One of the questions we are left after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s White House encounter with President Donald Trump is this: Are the Afrikaners (or now “Amerikaners”) who left for the US bona fide refugees fleeing “white genocide” in South Africa?
Similarly, as the 49 Afrikaners boarded their Omni Air International flight at the Oliver Reginald Tambo airport, one could be forgiven for wondering what the anti-apartheid icon from Transkei, if alive, would have thought of their depiction as “refugees” in need of resettlement.
After all, Oliver Tambo was not only a refugee himself, having lived in exile for more than 30 years, but was also a brilliant legal practitioner who established Mzansi’s first black legal practice, together with Nelson Mandela, in 1952.
Regardless of the merits of their claims, the resettlement of 49 Afrikaners by the Trump administration has evoked condemnation and commentary on political interests, race, apartheid, the Gaza conflict, farm murders, genocide, and the shrinking asylum space. While these commentaries are neither new nor likely to cease, the role of politics in refugee protection is one that has rarely been reflected upon in the media, and little discourse on it exists.
However, consensus exists that Donald Trump’s actions, at a time of unprecedented displacement in Gaza, Sudan, Venezuela, Ukraine, D.R Congo or South Sudan, prioritise undeserving white South Africans on the pretext of their membership of a particular social group fleeing a non-existent genocide.
Trump’s Executive Order on 7 February 2025 and the resettlement of the 49 Afrikaners have exposed the intrinsic nature of politics in refugee protection and resettlement. The state’s own national or domestic interests are rarely faced by the public. Additionally, even fewer know how the resettlement system is not only state-centric but also normatively diverse, with rich Global North states dictating the final terms, such as preferred ethnicities, nationalities, family composition, religion, ages and even genders of “desirable refugees”.
The refugee regime that evolved in the 1950s was one that was greatly shaped by the Cold War and that centred states’ self-interest. Cold War politics influenced the notion of “persecution” and its standards to offer political advantage to the Western bloc over the Soviet bloc. Similarly, by carefully linking refugees with those disfranchised based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular group, the refugee protection regime created opportunities for latter-year leaders to adopt an incomplete and politically partisan rationale.
Whereas deeply flawed and morally wrong, the abuse of refugee pathways at a time when other deserving caseloads have been defunded and the US resettlement admission programme decimated, is not surprising. It is unrealistic to imagine that the problem of refugees can be entirely non-political. After all, resettlement at its inception was historically politicised and selectively applied before containment measures were introduced, when displacement in the Global South increased.
As the Executive Order suggests, interests beyond humanitarian concerns such as foreign policy, domestic pressure, as well as economic and political, rather than the refugee convention grounds are at the core the Afrikaner refugee status determination and priority resettlement. Unlike the current caseload where even South African courts have rejected claims of a “white genocide”, most refugees typically have to jump through hoops in articulating a well-founded fear of persecution, and wait in the “resettlement pipeline” for periods of 2-3 years.
For practitioners, the role of politics in resettlement and the wider refugee space is undeniable, albeit not openly acknowledged. The acknowledged reality for policymakers, practitioners and humanitarians is that the Afrikaner resettlement programme diverts resources in an era of massive funding cuts, erodes trust and denies assistance to those most in need of international protection. This is because “the measure of resettlement as a protection tool and durable solution is based not only on how many refugees have access to this solution and how many countries offer resettlement places, but also on the way refugees are selected, received and supported.”
Perhaps a discourse to be had is whether it was envisaged that a blatant misuse of the system to resettle persons not in need of international protection was a foreign policy tool to punish adversaries or conduct partisan politics.
It could be easily argued that the absence of a legal definition of “resettlement” in the UNHCR Statute of 1950 as well as the 1951 Refugee Convention left a door wide open for Global North states to apply it based on their interests and prevailing government policies − some of which may conflict with refugee protection.
This is historically evident with US’s reluctance to admit South Americans fleeing coups led by socialist figures in Chile and other Western-allied countries in the 70s, or the US government’s admission of those fleeing communism, to signal an ideological victory for the West. Perhaps even the admission of thousands of Vietnamese refugees in 1975 may be viewed as a form of “damage control” in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, and an effort to regain America’s moral authority on the world stage.
Even in 2025, one fact is constant: the global refugee regime looks the way it does “because powerful political forces and dynamics have shaped and constrained it”. Events such as the Global War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks introduced additional security screenings and dynamics, leading to fewer Middle East refugees being admitted. Similarly, refugee claimants have been known to convert to other faiths, marry or separate to improve their chances of resettlement.
Whereas resettlement is portrayed as a core humanitarian act, it is inexplicably linked to power and power dynamics. While humanitarian actors will often colour it as a humanitarian solution, the realities paint an institution embedded in a complex network of [political] actors, relations, and State practices. It was not until 1991 after the end of the Cold War that the UNJCR Executive Committee (EXCOM) resolved to apply resettlement as a “protection-oriented tool” – an attempt to de-politicise it.
A recent shift in discourse, albeit subtle, is an acknowledgement of the role that politics and politicians continue to play. To understand the Executive Order, one only needs to look into recent posturing by stakeholders on “strategic use of resettlement”, or positioning resettlement as “smart diplomacy”. The notion that farm murders, whatever their nature or scale, could amount to “events seriously disturbing public order” as envisaged by the OAU Refugee Convention may seem laughable, but such notions owe their roots to the system’s factory settings.
As anti-migration sentiments rise and agencies compete for resources, more brazen proposals by policymakers have sought to reverse the de-politicisation of refugee protection and resettlement. For example, it has been argued that “resettlement can be much more than a leftover Cold War tactic to undermine foreign adversaries”, implying that it has a wide range of diplomatic uses that the US and other wealthy democratic countries should leverage as a part of their broader foreign policy.
Unfortunately, this framing has been replicated in carefully crafted funding appeals that have sought to portray resettlement as more than just a humanitarian imperative, but, rather, resettlement as a foreign policy tool, or “savvy diplomacy”.
Perhaps the chickens have come home to roost with the Amerikaner refugees.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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