After years railing against immigrants coming to America, Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday to prioritize the U.S. resettlement of white South African “refugees” suffering from what he called “government-sponsored race-based discrimination.”
Trump also shut down all funding for the country, much of which is used to battle AIDS.
Afrikaners, architects of the historically brutal discriminatory system of apartheid in South Africa, would be resettled in America through the U.S. refugee program, which Trump had suspended by executive order on his first day in office, according to the president.
Trump accused the South African government in his order of discriminating against the white Afrikaaners, descendants of the largely Dutch colonists who arrived in the country in the 1600s and imposed apartheid against the overwhelming majority of Blacks living there until the 1990s.
Trump raged in his order that South Africa’s government is seizing “ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” and enacting “countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity” in employment, education and business.”
South Africa’s government has denied private land confiscations or racially motivated discrimination. Officials have said the government is looking at unused or publicly owned land to give citizens help who suffered generations of apartheid
The Washington Post has reported that private land is confiscated only “rarely,” and is intended to address the disparities created by apartheid.
Afrikaners, who make up only 8 percent of the population, own three-fourths of the country’s farmland, while Blacks, who comprise 80 percent of the population, own just 4 percent of agricultural land, according to the country’s 2017 land audit,
