Asylum: Only white Afrikaners need apply

White Afrikaner farmers arrive in the U.S.

Trump insists there's "a genocide taking place." That's flatly untrue. Afrikaners "don't have legit asylum claims."

(Image credit: Getty Images)

Seeing President Trump "rolling out the red carpet" for white Afrikaner farmers should cut "deep into America's soul," said Elvia Díaz in The Arizona Republic. Why? Because his administration has simultaneously "shut down the asylum program" for Venezuelans, Afghans, and Haitians, who face actual deadly oppression but are mostly non-white. The same day 59 Dutch-descended South Africans landed near Washington, D.C., on a taxpayer-funded jet last week to an effusive welcome by Trump officials, the U.S. removed deportation protections for thousands of Afghan refugees, who fled the Taliban's medieval, autocratic regime. In post-apartheid South Africa, meanwhile, whites still own most of the wealth and 72% of its farmland. Yet Trump insists there's "a genocide taking place." That's flatly untrue. Afrikaners "don't have legit asylum claims."

Perhaps they actually do, said Ilya Somin in Reason, but admitting them while kicking out brown and black-skinned refugees is "blatant bigotry and hypocrisy." In South Africa, the government's land policies are effectively "a form of racial discrimination," assigning "collective guilt" to whites who might not have even been born before apartheid's abolition. Though there's hardly a genocide of whites, as Trump and South African immigrant Elon Musk have claimed, anti-white reprisal killings are "rare but real." Still, only dozens of South Africa's 2.7 million Afrikaners even sought asylum here, suggesting they don't face "genuinely massive violence and oppression." To portray them as more imperiled than, say, Afghan or Sudanese people reflects the MAGA right's "obsession with white racial grievances."

The Trump administration has an explanation, said Jonathan V. Last and Will Sommer in The Bulwark. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau stated that Afrikaner refugees "could be assimilated easily into our country," presumably meaning that they are white, Christian, and mostly right-wing. Consider the views of one of the 59 new arrivals, Charl Kleinhaus, 46, a Trump and Elon Musk fan who has posted a litany of antisemitic screeds on X. "Jews are an untrustworthy and a dangerous group," he said in one. Such sentiments have gotten foreign students and immigrants deported, but what makes Kleinhaus different? "It's a mystery!" The warm welcome of the Afrikaners sends a clear message, said Greg Sargent in The New Republic. The Trump administration is "flaunting" its belief in white victimhood "for all of us to see—deliberately, aggressively, and proudly."