Closing the Door to New Americans

“I’m proud of the fact,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told Fox News in December, that “President Trump has stopped all refugee resettlement into the country. The only refugee resettlement that is happening are the Afrikaners being persecuted in South Africa.”

Oval Office pride vis-à-vis refugees used to flow in the opposition direction. “We lead the world,” Ronald Reagan bragged in his last speech as president, “because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world.…If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

In October 2025, the Trump administration slammed the door shut to the world’s most miserable, slashing the annual cap of refugee intake by 94 percent, to an all-time low of 7,500. Even the COVID-19 years of 2020–2021 averaged more, at 11,600, than this cap would allow. In the year that Reagan left office, the U.S. brought in more than 107,000 refugees.

America is choking off demand for refugees at a time when the planet has been jacking up supply. In 2012, there were around 10 million internationally displaced people (not counting Palestinians), according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; that number cracked 20 million in 2017 and 30 million by 2023. The U.S. has gone from taking in one of every 70 global refugees during the Reagan/Jimmy Carter spike years of 1979–83 to around one in 4,000 now.

The White House’s rationale for ungenerosity has been threefold: security, capacity, and culture. “The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees,” Trump declared on the first day of his second administration, in an executive order suspending the refugee program until it was reshaped to his liking. “It is the policy of the United States to ensure that public safety and national security are paramount considerations…and to admit only those refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate.”

Afrikaners,
expected to account for at least 6,000 of the 7,500 slots, are subject to considerably less vetting than the reported “130,000 conditionally approved refugees and 14,000 Iranian religious minorities” who have passed through sometimes years of security screening, according to The New York Times. “Under the Trump administration’s updated procedures,” The Washington Post reported, citing unnamed officials, “many Afrikaners are being vetted in as little as a week.”

It is true that immigrants from South Africa earn among the highest median U.S. incomes of any nationality, and that speaking English (as 90 percent of Afrikaners do) certainly helps. It is also true, no matter how vociferously the Trump administration says otherwise, that Nigerians and Iranians do pretty damn well too. The average resettled refugee and asylee in this country, regardless of how lowly they started out, catches up to native-born American incomes within 10 years—and surpasses them within 20.

Instead of celebrating America’s world-beating assimilation machine, including the fact that refugees and asylees work and start businesses at rates higher than the native population does, Trump and Miller have been making successful politics and restrictive policies around the reductive accusation that (as Millerposted on X over the December holidays) “Americans labored while non-Americans looted.”

Trump in 2025 revoked temporary protected status for more than 1 million people, and humanitarian parole (a temporary status for those with urgent humanitarian need) for half a million more. The majority of those affected were Venezuelans, including several hundred thousand that Trump himself had originally protected in the name of offering relief from the catastrophic police-state socialism of Nicolás Maduro.

Maduro and his wife, at press time, had been forcibly removed from power and stashed in a Brooklyn jail, with Trump proclaiming control over Venezuelan oil, though the rest of Maduro’s authoritarian governing apparatus remains intact. It is unclear what effect this volatility will have on the future return of—or creation of new—refugees. Administration tub-thumping toward starving Cuba, another traditional generator of U.S.-bound refugees, has similarly unknowable future impacts.

Still, we know one thing for sure. The country and culture that welcomed both the arrival and the fruits of Albert Einstein, Gene Simmons, Andy Grove, and Sergey Brin now wants to correct that catastrophic mistake. “The Refugee Act of 1980,” Miller posted on X during his holiday bender, “has been one of the gravest historical calamities.”