(Washington) The United States announced Thursday that it was drastically reducing the number of refugees it is prepared to welcome each year, to a historically low number, and said it would favor whites from South Africa.
In what constitutes a major reversal of a decades-long tradition of welcoming, the United States has set the number of people who will be granted refugee status this year at some 7,500, compared with some 100,000 a year under former Democratic President Joe Biden.
And the vast majority will be made up of Afrikaners, descendants of the first European settlers in South Africa, according to a White House document released Thursday.
“The number of admissions will be mainly distributed between Afrikaners from South Africa (…) and other victims of illegal or unfair discrimination in their respective countries of origin,” adds the text dated September 30 and which must be published Friday in the federal register.
Upon his return to power in January, President Donald Trump slashed US foreign aid and tightened immigration policy by focusing on the expulsion of illegal immigrants and freezing the reception of asylum seekers and other refugees.
The Republican leader had already issued a decree on February 7 which claims that Afrikaners are robbed of their land and persecuted, granting them refugee status.
In May, around fifty of them were welcomed to the United States as refugees, a move vigorously contested by Pretoria.
Afrikaners make up the majority of South Africa’s white population. It is from this segment of the population that the political leaders who established apartheid came, a system of racial segregation that deprived the black population – the vast majority – of most of their rights from 1948 until the early 1990s.
The white minority represents a little more than 7% of the population, but owned 72% of agricultural land in 2017, according to government statistics, the legacy of a policy of expropriation of the black population during colonization and then apartheid, which laws passed since 1994 aim to revise.
President Trump has repeatedly denounced their “terrible situation” and referred to a “genocide”.
“Lifebuoy”
As soon as the decision was announced, NGOs and associations defending immigrants cried foul.
Since 1980, “more than two million people fleeing persecution have been admitted to the United States” under the refugee program, noted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council.
“From now on, it will serve as an immigration route for white people,” he denounced on X.
For his part, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, who heads the Global Refuge association, lamented the fact that for decades, the refugee program “has been a lifeline for families fleeing war, persecution and repression.”
“At a time when countries such as Afghanistan, Venezuela, Sudan and many others are in crisis, concentrating the vast majority of admissions on a single group undermines the objective of the program as well as its credibility,” he said in a statement.
The Trump administration had already removed a special temporary reception status which protected nationals of Afghanistan, Haiti and Venezuela in particular.
