About 49 White South Africans will be admitted to the US Monday while everyone else remains most unwelcome in Donald Trump’s administration. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, said this will be the first move in a “much larger-scale relocation effort”.“What’s happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created,” Miller said. “This is race-based persecution. The refugee program is not intended as a solution for global poverty — and historically, it has been used that way.”These South Africans will get US citizenship, apart from housing, groceries. As many as 1,000 Afrikaners could be admitted to the US this year.
Who are these Afrikaners?
Afrikaners are a Southern African ethnic group which descended from mainly Dutch settlers who first arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. They claim to have been victims of racial discrimination. Trump accused the South African government of confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people very badly. What Elon Musk said about this alleged racial discriminationElon Musk, who is also from South Africa, claimed on X that a political group is promoting a “white genocide” in the country. But the claim has been widely denied. Musk has been openly critical of the Expropriation Act. South Africa’s transport ministry said the first group, which has been selected for resettlement in the US, would leave by Sunday evening. Transport ministry spokesman Collen Msibi told AFP on Sunday that 49 individuals were set to leave from Johannesburg’s main airport on a chartered flight at 8:00 pm (1800 GMT).Trump said in March that any South African farmer seeking to “flee” would have a “rapid pathway” to US citizenship, despite halting all other refugee arrivals to the US immediately after taking office in January.South Africa’s foreign ministry on Friday said the resettlement of Afrikaners “under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy”. It would however “not block citizens who seek to depart the country from doing so”, it added.