The first Afrikaner refugees are set to arrive in the U.S. on Monday under President Donald Trump’s policy of granting them asylum due to racial discrimination and threats of expropriation by the South African government.
As Breitbart News reported in February, Trump extended an offer of asylum to “ethnic minority Afrikaners” and cut off aid to South Africa following the passage of that country’s Expropriation Act, which allows the government to take property — and not just farms — without compensation.
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration is working to bring the first group of white South Africans it has classified as refugees to the United States early next week, according to officials briefed on the plans and documents obtained by The New York Times.
Although the president halted virtually all other refugee admissions shortly after he took office in January, his administration hastily put together a program to allow in white South Africans, who he claims have been the victims of racial persecution in their home country.
The administration plans to send government officials to Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia for an event marking the arrival of the South Africans, who belong to the white minority Afrikaner ethnic group, according to the memo from the Department of Health and Human Services. The administration initially planned to welcome the Afrikaners on Monday, but some officials familiar with the matter cautioned that the plans remained in flux, subject to flight logistics and processing of the group.
National Public Radio reported that it is possible the government could charter a flight for the Afrikaners.
There has been a rush of some 70,000 applications for asylum from Afrikaners since Trump’s policy was announced. The U.S. embassy in Pretoria has been tasked with processing the applicants as soon as possible.
Though the government has sought to reassure investors and has pushed back against critics, radicals like Julius Malema, who leads a black nationalist and socialist opposition party, have vowed to seize farmland.
Many South Africans fear that their country could be forced to endure Zimbabwe-style “land reform” that would chase farmers, who are disproportionately white Afrikaners, off the land and destabilize the economy.
Afrikaners are the descendants of Dutch colonists, as well as 16th-century French Huguenots who fled religious persecution. Their language, Afrikaans, emerged within the diverse mix of ethnic groups at the Cape; the first written Afrikaans text is in Arabic script, highlighting the influence of “coloured” or “Malay” Muslim slaves imported by the Dutch from Indonesia. Afrikaners developed a strong national identity in the late nineteenth century, and the Afrikaner-dominated National Party ruled South Africa during apartheid.
The National Party agreed to cede white minority rule through a democratic transition in the 1990s, given guarantees of protection for the cultural, linguistic, and property rights of all South Africans. However, Afrikaans has been targeted by the new government for removal from many of the institutions that have protected it, especially schools and universities. And as white South Africans, Afrikaners have been subject to racial discrimination under aggressive affirmative action policies. The Trump administration expelled South Africa’s ambassador in March after he claimed President Trump was leading a white supremacist movement.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
