I instructed y’all.
Again in Could, I warned that Donald Trump’s govt order launching a so-called “refugee” program particularly designed to fast-track white South Africans into america wasn’t about humanitarian aid. It was about rescuing whiteness. It was about giving apartheid a second passport and smuggling settler colonialism by means of the again door of U.S. immigration legislation.
And identical to that, the warning grew to become coverage.
The primary arrivals usually are not local weather refugees. Not warfare refugees. Not famine refugees. They’re white farmers. They’re the descendants of Dutch and British colonizers who helped assemble and uphold one of the violently racist apartheid techniques in trendy historical past. And now they’re being recast as persecuted innocents, worthy of American sanctuary.
On July 25, Reuters confirmed what critics already suspected. A senior U.S. embassy official in South Africa requested if mixed-race “colored” South Africans or Black Khoisan individuals who converse Afrikaans might qualify for this system. The response from Spencer Chretien, a high official within the State Division’s refugee bureau, was blunt: “This system is meant for white individuals.”
Though the precise phrasing wasn’t verified, three sources confirmed the substance of the message. The State Division later tried to backpedal, claiming this system was open to all who met the factors. However the numbers converse louder: By late July, 88 white South Africans had been resettled. Not a single Black or mixed-race applicant has made it by means of.
That remark, spoken out loud by a U.S. authorities official, wasn’t a stunning slip. It was a affirmation. In an period the place racism not bothers to put on a disguise, the quiet half wasn’t whispered; it’s coverage. No extra winks. No extra canine whistles about “heritage,” “tradition,” or “farmers beneath siege,” or lies about “white genocide.” Simply uncooked, unvarnished racial choice embedded into federal immigration technique.
The Reuters report merely confirms what has been clear all alongside: this isn’t immigration coverage. It’s racial recruitment. These individuals aren’t being rescued from hazard. They’re being rescued for whiteness. And never simply any whiteness.
Whiteness educated in domination. Whiteness with generational experience in occupying land, extracting labor, and turning Black struggling into white capital. Whiteness fluent in settler colonialism however repackaged as “agrarian” and “hard-working.” Whiteness that is aware of easy methods to police Black motion.
This can be a whites-only asylum pipeline. A state-sanctioned apartheid rescue mission. And whereas officers attempt to costume it within the language of humanitarian concern, refugee packages from throughout sub-Saharan Africa stay partially or absolutely frozen. A journey ban on dozens extra, together with key student-sending nations, is beneath evaluate, awaiting potential restriction imminently.
This isn’t a contradiction. It’s the blueprint. The logical endpoint of a xenophobic, white-first immigration mannequin.
No person in energy is confused about who’s really in danger in South Africa. Crime is actual, nevertheless it’s not white farmers who’re probably the most susceptible. It’s poor Black individuals. Ladies. Kids. It’s the descendants of those that have been disenfranchised and traumatized by apartheid. Poverty, unemployment, overcrowding, and insufficient policing have concentrated danger in townships and casual settlements, areas which might be predominantly inhabited by Black South Africans. However there are not any emergency activity forces or pilot refugee packages for them.
As a substitute, America imports the lie of “white genocide,” a delusion cooked up by white nationalists, echoed by conservative media, and now embedded in U.S. overseas coverage. Even white Afrikaner farmers acknowledged that crime impacts all farmers, not simply whites. They emphasised that isolation, not race, is the actual danger on rural farms. Authorities and tutorial studies echo that stance, refuting systemic racial persecution.
As a result of for all of the discuss vetting and safety and quotas, the actual rule of American immigration stays: In the event you’re white, we’ll discover a option to allow you to in.
This nation turns away Haitian refugees. Sends Latino migrants to an alligator swamp in Florida. It lets Palestinian households starve beneath siege. It deports African migrants by the plane-load. However for white South Africans, all of a sudden there’s room. Abruptly, there’s urgency. Abruptly, benefit is redefined to appear like a Boer in good garments.
That is white ethnostate growth by different means.
It echoes Chilly Struggle immigration coverage, which favored white Cubans, Hungarians, and Russians fleeing communism, whereas excluding African, Caribbean, and Asian refugees escaping Western imperialism. The message then, as now: We rescue whiteness. We reject the remainder.
What’s additionally behind this refugee program is the right-wing panic over “substitute idea.” However these racists usually are not afraid of being changed. They’re afraid of being handled the way in which they’ve handled Black individuals, Indigenous individuals, immigrants, and the colonized world for hundreds of years. So, they’re fast-tracking reinforcements. Importing whiteness. Strengthening the partitions with individuals already educated in racial dominance.
And America, as all the time, will get to fake that is generosity, when actually, it’s laundering apartheid into patriotism.
And let’s not overlook about Trump’s refusal to go to Africa. In two presidencies, he hasn’t stepped foot on the continent. No summits. No symbolic visits. No photograph ops with African schoolchildren. However chartered planes for white South Africans are the type of diplomacy that makes the minimize.
Throughout his first time period, Trump known as African nations “shithole nations.” He imposed sweeping journey bans on Nigeria, Sudan, Eritrea, Tanzania, and Somalia. These bans blocked 1000’s of scholars and researchers, many mid-degree at U.S. universities, from reentering the nation.
Hundreds of African and Muslim-heritage college students learning within the U.S. had their lives upended when Trump’s journey ban stripped their visas or froze processing. Many are actually too afraid to depart the nation, too terrified they gained’t be allowed again in. Households are fractured. Levels are in danger. And but, whereas Black college students face closed borders, white South African colonizers are being fast-tracked with federal approval. American establishments are bleeding expertise as a result of Black excellence is expendable, however white grievance is precedence.
So no, this refugee program isn’t stunning. It’s not an exception. It’s constant. It’s a racial sanctuary program for white discomfort. A strategic asylum pipeline for settlers fleeing fairness.
It’s whiteness demanding sanctuary from a world the place it could be held accountable. It’s empire providing amnesty to its foot troopers. It’s apartheid, rebranded for a softer touchdown, full with a visa and federal advantages.
That is about constructing the following frontier of white supremacy. About stacking the deck with settlers who already know easy methods to dominate, exclude, and erase. As a result of in America, you don’t must flee a warfare to qualify as a refugee. You simply must flee the top of white rule.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and creator of “Spare The Youngsters: Why Whupping Kids Received’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Kids In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
SEE ALSO:
South African Refugee Program Is White’s Solely, Report Says
Trump Prioritizes White Afrikaners Over Black And Brown Migrants
