The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Bigotry, Hypocrisy, and Trump's Admission of Afrikaners as Refugees
The Administration isn't wrong to admit white South African migrants. But it is wrong to exclude all other refugees, including many fleeing far worse discrimination and oppression.
Last week, the first group of South African white Afrikaners admitted by the Trump Administration as refugees, arrived in the United States. They were admitted under an executive order issued by Trump in February, even as his administration has tried to block all other refugee admissions (a court order has partially restrained the administration's plans in this regard).
In this post, I am going to simultaneously offend many on both right and left by arguing 1) the federal government is right to admit the Afrikaners, 2) the decision to do so while simultaneously barring all other refugees is an instance of incredible hypocrisy and bias by the administration, and 3) if allowed to stand, the admission of the Afrikaners might set some useful precedents for advocates of expanded migration rights; if the Afrikaners qualify for expedited admission as "refugees," so too do a vast range of other people!
Why it is Right to Let Afrikaners Migrate to the US
I have long argued that migration rights should not be restricted based on arbitrary circumstances of ancestry, parentage, place of birth, or race and ethnicity. Afrikaners - and other white South Africans - should not be an exception to that principle.
Some on the left who accept that idea in most other contexts might balk at doing so because of the association of Afrikaners with the evils of apartheid. But it is wrong to ascribe collective guilt to entire racial or ethnic groups. The Chinese government perpetrated the biggest mass murder in the history of world. That does not mean all Mandarin Chinese bear an onus of collective guilt, and Chinese migrants should be barred from the West. Germans don't bear collective guilt for the Holocaust (I say that even though, like most other European Jews, I lost many members of my own family to that atrocity). Russians are not collectively response for Vladimir Putin's atrocities, or those of the communist regime before him. And so on.
Moreover, many of today's white South Africans were either not even born yet when apartheid ended in 1994, or were minors at that time. Such people obviously are not responsible for apartheid-era injustices.
A more plausible justification for excluding white South Africans is the idea that, even if most don't bear personal responsibility for apartheid, they may have horrible racist attitudes, that we should keep out. I would argue the government should not be restricting migration (or any other liberties) based on judgments about people's political views. Speech-based deportations are unconstitutional and unjust, and the same goes for speech-based and viewpoint-based restrictions on migration. If we (rightly) don't trust the government to censor the speech and viewpoints of native-born citizens, the same principle applies to migrants.
Moreover, it is far from clear that most white South Africans today are still virulent racists. The Democratic Alliance - the party supported by most South African whites today (and led by Afrikaner John Steenhuisen) - is a multiracial party that favors racial equality (while opposing affirmative action preferences for blacks).
If some white South African migrants do have awful racial views, we should have confidence in the assimilative power of our own liberal values to mitigate them. In my my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, I describe how most American Muslims (a large majority of whom are immigrants or children thereof) support same-sex marriage, in sharp contrast to the homophobia prevalent in most of the Muslim world. I see a similar pattern among my own immigrant community - those from Russia and other post-Soviet nations. Racism and homophobia are common in their countries of origin, but largely disappear by the second generation among immigrants. Overall, the evidence strongly indicates that home-grown nationalists, not immigrants with illiberal values, are the main threat to liberal democratic institutions in the US and Europe.
There is also a plausible case that white South Africans qualify for refugee status under current law. US law defines a "refugee" as a person who has "a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." If "persecution" on the basis of race includes racial discrimination by the government, then South African whites plausibly qualify. As my Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh points out in a piece that is also highly critical of many aspects of the Trump Administration's policy, "The South African government clearly discriminates on the basis of race through its Black Economic Empowerment system and subsequent amended policies with similar-sounding names."
These are affirmative action policies intended to overcome the legacy of apartheid. They are a form of racial discrimination, nonetheless. Elsewhere, I have argued that affirmative action and other "reverse discrimination" policies are not a justifiable answer to our own history of terrible racial discrimination against minorities, and defended the Supreme Court's decision to curb them. Similar reasoning applies to South Africa. South African whites also endure rare, but real, instances of racially motivated violence.
The state-sponsored racial discrimination faced by white South Africans is nowhere near as bad as that endured by blacks under apartheid, or by many oppressed minorities around the world today. But, if "persecution" is defined broadly enough, it might justify allowing them refugee status.
I have advocated broadening the definition of "refugee" to include all forms of persecution and oppression. In that event, the admission of white South Africans would be still easier to defend.
