On 12 May 2025, 59 white South Africans stepped off a plane at Dulles airport, in Virginia. They were welcomed as refugees. They were the first group of a programme launched three months earlier by the Trump administration — a programme that has since brought more than 6,000 people into the United States. Of the 6,069 refugees admitted to the country between 1 October 2025 and 30 April 2026, all but three came from South Africa.

The same US government had, in January 2025, frozen the bulk of its refugee programme. More than 100,000 people had been admitted during the last full year of the Biden administration. For fiscal year 2026, the ceiling fell to 7,500 — the lowest in US history — and it is "primarily" reserved for Afrikaners, South Africa's white minority.

The matter goes far beyond the question of migration. It probes the very definition of the word "refugee": a status designed, since the US Refugee Act of 1980, to protect people fleeing war and persecution. It raises the question of who decides that a life deserves protection. And it rests on a narrative — that of a "white genocide" in South Africa — that independent fact-checks, researchers and the South African government consider unfounded.

This article takes the facts in order: who the Afrikaners are, what the land law invoked by Washington says, what the rural crime figures show, and what this programme reveals about a migration policy that has become selective.

Who are the Afrikaners?

Afrikaners are a white minority in South Africa, descendants — for the most part — of Dutch settlers, and to a lesser extent French (Huguenots) and German, who arrived from the 17th century onwards. They speak Afrikaans, a language derived from Dutch. The news agencies AP and Reuters estimate them at around 2.7 million people, roughly 60% of the country's white minority.

The 2022 South African census gives the orders of magnitude. South Africa has around 62 million inhabitants. The population classified as "white" represents 7.3%. Afrikaans is reported as the language spoken most often at home in 10.6% of households — a figure higher than the white population alone, because Afrikaans is also spoken by part of the country's "Coloured" (mixed-race) population.

This linguistic nuance matters. It is a reminder that the categories — race, language, political identity — do not perfectly overlap. Not all Afrikaners are farmers. Not all white farmers are Afrikaners. And Afrikaans is not the language of a single racial group.

Historically, Afrikaners are associated with the political core of apartheid — the regime of institutionalised racial segregation between 1948 and 1991, designed and run by the National Party, itself carried by the Afrikaner establishment. That legacy still weighs on how the group is perceived, in South Africa and internationally.

But in 2026, Afrikaners do not form a homogeneous bloc. This is a point the sources document clearly, and one that has to be held onto in order not to tell this story wrong.

A group that does not speak with one voice

When the Trump administration signed its executive order in February 2025, the reaction of the main Afrikaner organisations was not enthusiasm. It was, in large part, refusal.

AfriForum, the main Afrikaner lobbying group — accused by Pretoria of amplifying persecution narratives — rejects the idea of an American exile. Its chief executive, Kallie Kriel, put it unambiguously:

The Solidarity Movement, a network that brings together AfriForum and the Solidarity trade union and that claims to represent 600,000 Afrikaner families and 2 million individuals, publicly rejected, on 9 February 2025, the idea of a "repatriation" of Afrikaners as a solution. Its statement, relayed by Reuters: "We may disagree with the ANC, but we love our country." The ANC, the African National Congress, has been the governing party since 1994.

The position is paradoxical, and that is what makes it important. These organisations denounce what they present as injustices against Afrikaners — affirmative action, land reform, rural insecurity. But they refuse to leave. For them, accepting American "refugee" status would mean abandoning a claim to indigeneity: the idea that Afrikaners belong to this land.

Conversely, other white South Africans have actively sought to leave. The South African Chamber of Commerce in the U.S., chaired by Neil Diamond, served as an informal point of contact: it passed on to the US embassy a list of 67,042 names of interested people. AP specifies that these were not official applications, but expressions of interest.

And since then, the trajectories have diversified further. In March 2026, Reuters reported that thousands of white South Africans living abroad are returning to the country. At least four of the refugees admitted to the United States under the new programme have already gone back to South Africa. The narrative of a homogeneous and definitive exodus does not hold up against the facts.

A quiet street in a rural South African town, lined with modest homes and trees, reflecting a sense of community and history.

The executive order of 7 February 2025

The founding text of the programme is executive order 14204, signed by Donald Trump on 7 February 2025, titled Addressing Egregious Actions of The Republic of South Africa.

It does two things. On the one hand, it suspends US aid to South Africa, accusing the Pretoria government of "racial discrimination". On the other, it orders US administrations to promote the resettlement of "Afrikaner refugees" — presented as fleeing "government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation".

