US President Donald Trump's administration is slashing the number of refugees it admits annually to 7,500 and has revealed they will mostly be white South Africans.
The US government published the news on Thursday in a notice on the Federal Register, saying the limit was “justified by humanitarian concerns, or is otherwise in the national interest”.
“The admissions numbers shall primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa pursuant to Executive Order 14204, and other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands,” the notice read, referring to an order released in February.
The figure is a vast decrease from last year’s ceiling of 125,000 set by former president Joe Biden.
Mr Trump suspended the programme on his first day in office and since then only a trickle of refugees have entered the country, mostly white South Africans. Some refugees have been admitted as part of a court case seeking to allow entry to those who were overseas and in the process of coming to the US when the programme was suspended.
Across the country, groups that work to help resettle newly arrived refugees have had to lay off staff as the number of people arriving under the long-standing programme plummeted.
“The US refugee admissions programme is one of the few remaining expressions of America’s humanitarian leadership on the world stage,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and chief executive of Global Refuge, said this month. “To drastically lower the admissions cap and concentrate the majority of available slots on one group would mark a profound departure from decades of bipartisan refugee policy rooted in law, fairness and global responsibility.”
Shawn VanDiver, founder and president of AfghanEvac, said the announcement had “shut the door on nearly every refugee population in the world”.
“While the determination contains a narrow reference to admitting 'victims of unjust discrimination', that phrase is undefined and functionally meaningless,” he said. “It offers no clear or lawful pathway for Afghans or any other population to access protection. This is an unprecedented dismantling of America’s refugee programme and a moral collapse that abandons the very allies who stood shoulder to shoulder with our troops.”
Afrikaners make the list
In May, the US granted refugee status to 59 Afrikaners, prompting outrage and ridicule in the US and around the world.
Afrikaners are the descendants of European colonisers mainly from the Netherlands who arrived in South Africa nearly 400 years ago.
In 1948, the all-white government of South Africa established the apartheid system, which persisted until the 1990s. Apartheid laws instituted strict separation between races and institutionalised discrimination, primarily against black South Africans.
The legacies of that system still linger, experts say. Despite making up only 7 per cent of the population, white people in South Africa still own the majority of land and are the highest earners.
Mr Trump has previously said he is admitting Afrikaners as refugees because of the “genocide that’s taking place”. He claimed in post-apartheid South Africa white farmers are “being killed”.
When Mr Trump met South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House in May, the US leader dimmed the lights in the Oval Office and played a video that purported to show evidence of the genocide of white farmers in South Africa.
The accusations stem in part from a law Mr Ramaphosa signed in January, the Expropriation Bill, which allows the government to confiscate land, in some instances without compensation, and redistribute it to marginalised groups.
Mr Ramaphosa has said it was “completely false” to claim that “people of a certain race or culture are being targeted for persecution”.
