State Dept. quotas for white South African ‘refugees’ echo a KKK-endorsed law

The Trump administration is reportedly making plans to allow thousands of white South African immigrants per month into the United States as it presses forward with a racist mass deportation push. 

That’s the crux of a new report from Reuters citing documents (which have not been reviewed by MS NOW) that show the administration’s goal of welcoming thousands of white South Africans per month to the United States. President Donald Trump and his conservative allies have pushed false claims, rooted in white nationalist disinformation, that a “white genocide” is occurring in South Africa.

Raising questions about how this goal fits in with the administration’s broader refugee policy, the report goes on to note that “Trump has said the U.S. would only admit 7,500 total refugees from around the world in fiscal year 2026.” There is also some question about whether the State Department can even find that many people who want to come. “Only 2,000 white South Africans had entered the U.S. as refugees as of January 31 under a program launched in May 2025, although the pace has picked up in recent months.”

“The inability to safely process about 4,500 applicants per month, an objective communicated to (the U.S. State Department’s refugee division) from the White House, would result in failure to meet a Presidential priority,” the State Department document reads, according to Reuters. (A department spokesman declined to comment on the document to Reuters.)

The report characterized the document, posted to a U.S. government database on Wednesday, as a form seeking contractors to install trailers on U.S. embassy property in South Africa to process more immigrant approvals. So while the Trump administration is trying to convert warehouses at home into massive prisons to jail and deport immigrants swept up in its racist crackdown, it is also working to build trailers in Pretoria so it can rapidly increase the number of white South Africans.

It’s the kind of immigration policy the Ku Klux Klan dreamed of. Literally. This kind of quota system mirrors the kind of policies that white supremacist groups, including the Klan, pushed for 100 years ago.

Historian Jill Weiss Simins wrote a post for the Hoosier State Chronicles blog in Indiana back in 2019 that explained how the KKK used slogans like “America First” to push its white nationalist agenda nationwide. This agenda, she explained, included support for a law known as the Immigration Act of 1924, which was unmistakably racist in its application.

She wrote:

This legislation drastically limited immigration to the United States through a quota system that targeted specific groups for exclusion. While the annual quota for German immigrants was set at over 51,000 people, the quota for Syrian immigrants, for example, was 100 people.  Thus, U.S. policy officially distinguished between races and backgrounds of people included or excluded as future Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was crucial to the passage of this legislation, which had dire consequences for those seeking asylum in the U.S. over the following decades in which the quota system remained in place.

For those doing the math at home: If the U.S. were to succeed in welcoming roughly 4,500 white South Africans each month, the annual total would come out to about 54,000 people — which isn’t that far off the number of Germans set by the legislation the KKK pushed for just a century ago.