Trump's Policy is Based on Bigotry and Hypocrisy
Though there is a solid case for admitting the Afrikaners, the administration's decision to do so while trying to bar all other refugees is, nonetheless, an example of blatant bigotry and hypocrisy. It is beyond obvious that many refugees and other migrants barred by Trump face far worse oppression and discrimination than that threatening South African whites.
While the South African government discriminates against whites in some ways, it has not engaged in large-scale systematic oppression or mass murder. Despite some Western right-wingers' claims to the contrary, there is no "white genocide" going on there. The government's controversial land confiscation law also falls far short of genocide and only allows uncompensated land seizures in very limited circumstances. The coalition government in power in South Africa right now includes the Democratic Alliance (the party supported by most whites), and even the Freedom Front Plus party (a right-wing party representing primarily Afrikaners).
The fact that only a few dozen Afrikaners have so far taken up Trump's resettlement offer is another indication that their group doesn't face genocide or other genuinely massive violence and oppression. When populations face genuinely massive threats of repression and murder, millions flee, as in the case of the roughly 8 million who have fled Venezuela's oppressive socialist government, and the similar number fleeing Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine. The Trump Administration, of course, has blocked admission of new Ukrainian and Venezuelan migrants, among others, and is trying to deport many Venezuelans previously admitted to the US.
I won't try to go over them all here. But other examples of refugees fleeing far greater threats of violence and oppression than South African whites are legion.
Thus, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump's policy is based on hypocrisy and bigotry. Relatively modest racial discrimination against a group of whites gets absolute priority over far greater oppression targeting a vast range of other groups. It's not just that South African white Afrikaners get a degree of priority over more severely victimized groups, but the latter are barred from the US refuge program entirely. The government's policy pretty obviously reflects the obsession with white racial grievances prevalent in sectors of the US far right, rather than any objective, racially neutral, standards for allocating refugee admissions.
That conclusion can't be avoided by citing South African whites' relatively high levels of education or other human capital. Lots of high-education people facing persecution and oppression far worse than that endured by are nonetheless excluded from refugee admissions under Trump's policy.
If not for the unusually high deference to executive decisions on immigration policy wrongly granted by the Supreme Court in cases like Trump v. Hawaii, the Trump policy would likely be struck down as an example of blatant racial discrimination. At the very least, the policy is obviously hypocritical and internally inconsistent (unless the consistency is provided by a racist double-standard).
As Bier and Nowrasteh emphasize, this discrimination and hypocrisy are not the fault of the Afrikaner migrants. Don't blame them; blame Trump and his allies.
A Potentially Useful Precedent
Despite the awful motivations underlying it, Trump's bestowal of refugee admissions on Afrikaner South Africans could potentially be a useful precedent for advocates of expanded migration rights.
Nowrasteh notes that the same reasoning that justifies granting refugee status to Afrikaners would also justify extending it to other minority groups victimized by affirmative action policies, such as "Hindu Indians based on their caste, Malaysian citizens who are ethnically Chinese and Indian, people from disfavored regions of Pakistan under the region-based quota system, and other groups in other countries." More generally, it would justify extending refugee status to any group facing comparable or greater racial or ethnic discrimination, anywhere in the world. That includes a vast number of groups with many millions of members.
As Nowrasteh also points out, the Afrikaners were processed and admitted into the United States far faster than all or most previous refugees (within just a few weeks, as opposed to the normal excruciating long wait of about 24 months). If that is acceptable for the Afrikaners, why not for other refugees?
The Trump administration even sent a plane to pick up the first group of Afrikaners at US taxpayer expense. This is in blatant contradiction to right-wing immigration restrictionists' complaints that taxpayer dollars should not be spent on immigrant admissions. They even falsely claim that the Biden Administration spent public funds to fly in CHNV migrants fleeing communist oppression in Latin America, despite the fact that their travel was actually funded by the migrants themselves or by private US sponsors.
With extremely rare exceptions, I think migrant transportation should be funded by the migrants themselves or by private sector organizations. But restrictionists who accept Trump's use of public funds here should not complain about similar expenditures in other cases involving refugees facing far greater oppression.
In sum, there is good reason to open doors to white South African migrants, while also condemning the blatant hypocrisy and bigotry underlying the Trump Administration's policies on this score. If allowed to stand, the admission of the Afrikaners might nonetheless create a useful precedent for future refugee admissions.
UPDATE: Those interested (or those inclined to accuse me of racial double standards on refugees), may wish to check out my 2022 post with links to my long history of writings advocating migration rights for a variety of non-white refugees and other non-white migrants. I would now add my more recent work advocating for Latin American CHNV migrants (most of whom are also not white, at least as that concept is conventionally understood in the US).
