A charter plane carrying 59 white South Africans arrived at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC, on Monday. For these 59 people, including families and children, the United States is their new home.
US President Donald Trump himself had fast-tracked their arrival.
Back in February, he had announced a new program to take in refugees from South Africa who, in his view, were suffering from racist policies.
While many refugees wait years before they are approved to travel to the United States, the Afrikaners who arrived on Monday were admitted in under three months.
Refugee status ‘based on lies’
On Monday, Trump said he was admitting these people as refugees because of a “genocide that’s taking place.” He also said that in post-apartheid South Africa, white farmers are “being killed.”
Trump was responding to a new law signed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in January that regulates the expropriation of private property and possible compensation.
“The idea that white farmers feel that their land is under threat is wrong on every level,” Tessa Dooms, director of the Rivonia Circle think tank in Johannesburg, told DW.
“When they talk about white genocide, there is a longstanding narrative that has been built over the last 15 years amongst Afrikaner communities that farmers who are mainly white have been targeted specifically for crime and have been murdered specifically. That is untrue,” she added.
“The high murder rate in South Africa could also affect white South Africans as part of society, but Black South Africans, mostly young men, are murdered more frequently,” Dooms said. “With the high level of gender-specific violence in the country, the probability of Black women being murdered is much higher than for white farmers.”
In her view, the US giving South Africans refugee status is a very concerning development, “It is based on lies, on false narratives and propaganda that is purely fictional.”
Afrikaners, also known as Boers, are white descendants of Dutch and other European immigrants. Today, they make up around 7% of South Africa’s population.
No persecution
“There is no persecution of white Afrikaners in South Africa,” South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola told DW.
“This has been proven by a number of statistics in our country, including police reports which do not back that assertion of persecution of white South Africans on the basis of their race. The crime that we have in South Africa affects everyone, irrespective of race,” he said.
According to Dooms, no major land reform is taking place either, even though “we were dispossessed for centuries by racist colonial policies.”
To this day, white South Africans own around four-fifths of private farmland in South Africa. During the colonial era and the racist apartheid regime, white South Africans regularly took possession of land owned by Black people.
However, Trump and his close adviser, South African-born Elon Musk, portray South Africa’s new law on the expropriation of private land as a redistribution initiative to the detriment of South Africa’s white population.
Constitution prevents arbitrary land reform
The government in Pretoria has rejected this and insists that similar laws exist in most countries around the world, including the United States. The law creates a legal framework for expropriating land from private owners for an overriding public interest, for example, if it is needed for roads without providing compensation to the owner.
Also, the political scientists Zainab Usman and Anthony Carroll from the Africa Program of the US think tank Carnegie Endowment rather view the law as “part of an effort to address historical inequalities rooted in apartheid-era land dispossession,” they wrote in an op-ed in the South African newspaper Daily Maverick.
“Nevertheless, there is still constitutional protection against arbitrary seizure,” Carroll told DW.
American migration researcher Loren Landau from Witwatersrand University in South Africa also said he does not believe that fear of discrimination is a major driver.
“Afrikaners who have accepted US President Donald Trump’s resettlement program are aware that there’s no persecution of white people in the country, but are taking advantage of the opportunity to go to America,” he toldthe South African newspaper The Citizen.
By mid-March, more than 67,000 South Africans had already registered to emigrate to the US, according to the South African Chamber of Commerce in the US.
Trump — a “savior of Christianity”
“It has very little to do with South Africa’s empirical realities and everything to do with Trump positioning himself as a savior of white privilege and Christianity globally,” Landau told the news portal South Africa Today earlier this week.
In fact, ties between Pretoria and Washington have been strained for years.
South Africa’s proximity to the other BRICS countries, especially China and Russia, has been a thorn in the side of the last two US administrations.
Relations deteriorated further following South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel for genocide against Palestinians in Gaza at the International Court of Justice in The Hague in late 2023.
Shortly after Donald Trump took office again in January 2025, ties reached another low point.
By decree, the US president suspended all aid to the country, which was primarily dedicated to the fight against HIV/AIDS.
However, with the same document, he created an exception to his otherwise restrictive refugee policy for white Africans who wanted to flee “racially motivated persecution”.
This article was originally published in German.
