The legacy media’s coverage of the recent arrival of 49 white refugees from South Africa shows a lamentable hypocrisy compared with its reporting on the previous four years of the mass release of illegal immigrants at the border, their mass parole, and lax enforcement of immigration and deportation laws within our nation.
Unlike the border influx, which was from 180-plus countries, this small group was comprised of Afrikaners—the descendants of Dutch and other Europeans who started arriving in South Africa in 1652. (They are also called Boers, from the Dutch word for “farmer.”)
For years, the media parroted the Biden administration’s line that the millions of people he let in—who skewed young and male—were all deserving of our refuge. They hardly questioned the dogma that every one of these millions was persecuted—and innocent of any crime himself—back in his home country. Yet a recent Washington Post article (along with many others) covering the arrival of the Afrikaners in the United States was highly skeptical of their asylum claims.
Why?
The Afrikaners all qualified for admission as refugees after an application, personal interview, and vetting by authorized U.S. immigration and asylum officers in South Africa—unlike the millions released after cursory processing at the U.S. border, or those who were paroled in with scant evidence of their identity and no criminal background check.
Are the Afrikaners claims of persecution on account of race or political ideology really so hard to believe?
When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa came to the White House to meet President Donald Trump this week, the Associated Press news headline was: “Trump confronts South African leader with baseless claims of the systematic killing of white farmers.” The AP and other left-leaning media often follow Trump statements with qualifiers like “baseless” or “without evidence.”
Is the AP saying that the claim white farmers are being murdered is baseless? Or is it the assertion that these killings are systematic that they believe to be baseless? Let’s look at both.
As to the killing, there is much evidence, including this memorandum from the group Amerikaners, or this report detailing 300 farm attacks and 50 murders in 2022 alone.
The Wall of Remembrance in Bothaville, South Africa, commemorates all the “commercial farmers” murdered since 1961. The annual number varies from a low of 23 in 2024 to a high of 159 in 1998. There have been roughly 50 white farmers killed every year for the past decade, out of roughly 35,000 remaining. That gives a murder rate of over 14 per 10,000.
For comparison, South Africa’s overall murder rate is about 4.5/10,000, whereas in the United States, it is 0.5 per 10,000. So, the murder rate for white farmers in South Africa—a very violent country—is still about three times the national average there. It’s very possible that in some of these murders, race is a factor.
Are the murders “systematic”? The government itself is not targeting farmers, though some allied politicians encourage it. But South Africa’s rulers appear unwilling or unable to prevent violence in general.
The ruling African National Congress can’t provide steady electricity and water in many places, and corruption is endemic, so that’s not surprising. Furthermore, the U.S. State Department reports, “The government did not take credible steps to investigate, prosecute, and punish officials who may have committed human rights abuses.”
As Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a Senate hearing Tuesday, white farmers “live in a country where land is taken on a racial basis.” He’s referring to a January law “allowing land seizures by the state without compensation.” The obvious targets of this planned appropriation are commercial farmers.
The African National Congress claims it hasn’t yet taken land, but look at what happened in Zimbabwe. The government started slowly but eventually took land from 4,000 white farmers and redistributed it to political cronies and subsistence farmers, leading to what Al Jazeera called a “shattered economy, abandoned and poorly managed farms, food shortages, and soaring unemployment” two decades later.
South Africa is suffering from corrupt, inefficient government; high crime; and a collapse of services. Although South Africans all live in a violent, poor country—as do billions of others in the world—most black South Africans could not qualify for asylum protection in the U.S. simply for that reason. By no means could all white, mixed race, or Indian South Africans justify a claim either. But of the few remaining white farmers, some could certainly qualify based on U.S. refugee law protecting those fleeing persecution under five identified categories.
By calling attention to the plight of a small group of Afrikaners, perhaps Trump could prompt Ramaphosa to reestablish public safety for the benefit of all his people. That would not only help South Africans live safely and prosper, it would obviate any need for them to apply for refugee status elsewhere.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
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