I advised y’all.
Again in Could, I warned that Donald Trump’s government order launching a so-called “refugee” program particularly designed to fast-track white South Africans into the USA wasn’t about humanitarian aid. It was about rescuing whiteness. It was about giving apartheid a second passport and smuggling settler colonialism by means of the again door of U.S. immigration regulation.
And similar to that, the warning grew to become coverage.
The primary arrivals aren’t local weather refugees. Not conflict refugees. Not famine refugees. They’re white farmers. They’re the descendants of Dutch and British colonizers who helped assemble and uphold one of the vital violently racist apartheid programs in fashionable historical past. And now they’re being recast as persecuted innocents, worthy of American sanctuary.
On July 25, Reuters confirmed what critics already suspected. A senior U.S. embassy official in South Africa requested if mixed-race “colored” South Africans or Black Khoisan individuals who converse Afrikaans might qualify for this system. The response from Spencer Chretien, a high official within the State Division’s refugee bureau, was blunt: “This system is meant for white folks.”
Though the precise phrasing wasn’t verified, three sources confirmed the substance of the message. The State Division later tried to backpedal, claiming this system was open to all who met the standards. However the numbers converse louder: By late July, 88 white South Africans had been resettled. Not a single Black or mixed-race applicant has made it by means of.
That remark, spoken out loud by a U.S. authorities official, wasn’t a surprising slip. It was a affirmation. In an period the place racism now not bothers to put on a disguise, the quiet half wasn’t whispered; it’s coverage. No extra winks. No extra canine whistles about “heritage,” “tradition,” or “farmers underneath siege,” or lies about “white genocide.” Simply uncooked, unvarnished racial desire embedded into federal immigration technique.
The Reuters report merely confirms what has been clear all alongside: this isn’t immigration coverage. It’s racial recruitment. These folks aren’t being rescued from hazard. They’re being rescued for whiteness. And never simply any whiteness.
Whiteness educated in domination. Whiteness with generational experience in occupying land, extracting labor, and turning Black struggling into white capital. Whiteness fluent in settler colonialism however repackaged as “agrarian” and “hard-working.” Whiteness that is aware of easy methods to police Black motion.
It is a whites-only asylum pipeline. A state-sanctioned apartheid rescue mission. And whereas officers attempt to gown it within the language of humanitarian concern, refugee applications from throughout sub-Saharan Africa stay partially or totally frozen. A journey ban on dozens extra, together with key student-sending nations, is underneath evaluate, awaiting doable restriction imminently.
This isn’t a contradiction. It’s the blueprint. The logical endpoint of a xenophobic, white-first immigration mannequin.
No person in energy is confused about who’s truly in danger in South Africa. Crime is actual, nevertheless it’s not white farmers who’re the most susceptible. It’s poor Black folks. Ladies. Kids. It’s the descendants of those that have been disenfranchised and traumatized by apartheid. Poverty, unemployment, overcrowding, and insufficient policing have concentrated threat in townships and casual settlements, areas which can be predominantly inhabited by Black South Africans. However there aren’t any emergency process forces or pilot refugee applications for them.
As a substitute, America imports the lie of “white genocide,” a fantasy cooked up by white nationalists, echoed by conservative media, and now embedded in U.S. international coverage. Even white Afrikaner farmers acknowledged that crime impacts all farmers, not simply whites. They emphasised that isolation, not race, is the true threat on rural farms. Authorities and tutorial experiences echo that stance, refuting systemic racial persecution.
As a result of for all of the speak about vetting and safety and quotas, the true rule of American immigration stays: In the event you’re white, we’ll discover a approach to allow you to in.
This nation turns away Haitian refugees. Sends Latino migrants to an alligator swamp in Florida. It lets Palestinian households starve underneath siege. It deports African migrants by the plane-load. However for white South Africans, instantly there’s room. Immediately, there’s urgency. Immediately, advantage is redefined to seem like a Boer in good garments.
That is white ethnostate growth by different means.
It echoes Chilly Warfare immigration coverage, which favored white Cubans, Hungarians, and Russians fleeing communism, whereas excluding African, Caribbean, and Asian refugees escaping Western imperialism. The message then, as now: We rescue whiteness. We reject the remainder.
What’s additionally behind this refugee program is the right-wing panic over “substitute idea.” However these racists aren’t afraid of being changed. They’re afraid of being handled the best way they’ve handled Black folks, Indigenous folks, immigrants, and the colonized world for hundreds of years. So, they’re fast-tracking reinforcements. Importing whiteness. Strengthening the partitions with folks already educated in racial dominance.
And America, as all the time, will get to fake that is generosity, when actually, it’s laundering apartheid into patriotism.
And let’s not neglect about Trump’s refusal to go to Africa. In two presidencies, he hasn’t stepped foot on the continent. No summits. No symbolic visits. No picture ops with African schoolchildren. However chartered planes for white South Africans are the sort of diplomacy that makes the lower.
Throughout his first time period, Trump known as African nations “shithole international locations.” He imposed sweeping journey bans on Nigeria, Sudan, Eritrea, Tanzania, and Somalia. These bans blocked 1000’s of scholars and researchers, many mid-degree at U.S. universities, from reentering the nation.
Hundreds of African and Muslim-heritage college students finding out within the U.S. had their lives upended when Trump’s journey ban stripped their visas or froze processing. Many are actually too afraid to go away the nation, too terrified they gained’t be allowed again in. Households are fractured. Levels are in danger. And but, whereas Black college students face closed borders, white South African colonizers are being fast-tracked with federal approval. American establishments are bleeding expertise as a result of Black excellence is expendable, however white grievance is precedence.
So no, this refugee program isn’t shocking. It’s not an exception. It’s constant. It’s a racial sanctuary program for white discomfort. A strategic asylum pipeline for settlers fleeing fairness.
It’s whiteness demanding sanctuary from a world the place it could be held accountable. It’s empire providing amnesty to its foot troopers. It’s apartheid, rebranded for a softer touchdown, full with a visa and federal advantages.
That is about constructing the subsequent frontier of white supremacy. About stacking the deck with settlers who already know easy methods to dominate, exclude, and erase. As a result of in America, you don’t must flee a conflict to qualify as a refugee. You simply must flee the tip of white rule.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and creator of “Spare The Children: Why Whupping Kids Gained’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Kids In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
SEE ALSO:
South African Refugee Program Is White’s Solely, Report Says
Trump Prioritizes White Afrikaners Over Black And Brown Migrants
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