The text therefore explicitly links three elements: the question of the Afrikaners, South Africa's land law, and the broader diplomatic dispute between Washington and Pretoria — a dispute that also includes the case filed by South Africa before the International Court of Justice against Israel, a subject Kero covered in its analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On 31 October 2025, the Presidential Determination for fiscal year 2026 formalised the framework: a ceiling of 7,500 refugees, "primarily" allocated to Afrikaners "and other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands". The programme received an official name: Mission South Africa.

The political logic is set out in black and white. What remains is to test that logic against the facts it invokes.

The land law: what it actually allows

The first fact invoked by Washington is South Africa's land law. The argument: South Africa is supposedly about to confiscate white-owned farms without compensation.

The law exists. It is the Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, published on the South African government's website on 24 January 2025. But its actual content is more limited than the narrative built around it.

The text frames expropriation for two purposes: "public purpose" and "public interest". It identifies certain cases where compensation could be nil — for example, land left abandoned, or held purely for speculative purposes. And it specifies that its effective entry into force remains "to be proclaimed".

Above all: according to both the South African government and AP, no land had been expropriated under this law at the time the sources were consulted. The law is a legal framework, not a confiscation campaign under way.

To understand why this law exists, one has to look at the land structure inherited from apartheid. The South African Land Audit Report of 2017 — the reference source on the subject — establishes that, among agricultural land held by registered individual owners, 72% belongs to white people, against 4% to Black Africans.

This figure calls for a methodological clarification. It concerns registered individual private ownership in the deeds registry, photographed in 2015 — not the whole economic control of land, nor land held by companies, trusts or the state. The report itself acknowledges these limits. But the order of magnitude is clear: thirty years after the end of apartheid, land ownership remains very strongly correlated with race. It is this reality that South African land reform seeks to correct — and it is this reform that the US administration presents as persecution.

"White genocide": what the figures say

The second fact invoked is the most serious: the idea that a "white genocide" is under way in South Africa, and that white farmers are being systematically murdered.

This claim has circulated for decades, mainly on far-right websites and social media. It was brought to the White House. On 21 May 2025, during a meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Donald Trump presented images — videos, articles, photographs — supposedly proving this genocide. Several of these materials have been debunked: the white crosses shown as "graves" were a temporary memorial set up after the double murder of a farming couple in 2020; a photograph of body bags presented as South African was in fact from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

What do the data say? They do not support the genocide claim. And on this point, the sources converge — independent fact-checks, researchers, the South African government.

Reuters reported 44 homicides linked to farming communities in a year when the country recorded around 26,000 homicides in total. Murders on farms therefore account for less than 1% of the country's homicides. The South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) published, on 20 August 2025, a statement detailing the murders in farming communities in the first quarter of 2025: 6 murders, including 3 employees, 1 farm resident, 2 farmers. According to the published breakdown, five of the six victims were Black.

DIRCO's spokesperson, Chrispin Phiri, put it to Reuters:

Researchers say the same thing. The Institute for Security Studies (ISS), an independent institute that tracks violence in South Africa, published in 2025 a policy note explicitly aimed at "refuting the claim of a genocide against white farmers". Its head of the justice and violence prevention programme, quoted by international fact-checks, is categorical: if targeted violence against an ethnic group existed, the ISS would be among the first to raise the alarm and provide the evidence to the world.

The criminologists' finding is consistent: in South Africa, the risk of being killed is correlated with social class, gender and place of residence, far more than with race. The majority of the country's homicide victims are young Black men, poor, living in townships. Farm attacks exist, they are sometimes extremely brutal, but their dominant motive — documented for a long time — is robbery, not race. The South African government places them within the broader problem of violent crime in a country with a very high homicide rate, not within a logic of ethnic extermination.

That is why, in its official statement of 31 October 2025, DIRCO writes:

Pretoria's challenge

The South African government does not merely contest the facts. It contests the legal characterisation itself.

Its position: the US programme conflates voluntary migration and asylum. Refugee status, under international law, protects people who flee persecution and cannot count on the protection of their own state. Yet, Pretoria argues, Afrikaners are not in that situation: they enjoy all their civic and political rights, the South African state does not persecute them, and the crime they suffer — real — strikes the entire population.

Cyril Ramaphosa also defends land reform as an instrument for correcting the inequalities inherited from apartheid, and not as a racial, anti-white measure. The South African president flatly rejects the persecution narrative.

