President Donald Trump offered to take in white South Africans as refugees only to get swiftly turned down by the largest lobby groups representing minority Afrikaners.
Trump signed an executive order on Friday directing immigration officials to prioritize the resettlement of Afrikaners, the descendants of European, mostly Dutch, settlers.
In doing so, he cited a recently passed land expropriation law by the government of Cyril Ramaphosa, which is designed to address inequalities left over from South Africa’s former white supremacist rule.
Under the new expropriation law, the government is allowed to claim land without compensation if it is deemed “just and equitable and in the public interest.” This could include cases where land isn’t being used or where negotiations with current owners have failed.
Afrikaners, who make up only eight percent of South Africa’s 60 million population, own roughly three quarters of the privately owned farmland in the country. About four percent is owned by Black South Africans, who make up almost 80 percent of the population.
Land distribution has been a heated issue since, inextricably tied to racial discrimination against Black South Africans, since the end of the apartheid in 1994. In the 1950s, the apartheid-era National Party seized the vast majority of the country’s farmlands, ejecting millions of Black people from their property and livelihoods in the process.
Trump claimed the expropriation law will make Afrikaners the “victims of unjust racial discrimination” and accused South Africa of “rights violations” against some white citizens.
Trump’s South African-born lieutenant Elon Musk has been a vocal critic of the expropriation law, as well.
In addition to opening the door to white South African refugees, Trump’s order called for a halt to foreign aid to their country.
But Trump’s order was met with pushback from Afrikaner groups, including even the hard right white nationalist AfriForum, which has long lobbied American conservatives.
“We did not accuse the government of large scale, race based land grabs or distribute false information in this regard,” Flip Buys, the chair of AfriForum and umbrella organization Solidariteit, said at a press conference Saturday. “We want to state clearly that we were not aware that Mr. Trump would issue this order.”
“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,” added Kallie Kriel, AfriForum’s CEO.
The group also said it opposes Trump’s freeze on aid to South Africa, though ultimately blamed their political opponent, Ramaphosa, for the diplomatic fallout.
Solidariteit, which says it represents two million Afrikaners and includes a trade union, said in its own statement that “repatriation of Afrikaners as refugees is not a solution for us.”
“We may disagree with [Ramaphosa’s ruling African National Congress party], but we love our country,” the group added.
Pretoria condemned Trump’s ”campaign of misinformation and propaganda" against the country, in a statement issued by the foreign ministry Saturday, which also took a shot at the U.S. president’s mass deportation campaigns
“It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the U.S. for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the U.S. from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” the statement reads.
