Move comes as US administration largely closes refugee admissions from countries experiencing widespread violence and poverty.A group of 59 white Afrikaners from South Africa has arrived in the United States as part of a refugee programme set up by the administration of US President Donald Trump to offer sanctuary from what Trump has depicted as racial discrimination against white people.
In a press conference on Monday, Trump mirrored the claims of a myth popular on the far right that white people in South Africa have been subjected to systematic violence since the end of white minority rule in that country.
“It’s a genocide that’s taking place,” Trump told reporters at the White House, a claim that has drawn criticism from government officials, news media, and even some Afrikaners themselves.
The move comes as the Trump administration blocks nearly all refugee admissions from non-white countries and leans into rhetoric about an “invasion” of immigrants from poor countries.
While people fleeing widespread violence and persecution in countries such as Haiti and Afghanistan have found a closed door, Al Jazeera correspondent Patty Culhane says that the Trump administration “has made a priority of getting these people [white South Africans] into the United States and paying for them to get here”. Advertisement
‘Wrong end of the stick’
The South African government has called Trump’s claims that Afrikaners face persecution “completely false”, noting that they have remained among the richest and “most economically privileged” groups, even after the end of the apartheid system that upheld white minority control of the political, economic, and military resources of the country and denied basic …