One has to be precise here, and not write on behalf of the institutions. Kero does not say, in its own voice, that "Afrikaners are not refugees": that is a legal characterisation that belongs to states and to the competent bodies. What Kero observes is that the US characterisation is formally contested by Pretoria, which speaks of voluntary migration, and that the facts invoked to justify it — land confiscation, genocide — are not supported by the available data.

One detail of the framework puzzles asylum-law specialists. Ordinarily, a person fleeing persecution files their application from outside their country, often after fleeing to a third country. The US programme, however, allows Afrikaners to apply from within South Africa — from the very country where they are supposedly persecuted. It is a singularity that, for several observers, blurs the line between a refugee programme and a programme of chosen immigration.

South African landscape with mountains, green valleys and a river winding through nature. Blue sky with a few clouds.
Aerial view of a lush valley in South Africa, featuring a winding river bordered by mountains and agricultural land.

The White House face-to-face

The sequence of 21 May 2025 is worth pausing on, because it crystallised the dispute.

That day, Cyril Ramaphosa was received at the White House. In front of the cameras, Donald Trump confronted his counterpart with the images of the alleged "genocide". He played a video of Julius Malema — a figure of the left-wing opposition, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters — singing Dubul' ibhunu, an anti-apartheid song from the 1980s whose title translates as "Kill the Boer" ("Boer" meaning farmer, and by extension Afrikaner).

The South African police minister, Senzo Mchunu, responded two days later. The crosses shown by Trump are not graves, he clarified: it is a memorial linked to a double murder committed in 2020 — that of a farming couple — and set up temporarily along a road. Three suspects were arrested in that case, and convicted. The memorial, for its part, has since been removed.

This battle of images says something essential about the file: part of the strength of the "white genocide" narrative rests on decontextualised visual material, which turns a tragic but isolated news item into proof of a systematic campaign. The amplifying role of Elon Musk — an entrepreneur born in South Africa, a political ally of Trump — is highlighted by Reuters and AP: he gave an old, hitherto marginal South African narrative a global echo chamber.

A migration policy that has become selective

Beyond the Afrikaner case, this programme says something about the evolution of US asylum policy.

The US refugee programme, formalised by the Refugee Act of 1980, long operated on one principle: protecting populations fleeing war and persecution, according to humanitarian criteria. The recent figures show a break:

Fiscal yearRefugee ceiling / admissions
FY2024 (Biden)over 100,000 admitted
FY2025 (Biden ceiling)125,000
FY2026 (Trump)7,500, "primarily" Afrikaners

The reversal is clear. Humanitarian protection grows scarce for nearly everyone — for people fleeing Sudan, Afghanistan, war zones — and accelerates for one minority politically singled out. Of the 6,069 refugees admitted to the United States between October 2025 and April 2026, the overwhelming majority were white South Africans; the only others were three Afghans.

It is this contrast that gives the subject its international scope. The question is not only "are Afrikaners persecuted?". It is also: who decides that a life deserves protection? And by what criteria — the reality of the danger, or political and cultural proximity with the host country?

The subject connects to a broader question about the hierarchy of sufferings deemed worthy of attention — something Kero explored in its article on the wars we no longer watch. When reception capacity becomes a scarce resource, the choice of who benefits from it becomes a weighty political act.

What the file does not yet say

Several uncertainties remain, and they must be named.

The volumes will keep moving. In April 2026, Reuters indicated that Washington was considering raising the annual ceiling by 10,000 additional places. The admission figures — 1,000, 2,000, 4,500, then 6,069 — come mainly from State Department data cited by the press. They are in constant motion.

The returns raise questions. At least four Afrikaners admitted as refugees have already gone back to South Africa. For analysts, these returns undermine the very logic of the programme: one does not return to a country where one is supposedly at risk of genocide. But they will probably not be enough to end a framework that has become a political symbol.

The ground remains to be documented. South African crime statistics are not routinely broken down by race. The very precise breakdown published for the first quarter of 2025 comes from a targeted government communication — a counter-fire against the US narrative. It must not be extrapolated without caution to the entire post-apartheid period.

What can be established fits in a few lines. Afrikaners exist as a group, with a heavy history and a claimed identity. South Africa's land law exists, but has not been used to confiscate farms. Rural crime exists, sometimes very violent, but does not form a racial genocide. And a US programme exists, which turns this ambiguous reality into a refugee category — at the very moment when the same administration is closing the door on almost everyone else.

One question remains, that neither Washington nor Pretoria truly settles: what is the word "refugee" for, if it can primarily designate those whose persecution is the least documented?

Sources