Africa have taken against the genocide, the real genocide, that’s taking place in Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: Lebohang Pheko, I wanted to ask you about what’s called the PayPal Mafia and the people who surround President Trump and Vice President JD Vance. You’ve got Peter Thiel, the South African longtime JD Vance patron, educated in the South African town of Swakopmund, that at the time he lived there incredibly racist, with Hitler’s birthday celebrated, people greeting each other with Nazi salutes, when Thiel was living there. And, of course, it was very similar to what we saw another South African, Elon Musk, do at one of those rallies, where, you know, he had that stiff-arm salute, and everyone questioned, “Was this a Nazi salute?” So, you have Peter Thiel, you have David Sacks, and you have Elon Musk. These are the people that are very close to Trump and JD Vance. Talk about what he — who he is informed by.

LEBOHANG PHEKO: So, I mean, you’re quite right. All of these — it’s a really weird coincidence of history and geopolitics that he happens to be surrounded by these tech bros, these tech apartheid bros, really — Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, as well — and all of whom have these different connections with South Africa, southern Africa, as well. It’s really important, because what they also represent is tech capital. They represent libertarianism. They represent a really rabid form of white nationalism. They also represent a form of rabid surveillance capital, surveillance politics, which is shrouded in this idea of statelessness and the idea that the state should not intervene entirely and too deeply into the business of business and corporate.

But they also then link this with defense technology and really a putrid kind of anti-liberal libertarian politics, which purport, again, to be, you know, beyond politics. And yet all of them, you know, have said things around so-called anti-wokeness, a very, very problematic terminology. They have a hostility to regulation. They have an anti-DEI agenda. And we’ve seen Elon Musk trying to muscle his way and that Starlink thing of his into African markets, South African markets, as though we don’t have Wi-Fi already. And they also push these really ugly civilizational decline narratives.

And it’s really problematic and troubling that none of them, as far as I know, are, per se, deeply rooted in political science or sociology or political — you know, political philosophizing, which would give them such a strong grasp of the civilizational crisis. But they also speak to strong state politics when it protects capital or their own geopolitical interests, and a weird coincidence that these five apartheid tech bros happen to have configured around Donald Trump.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Sharif Aly, as the Trump administration increases what was an unprecedented number, that was so low, of refugee admissions to the U.S., he’s increasing this number only for white South Africans. Could you explain what the situation is of all of the refugees fleeing absolutely devastating conditions, from Syria to the DRC to Afghanistan, and what their fate is in light of what the Trump administration has done and is continuing to do now with this increase exclusively for white South Africans?

SHARIF ALY: Thank you. Their fate is changing on a daily basis, and the fact that their status is in limbo has created more uncertainty and ambiguity in their lives. And they’re suffering considerably. Their vulnerability levels are increasing at a very tremendous level. I was in Jordan and Lebanon in December meeting with our teams and talking to our clients and learning about the work that they — the experiences that they’re facing. Unfortunately, their vulnerability levels are increasing. So, what you’re seeing is that people who were planning on resettling and moving and finding safety have actually found themselves less employable, without work authorizations, without safety. In Jordan specifically, there was an increase in homelessness, which has led to further exploitation. People, especially women, are really at risk of sexual exploitation for favors to get them to be able to live their lives. This is increasing the level of trauma and difficulty that refugees and displaced people are facing.

Now, as another example, we have, after the Afghans — the removal of the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, the Afghan allies who were meant to come to the U.S. through special immigrant visas have not been able to be processed and come to America. These are part of the exceptions that the 9th Circuit required and Congress requires of the U.S. government to fulfill — people who are from religious minorities, people who have family that are refugees, people who are wartime allies. And yet now we have a group of Afghans in a camp in Qatar who are waiting to be resettled, and the rumor is that they will be resettled in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they have no connection, where they have no relationship to the country, where they were not planning to resettle there, and where there’s currently a major Ebola outbreak.

I just want to show you that there is a real disregard for the humanity of this. Over 117 million people in the world today are displaced. Forty-five million of them are refugees. America takes a fraction of those people into their country, into our country. And those people are now just left to fend for themselves in a society that’s not helping them.

AMY GOODMAN: Sharif Aly, we want to thank you for being with us, president of IRAP, the International Refugee Assistance Program, which is currently suing the Trump administration over the dismantling of the U.S. refugee program, and Lebohang Pheko, senior research fellow and political economist at the Trade Collective think tank, professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, speaking to us from Johannesburg, South Africa.

Coming up, a new study finds Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of USAID funding has led to an increase in violence across Africa. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Sowa” by Fatoumata Diawara at our Democracy Now! studio.