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What’s behind Trump’s welcome for ‘Afrikaner refugees’ from South Africa?

The plan is to stigmatise and destabilise South Africa in preparation for breaking it up while creating a confused and highly racialised atmosphere around immigration in the US to aid in denying rights to non-white refugees, explains EMILE SCHEPERS

Afrikaners from South Africa arrive, May 12, 2025, at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va.

THE news that a group of “Afrikaners” (Afrikaans-speaking white people from South Africa) have shown up in the US, invited by the Trump administration as “refugees,” shouldn’t come as a surprise. Donald Trump is obsessed with South Africa; he has been for years.

Back in the 1990s, when an adviser told him that non-white people could someday become the majority population in the US, he reportedly said that would spark a revolution: “This isn’t going to become South Africa.”

During his first round in the White House, he ordered the State Department to study what he called “the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers.” The same fantasy is again being used to justify aggressive policies against the black-majority nation in his second term.

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