Donald Trump welcomes white South Africans as ‘refugees’ to US, sparks global outrage

The Trump Administration has welcomed white South Africans if granted refugee status in the US, having deemed them victims of racial discrimination, while drawing criticism from Democrats and stirring confusion in South Africa.

US President Donald Trump has blocked mostly non-white refugee admissions from the rest of the world, but in February offered to resettle Afrikaners, the descendants of mostly Dutch settlers, saying they faced discrimination.

Asked on Monday why white South Africans were being prioritised above the victims of famine and war elsewhere in Africa, Mr Trump said, without providing evidence, that Afrikaners were being killed.

“It’s a genocide that’s taking place,” Mr Trump told reporters at the White House, going further than he has previously in echoing right-wing tropes about their alleged persecution.

He was not favouring Afrikaners because they are white, Mr Trump said, adding that their race “makes no difference to me”.

South Africa maintains there is no evidence of persecution and that claims of a “white genocide” in the country, echoed by Mr Trump’s white South African-born ally Elon Musk, have not been backed up by evidence.

US senator Jeanne Shaheen, the most senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the move “baffling”.

“The decision by this administration to put one group at the front of the line is clearly politically motivated and an effort to rewrite history,” she said in a statement on Monday.

US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau greeted the first 59 Afrikaners to arrive in a hangar at Washington’s Dulles airport.

He compared their journey to that of his own father, a Jew from Austria who fled Europe in the 1930s, first to South America and then to the United States.

Since his return to the White House in January, Mr Trump has cut all US financial assistance to South Africa, citing disapproval of its land policy and of its genocide case at the International Court of Justice against Washington’s ally, Israel.

Speaking at a conference in Ivory Coast, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the white Afrikaners had ostensibly left because they were opposed to policies aimed at addressing racial inequality persisting since apartheid, or white minority rule, ended three decades ago.

“We think that the American government has got the wrong end of the stick here, but we’ll continue talking to them,” he said.

Since Nelson Mandela won South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, the once-ruling white minority has retained most of its wealth amassed since colonial times.

Whites still own three-quarters of private land and have about 20 times the wealth of the Black majority, according to the international academic journal the Review of Political Economy.

Less than 10 per cent of white South Africans are out of work, compared with more than a third of their Black counterparts.