White South Africans would Rather Live In South Africa Than In The US Under Trump

from the great-orange-hope dept

Shortly after Trump took office for a second time, his administration made it clear that it felt constitutional rights were merely privileges it would extend only to those who fully supported whatever the hell the administration happened to be doing.

At the time, the administration was not only engaged in a full-blown, bigoted war against migrants, but throwing all of its support behind Israel’s ongoing anti-Palestinian efforts, which look a whole lot like actual genocide.

Last April, the administration stated it would no longer consider anti-Israel speech to be protected by the First Amendment, especially if said speech was uttered by immigrants, legal or otherwise:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced it will begin screening immigrants’ social media for evidence of antisemitic activity as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests. The screenings will affect people applying for permanent residence status as well as foreigners affiliated with educational institutions. The policy will go into effect immediately.

In a statement issued Wednesday morning, the Department of Homeland Security said it will “protect the homeland from extremists and terrorist aliens, including those who support antisemitic terrorism, violent antisemitic ideologies and antisemitic terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or [the Houthis].”

But, in true MAGA fashion. Trump’s anti-antisemitic efforts only affected people who were more brown than white. A month later, Trump was opening the immigration door to South African “refugees,” but only the white ones. This decision was presumably based on lizard brain analysis of out-of-context clips shown on social media and/or Fox News that pretended whites in South Africa were being persecuted by the Black residents they’d persecuted for decades under apartheid.

And that included white South Africans who engaged in antisemitic speech, who were given a free pass to play their version of the race card to gain unvetted admittance to the Land of Opportunity.

Nine months later, the doors have been thrown wide open for white South Africans, with the administration yet again claiming — without facts in evidence — that these particular South Africans were more deserving of expedited asylum proceedings than anyone from any country where actual violence and persecution targets residents who are not white enough for the administration to consider worthy of naturalization.

The U.S. aims to process 4,500 refugee applications from white South Africans per month, far above President Donald Trump’s stated refugee program cap, and is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort, a U.S. contracting document said.

While both versions of the Trump administration may have rendered satire mostly obsolete, it can’t eradicate irony. And here’s where it gets absolutely hilarious. White South Africans are now thinking their homeland is a better option than living here under this administration, as Reuters reports.

Andrew Veitch left South Africa after being held up at gunpoint in his car. But now he feels there are greater threats in the United States, ​he said, citing mass shootings in public places as well as violence by U.S. immigration officers.

“People are being shot in broad daylight. American citizens are being shot and killed,” said ‌the 53-year-old, who moved to California in 2003. “I don’t want to live in a place like this.”

It’s a valid point — one that people who have lived here for their entire lives are making, albeit without the easily available option of just pressing CTRL-Z on their temporary protected status. Veitch isn’t the only one wanting to return to the allegedly-hyper-violent country of South Africa, rather than continue to live in the Land of Opportunity that is daily being rebranded as the Land of Impending Martial Law.

Other South African (white) “refugees” are heading back home because the financial climate is preferable, even if they choose to ignore the threat Trump poses to every freedom Americans hold dear. After 20 years of US residence, it’s the Trump administration that’s encouraging South African (white) migrant Naomi Saphire to return to her homeland.

[Saphire] had ⁠been settled in the United States for two decades when she came back for a holiday and realized how much she missed home.

Last year, she left North Carolina for a seaside town in South Africa’s Western Cape, where she said her three children spend more time outdoors, health insurance is affordable and she prefers the schools.

“My heart is just full of gratefulness to be here,” the 46-year-old said from her home in Plettenberg Bay. “The U.S. has been really good to me (but) I just felt like I was depriving my kids of this life.”

As for the supposed violence targeting white South Africans Trump is now pretending to “save” from their misery with his “let’s get a bunch more whites in here” immigration policies, it’s as mythical as divorced from reality as Trump’s self-perception as the smartest, savviest businessman/politician to ever grace the Earth with his presence:

Crime and joblessness are major issues in ​South Africa, but the unemployment rate is 35% for Black ​people compared with 8% for whites, according to ⁠the latest figures from the national statistics agency Stats SA.

Police statistics released last year showed that even farm murders, which Trump has focused on, killed more Black people than whites. Reuters has found that photos and videos Trump has presented on the matter were taken out of context or misrepresented.

While this might seem like the most useless of anecdotal evidence, there’s reason to believe white South Africans will either ignore the Trump’s invitation to further whiten the US, or head back home where things are still pretty fucking good for whites, but without having to deal with a megalomaniac chaos agent who seems to believe World War III will finally allow Truth Social to turn a profit.

White South Africans have been rejecting the United States since 2022, when a law allowed them to regain their citizenship after it was stripped by a post-apartheid law passed in 1995. 15,000 white South Africans took advantage of that to return to their homeland. Now that Trump’s back in office, even more whites are exiting than entering the United States, despite the administration’s warm welcome of white migrants into its white Christian nationalism plans.

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber ​said 1,000 people had reclaimed their citizenship, a number he expected to grow significantly as the programme takes off.

One of the main reasons for exiting the US was “lower cost of living,” something Trump has actively worked against achieving, starting with his indiscriminate (and apparently unlawful) tariffs and continuing through his destabilization of the world economy by (1) being buddies with Russia, (2) starting yet another forever war in the Middle East, (3) refusing to engage honestly with inflation and joblessness, and (4) decreasing American productivity by forcibly ejecting hundreds of thousands of people who work harder, pay more in taxes, and commit fewer crimes than US citizens.

And now it’s clear this administration is so inept and inherently dangerous it can’t even convince white people to live here. Let that sink in for a bit.

Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, ice, immigration, mass deportation, south africa, trump administration, whites only