It turns out that amid President Donald Trump’s zeal for mass deportations, there’s at least one group of immigrants he is happy to rush toward American citizenship. In a post to his Truth Social account on Friday morning, he wrote that “any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship.”
The short version is Trump is extending to white South Africans a shortcut through the maze that people waiting to enter the country typically have to traverse.
There’s a lot to unpack from that. The short version is Trump is extending to white South Africans a shortcut through the maze that people waiting to enter the country typically have to traverse. Should it become a reality, it would be an extreme perversion of the very laws his administration baselessly claims were exploited by his predecessor. And while it would be nice to blame this exclusively on billionaire Elon Musk’s influence, the far right’s obsession with putting post-apartheid South Africa in its place goes back way further than Musk’s alliance with Trump.
Trump’s offer is the latest escalation in a series of actions from his administration in protest of a new South African law designed to help offset the lingering effects of apartheid. Thirty years after the end of minority-white rule, around 75% of the country’s private land is still owned by the tiny 7% of Afrikaners. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government passed the Expropriation Act to try to rebalance that dynamic, as the BBC explained earlier this year:
The law ‘outlines how expropriation can be done and on what basis’ by the state, the government says. It replaces the pre-democratic Expropriation Act of 1975, which placed an obligation on the state to pay owners it wanted to take land from, under the principle of ‘willing seller, willing buyer.’ The new law allows for expropriation without compensation only in circumstances where it is ‘just and equitable and in the public interest’ to do so. This includes if the property is not being used and there’s no intention to either develop or make money from it or when it poses a risk to people.
Even before this current law was signed, white supremacists spread the conspiracy theory that a “genocide” was happening against Afrikaner farmers. Trump tweeted in 2018 that there was “large scale killing of farmers” going on soon after then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran a segment about the false claims. Despite a major outcry against his rhetoric at the time, it’s clear that Trump is still extremely sympathetic to the supposed plight of the Afrikaners.
It’s also worth noting that so far there has been zero land seized under this new law, the South African government said last month, but it still prompted a major freakout from Trump. “South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” he lied on Truth Social in February. “Massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum, is happening for all to see.”
Trump then signed an executive order to cut off foreign aid to South Africa, most of which goes to its HIV/AIDS prevention program. The executive order also instructed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to submit to Trump and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller a plan 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 makes sense that Miller would be involved in this effort, as the principal architect of Trump’s deeply discriminatory immigration crackdown. He also spent his years out of office suing the Biden administration for (wait for it) supposedly discriminating against white farmers in America. Now it would appear that Miller is overseeing both the rollback of legal protections against deportation for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelan migrants and greasing the wheels for more white emigres to come to America.
It would also seem reasonable that Musk is encouraging Trump’s vitriol toward the majority-Black South African government. The Tesla CEO grew up during the height of apartheid; his grandfather was a radical racist who emigrated from Canada and, according to historian Jill Lepore’s review of his writing, became “an impassioned defender of the regime.” And Musk himself has pushed the claim on X that the government is “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa.”
There is little to disguise the shades of white supremacy that color Trump’s decision.
There’s also a financial element to Musk’s potential involvement. On Friday, he accused South Africans of discriminating against him by not allowing his Starlink satellite internet service to operate there. According to Reuters, there are local laws requiring that “foreign-owned telecommunications licensees sell 30% of the equity in their local subsidiaries to historically disadvantaged groups.” But, as the South African government responded, Musk has not even applied for a telecom license that could be rejected.
Even without Musk and Miller in his ear, it’s entirely possible that Trump would still be encouraging Afrikaners to come to the United States. But unlike the holders of his proposed “Gold Card,” who would pay $5 million for permanent residency and a pathway to citizenship, it’s hard to see even a pretense that there’s any economic benefit to this caveat in his anti-immigration policy. After all, it’s not like the offer is for farmers who will replace deported workers the fields where migrants from Central America toil in oppressive heat. And unlike migrants fleeing danger from elsewhere in the Global South, there is no imminent risk to the lives of the white South Africans who may, at worst, be forced to someday live in a truly equal society.
Trump’s team clearly found it intolerable that the previous administration used the president’s authority to provide parole or other legal protection for nonwhite migrants. It is only in this one case, where there is a white minority to side with, that they can apparently find an exception. As a result, there is little to disguise the shades of white supremacy that color Trump’s decision — and it speaks volumes that he thinks America would provide a more welcoming home for the South Africans who once benefited from Black oppression.
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