Episcopal Group Quits Refugee Program over White South African Arrivals

An Episcopal group is quitting a taxpayer-funded refugee program because President Donald Trump is importing white South Africans whose lives are threatened.

“Just over two weeks ago, the federal government informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government has classified as refugees,” said the May 12 letter from Sean W. Rowe, the presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.

The letter continued:

In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step. Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.
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It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years. I am saddened and ashamed that many of the refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Forty-nine Afrikaners — whose lives are threatened in South Africa — landed in Dulles Airport, Va., on May 12. Another 70,000 mostly poor, rural, white South Africans have applied to join the refugee program. The arrival of the legitimate refugees was greeted with hate and disdain by pro-migration groups and media.

“My read of this is that the administration is trolling the left,” Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News.

He added: “Admitting these few dozen Afrikaners is kind of trolling to get the left to find one immigrant, one refugee group that they don’t want. The numbers are small, but the Episcopal migration service dropped out of the refugee business rather than help these guys. So [Trump’s trolling] is  already working.”

Krikorian said the Afrikaners deserve an exit from South Africa “because as a minority group, a deeply hated minority group, they will never achieve or exercise any political power, and their departure or presence isn’t going to change anything in South Africa’s future.”

He noted that the hostile black majority has left them with only two alternatives: “the suitcase or the coffin.”

“Very few policies, apart from the USAID cuts, have attracted as much astonishment and revulsion as this policy, which appears to be racially motivated,” said Murithi Mutiga, Africa program director for the International Crisis Group. He told the supportive Washington Post that “South Africa’s African National Congress government is widely admired for its efforts to wipe out the legacy of apartheid.”

Since 1988, the Episcopal church’s Episcopal Migration Ministries has been well paid by the federal government to settle more than 100,000 individuals into Americans’ communities. The group makes clear that it favors imposing diversity on Americans:

Every year on June 20, we celebrate the strength, resilience, and stories of refugees on World Refugee Day. This year, our marking of this important event will be even more special as we also join in celebration of Pride Month throughout the month of June, providing resources and inspiring local communities to action through our Rainbow Initiative.

More than three million people have been selected for refugee migration to the United States since 1980. This huge inflow from Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Burma, and many other foreign cultures has been a boon for local employers and government officials but a huge burden for Americans who lose wages, housing affordability, education opportunities, career development, and civic clout.

Many South Africans have already migrated to Australia, amid the Australian government’s invited inflows of Indians, Arabs, and Chinese to the country. “Australia wants them … Let them go there,” Krikoran said.

Donald Trump has frozen the U.S. refugee program, which was scheduled to import another 125,000 migrants in 2025. His administration is instead promoting policies to force more wealth-generating, wage-boosting investment in workplace productivity.

The promise of cheap labor is ”a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation,” Vice President JD Vance told an audience of investors in May.

“Both our working people, our populace, and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy. And the solution, I believe, is American innovation,” he added.

“Real innovation makes us more productive, but it also, I think, dignifies our workers.  It boosts our standard of living.  It strengthens our workforce and the relative value of its labor,” Vance said.

For example, for many years, U.S. farmers have imported many Latino farmworkers and a small number of South African farmworkers to displace American citizens.  In November 2021, Breitbart News reported:

“Sunflower County, where [Pitts Farms] is located, is predominantly black; as of 2019, blacks made up an estimated 73 percent of the county’s population,” the lawsuit notes:

For many years, [Pitts Farms] employed a majority Black workforce. As of 2014, however, this number has steadily dwindled, as [Pitts Farms] began applying for and hiring white South Africans for the same work. And since 2014, PFP has used the H-2A [visa] program to hire only white South Africans – no black South Africans – although that country too is majority black by a wide margin: estimates stand at around 80% Black compared to less than 8% white.

“I never did imagine that it would come to the point where they would be hiring foreigners, instead of people like me,” Strong told the Times. “… It’s like being robbed of your heritage.”

“I gave them half my life and ended up with nothing,” he said.

Democrats support the H-2A program and argue it should be expanded to let H-2A workers gain citizenship in exchange for low-wage work.