The arrival of over 3,000 white South Africans in the United States under President Donald Trump’s fast-tracked refugee resettlement programme is a racial spectacle of historic proportions.
Framed by Trump as a rescue mission from “racial discrimination” and even “genocide” in post-apartheid South Africa, the scheme repackages whiteness as victimhood while reasserting racial hierarchies through the veneer of humanitarian concern.
Cheryl Harris’s seminal concept of “whiteness as property” is especially instructive here. This programme protects not the displaced, but the entitlements embedded in whiteness — land, social status, and the right to global mobility.
These arrivals, facilitated under a controversial executive order, mark the first time in US history that white South Africans have been accepted en masse as refugees. The move has drawn intense scrutiny, with South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola dismissing the claims as “unfounded and inflammatory”.
He clarified that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had no involvement and had consistently found no basis for refugee status for white South Africans. “The resettlement of South Africans under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is a political project to delegitimise our democracy,” Lamola asserted.
The narrative that white South Africans — particularly Afrikaner farmers — are victims of racial persecution has long circulated in far-right echo chambers, sustained by groups like AfriForum and amplified by conservative US media. Yet no credible human rights body has substantiated claims of systematic violence or oppression based on race in South Africa.
In February 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14152: Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa, suspending non-essential aid. He cited South Africa’s land reform policies and its support for Palestine at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as evidence of “anti-white discrimination”. His language echoed apartheid-era rhetoric, framing land expropriation without compensation — a constitutional measure designed to redress historical injustice — as proof of racial targeting.
This is not a story about humanitarian rescue. It is about the repackaging of privilege as persecution.
Trump’s administration, by reclassifying specific “South African communities” for humanitarian parole, has revived the settler-native divide. As Mahmood Mamdani has noted, this manoeuvre casts descendants of apartheid’s beneficiaries as “refugees” and South Africa itself as the oppressor.
Achille Mbembe’s critique of global humanism is relevant here: the programme renders Black suffering invisible while privileging whiteness as a passport to refuge and legitimacy. Consequently, while Black refugees languish in camps, whiteness is deemed inherently worthy of protection, effectively enacting a form of apartheid within the asylum system itself.
The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as someone fleeing a “well-founded fear of persecution.” Neither the Convention nor US law has ever interpreted this to include the loss of economic dominance or historical privilege. Fleeing land redistribution or reduced social status does not amount to persecution, especially when these changes are legally enacted by a democratic society seeking to correct historical wrongs.
The parallels to earlier racial engineering are striking. In 1932, the US-sponsored Carnegie Poor White Study analysed the “problem” of poor whites in South Africa. The initiative was not rooted in concern for poverty but in preserving white supremacy. The report warned that poor whites threatened the racial order and recommended state interventions to uplift them, while black South Africans were systematically excluded from similar support. This laid the foundation for apartheid’s white welfare state and established a pattern of American intervention when white South Africans faced hardship, real or perceived.
Trump’s resettlement scheme is the 21st-century iteration of this pattern. White South Africans are framed not as beneficiaries of a violent racial order, but as victims of transformation, worthy of rescue.
South Africa’s Constitutional Court recently affirmed that acquiring foreign nationality — whether through refugee resettlement or otherwise — does not automatically strip someone of South African citizenship. In a landmark ruling, the Court struck down a section of the Citizenship Act that had quietly revoked citizenship without due process, calling the move irrational and unconstitutional.
However, the case of these white South Africans is unique. Their refugee claims are based on false premises and a political agenda. South Africa may therefore have grounds to argue that accepting the US offer constitutes a voluntary renunciation of citizenship. The Constitutional Court’s ruling on dual citizenship might not protect them in this politically charged context.
Nowhere is the hypocrisy more glaring than in the American South. In the Mississippi Delta, six Black farmworkers filed a federal lawsuit in 2021 after being replaced by white South Africans brought in under the H-2A visa programme. The plaintiffs, many descended from enslaved people who built Southern agriculture, earned just $7.25 per hour — the federal minimum wage — while their white South African replacements were paid over $11.
The lawsuit alleges that these Black workers were forced to train their replacements, who were then housed in better accommodations and elevated in status simply because they were white. Between 2011 and 2020, the number of South Africans on H-2A visas increased by 441%, making them the second-largest national group in the programme. The majority are white.
The message is clear: in the racial calculus of US capitalism, white foreign labour is worth more than black American lives. Mexican seasonal workers, once the backbone of US agriculture, are also increasingly excluded — both by border walls and by labour policies that privilege whiteness over need. The result is a reshuffling of the global racial order, disguised as economic necessity.
Trump’s South African refugee programme is less about humanitarian concern and more about reaffirming a hierarchy of global suffering, where privilege continues to mask itself as victimhood.
What we are witnessing is the reinforcement of a global colour line — one where whiteness retains its claim to mobility, safety, and opportunity, while blackness and brownness are rendered threats to be contained. The implications are profound:
- Refugee systems that prioritise whiteness over need.
- Economic visas favour white foreign farmers over Black citizens.
- Historical privilege is purposely mistaken for victimhood.
This is not humanitarianism. It is neo-colonialism in motion.
As the world watches Trump engineer the next stage of global apartheid, we must ask: What kind of refugee is it when only the privileged are welcome? When does skin colour ration citizenship, safety, and opportunity?
If the notion of “refuge” is to mean anything, it must centre justice, not historical comfort.
Siyayibanga le economy!
* Siyabonga Hadebe is an independent commentator based in Geneva on socio-economic, political and global matters.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or .
