Trump’s Afrikaner refugee lie
Trump's Afrikaner refugee policy is based on racism and outright lies. One of our partner organizations, the International Institute of Akron, recently made the difficult decision to reject federal funding for refugee resettlement because the Trump administration "essentially eliminated refugee arrivals."
In the Ohio Immigrant Alliance's opinion, the Afrikaners are fake refugees opportunistically taking advantage of U.S. taxpayers. This is evidenced by the fact that some have already chosen to return home. Real refugees don't do that; they are deathly afraid of returning to a place where they face danger. The Afrikaner grifters are taking slots and U.S. tax dollars from real refugees who are being left to die.
Of course, this is consistent with the Trump administration's decision to end Temporary Protected Status for people from many countries in crisis, like Haiti and Syria, and send Ohioans born in these countries to their death. If anyone claiming to be Christian supports this policy, I'd say go back and read your Bible. It's devastating to watch this happen and know that our tax dollars are being used to deport people to their deaths, instead of saving lives.
To qualify for refugee status, you must have a "well-founded fear of future persecution on account of your race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and/or membership in a particular social group." Below are the facts about Afrikaners. The idea that Afrikaners are "persecuted" in South Africa is a racist trope, based on some white people's fears that the world is moving towards recognizing the inherent human dignity of all people, rather than maintaining white supremacy.
Three-fourths of South Africa's privately-owned farmland is owned by white people, who constitute 8% of the population. Only 4% is owned by Black South Africans, who make up 80% of the population. South Africa's eminent domain law requires parties to agree on farmland transfers and has never been used. Meanwhile, the current Trump administration has already filed 39 eminent domain cases to take land along the U.S. southern border for its use.
Murder and violence are problems in South Africa, and most of the victims are Black. In 2024, there were 26,232 murders; only 8 were farmers. According to the Afrikaner farmers' union, TLU-SA, 1,363 white farmers have been murdered since 1990, representing far less than 1% of all murders in the nation. That's not to say those 1,363 lives don't matter. It means their murders are part of an overall homicide problem in the country, and their deaths are extremely underrepresented when you consider that they comprise 8% of the population. That is not a genocide, by anyone's definition.
The "evidence" Trump has used to justify the "genocide" conspiracy theory is not only incorrect, some of it doesn't even come from South Africa. In one famous example, he showed a photo of people carrying body bags and said, "these are all white farmers that are being buried." The picture actually showed humanitarian workers in the Congo carrying Black murder victims killed by M23 forces.
These are just more examples of the Trump administration lying to justify a racist and deadly immigration policy. While many of us having been saying this with our whole chest for years now, when will the people who backed him finally join us? And when will Congress do something real?
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