Afrikaners Are Not Refugees

I can't believe I have to type those words.

Three weeks and a day into the second Trump administration, and the injustices are piling up so fast, we’re having a hard time choosing which stories to tell. But when a friend texted me this story Friday night, I literally gasped out loud—just when I think they can’t sink any lower, they do.

On Friday afternoon, February 7, President Trump issued another decree about the refugee resettlement program. In my post last week, “The Death of US Refugee Resettlement,” I wrote about how some of the earliest executive orders signed by the president will have a massive cost for the tens of thousands of people currently waiting for resettlement, as well as those whose support was slashed with an egregious and unprecedented “stop-work” order.

(I hate the word ‘unprecedented.’ I want to live in precedented times.)

On Friday night, Trump issued another executive order offering resettlement not to the 43.7 million current refugees in the world—but to white Afrikaners in South Africa.

The word ‘refugee’ has an internationally agreed upon legal definition. In the 1940s, following World War II, the US led the charge to establish “never again” commitments so that there would never again be a genocide on earth. (I especially recommend Samantha Power’s exquisite, Pulitzer-Prize winning “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide.) As part of those commitments, the Allies created the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNCHR—the international refugee agency who would determine what it means to be a refugee, and govern how countries worked together to handle refugee crises.

(The signing of the 1951 Convention agreement; from UNHCR website, photo source)

At the UNHCR 1951 Convention in Geneva, they agreed upon a definition, and wrote the first of many international policies for how refugees will be treated in host countries. (This is, by the way, why asylum-seekers crossing the border into the US are not here illegally; the US is legally required to offer them asylum until their cases can be processed. Sending them back across the border violates the international principle of non-refoulement—sending them back into danger is itself illegal.)

According to the legal definition, a refugee is someone:

"owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of [their] nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail [themself] of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of [their] former habitual residence, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it."

By any definition, and certainly not the legal definition that governs the US Resettlement Admissions Program (and all other international resettlement programs), the Afrikaners in South Africa are not refugees.

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Apartheid was the political system in South Africa from 1948 to 1991 that determined a strict racial hierarchy for voting and land ownership, among many, many other aspects of life. (I love this BBC explainer about Apartheid and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime.)

In a sentence that feels like the basic thing I could write: Since Apartheid was overturned, there has been tension in South Africa about how to rectify the unjust practices that took place during those decades. One of the most recent acts of legislation to be signed into law by President Cyril Ramaphosa was the “Expropriation Act,” designed to determine how land can be redistributed.

The fact that there is still stark inequality in land ownership in South Africa is clear. In 1950, the early days of Apartheid, the white National Party seized land in South Africa. Even decades after the end of Apartheid, land ownership remains mostly in the hands of white South Africans. According to Reuters:

“White South Africans make up about eight percent of the population. But they hold about three quarters of privately-owned land in the country.

“In contrast, only 4% of privately held land is owned by Black South Africans, who make up nearly 80% of the country's 60 million residents.”

But the question of whether this Expropriation Act is the answer is a complicated one; the act is controversial even within President Ramaphosa’s own African National Congress (ANC) party. The law is not seizing land from white owners, it’s setting out rules by which some land can be taken and used for the public good—the way that land in Texas is legally taken for an expansion of a highway, for example. (You should read Megan Kimble’s excellent City Limits.) Expropriation is often controversial; it’s also a discussion that should be held at the local or national level.

A far-right group, AfriForum, have mounted an international campaign in protest of the Expropriation Act. They’re claiming that the laws designed to undo the racialized laws under Apartheid are themselves—racist.

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It’s still the most frustrating rhetorical move, in my opinion—talking about race when addressing laws that were about race is not racism. It’s just using the language that those laws originally used. In the US, for example, four hundred years of racialized laws—about Black people’s lives and bodies, how ownership of their children was determined, whether Black people could vote, whom they could marry, what land they could own, what restaurants they could eat at, which schools they could attend, among many, many, many other policies—were explicitly written based on race. The Civil Rights movement had to mention race to undo those racist laws.

And then, people against the Civil Rights movement up to today will say, “Well, you’re just being racist.” It makes me want to pull my hair out. Those policies were about race. We have to talk about race to undo the policies.

That’s what’s happening in South Africa. Whether this is the right law, or whether South Africans want another law, that’s up to them to decide. But to undo years of unjust policies under a system literally determined by the color of other people’s skin, then chances are, you’ll have to mention…the color of people’s skin.

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AfriForum’s campaign was obviously successful, and of course, the fact that Elon Musk is South African makes this an especially pressing international matter to the Trump administration. So, instead of reversing a policy that denies resettlement to the tens of thousands of people waiting in legal limbo after proving successfully that they would be persecuted or killed if they returned to their home country, on Friday, Trump issued this order “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa”:

“The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take appropriate steps, consistent with law, to prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”

It’s all performative nonsense. With all of the cuts to USAID, it’s especially galling—read my colleague, Lauren Pinkston’s, incredible “Elon Musk Used and Then Abused USAID” for more context.

And none of it matters anyway. AfriForum released a statement on Saturday they don’t want Trump’s resettlement offer. As AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel said, “Emigration only offers an opportunity for Afrikaners who are willing to risk potentially sacrificing their descendants’ cultural identity as Afrikaners. The price for that is simply too high.”

The MK party, of former-president Jacob Zuma, filed a treason complaint against AfriForum on Monday, February 10. These are clearly internal matters that have little bearing on US foreign policy, other than they appeal to the people in power now who view any move toward equality after decades of racialized policies as…racism.

Afrikaners do not need or want resettlement. And they are not refugees. Thousands of actual refugees are being denied resettlement—a tiny percentage of refugees around the world—while the now-broken, once-glorious bipartisan federal program is being used as a pawn in a performative political game.