In mid-2025 the US rolled out an exceptional refugee pathway that has since captured global attention, not for its humanitarianism but for its striking racial undertones and administrative incoherence.
Unlike the established US refugee admissions programme, which allocates places according to region and vulnerability, this initiative carved out a separate fast-track for South African “Afrikaners”.
By creating a priority class defined by nationality and, in practice, race, Washington signalled that refugee protection could be bent into a political tool rather than grounded in universal principles of vulnerability and persecution. To compound the controversy, the initiative did not expand or reform existing refugee processes but instead constructed a racialised exception at a time when global displacement crises — from Sudan to Gaza to Afghanistan — are stretching asylum systems to breaking point. What began as a headline-grabbing jab swiftly unravelled into a case study in policy incoherence, ethical confusion and diplomatic fallout.
The ‘Amerikaner’ exception
What makes the programme even more extraordinary is the broader backdrop. On January 20 President Donald Trump signed executive order 14,163 (“Realigning the US refugee admissions programme”), which suspended the refugee admissions programme for 90 days, halting almost all refugee processing and entries. Against that freeze, Afrikaners were granted a unique exception with a fast-tracking that stood in stark contrast to the multiyear waits endured by other African asylum seekers from countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In May the controversial arrival of the first group of 49 Afrikaners was welcomed by US officials, including deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau and deputy homeland security secretary Troy Edgar, who greeted them on arrival. Many of those landing were handed miniature US flags, a perfect staged opportunity to underscore the political symbolism behind the initiative.
Since then a new term has begun to circulate, accentuating the cultural divide this departure represents. On social platforms and in commentary some now describe these migrant refugees as “Amerikaners”, a linguistic shift that both echoes the Afrikaans word for “American” and distances them from the identity of Afrikaners who remain in SA. The very coinage of the term illustrates how migration reshapes identity not only in law but in language.
The leaked email
On July 8 US charge d’affairs David Greene asked Washington whether the new refugee pathway applied strictly to Afrikaners, or whether it could include mixed-race “coloured” South Africans who speak Afrikaans, as well as Khoisan or Indian communities. The leaked reply was unequivocal. According to an exclusive report by Reuters in July, the answer came back days later in an email from Spencer Chretien, the highest-ranking official in the state department's refugee and migration bureau: “The programme is intended for white people.”
However, hours later the state department went public with a different line, insisting that the programme was open to “Afrikaners and other racial minorities.” This version inconsistency and the subsequent “no comment” offered by Chretien are telling in themselves.
Antithetical to the hype echoing globally on this initiative, currently only 88 white Afrikaner are confirmed to have been admitted to the US in terms of this programme, amid vetting delays, civil society resistance and staff retrenchments. Previously, the only number in circulation on potential demand came from the SA Chamber of Commerce in the US, a private members’ body. In March, amid much fanfare, its representatives handed the US embassy in Pretoria a list of 67,042 South Africans said to have expressed interest in Trump’s resettlement offer.
Tellingly, among those “Amerikaners” who have already gone to the US some are seemingly not too enthusiastic about their new lives. That disillusionment does not diminish the difficulty of their personal decisions, as some accounts make clear, but it does underline how they were instrumentalised for a political agenda they scarcely understood, relocated into a context for which they were ill-prepared, and were far removed from the plight of war-fleeing refugees.
The ambush and the inverted standard
Trump himself has fuelled the racial narrative. At the infamous White House meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa in May — which has since been reframed as an “ambush” rather than a presidential meeting — Trump presented a slide show of images of alleged mass grave sites of farm murders, echoing long-debunked claims of a “white genocide” being perpetrated in SA. What could have been a sober diplomatic engagement to foster unity became a spectacle of curated imagery and divisive rhetoric, crafted for an international show of power.
The backlash was swift and broad. The Episcopal Church, one of the oldest US refugee resettlement partners, withdrew its co-operation for the initiative, describing the programme as racially discriminatory. Civil society organisations have also condemned what they call “global apartheid”: the privileging of one racial group while other refugees, from Afghans to Sudanese, remain locked out despite urgent need.
The legal standard is not in dispute. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the US Immigration & Nationality Act, a refugee is defined as someone with a “well-founded fear of persecution” based on race, religion, nationality, membership of a social group or political opinion. The SA exception inverted that principle. It began with racial identity as the qualifying marker and only then sought to justify vulnerability. By subordinating protection to politics, the administration bent refugee law to the service of ideology.
Lessons from ubuntu
For South Africans this controversy is not a distant sideshow as it touches directly on how its people are perceived, categorised and divided on the global stage. In the African philosophy of ubuntu a person is a person through other people. It is a creed that finds cohesion in shared humanity, not division in difference.
The Amerikaner exception, and the theatre that surrounded it, is the antithesis of that spirit. It hollowed out the meaning of refugee, and turned people into props for a political show. Universal refugee protection was built on the idea that the dignity of one is the dignity of all.
If there is a lesson here for SA and the world it is that the test of refugee policy is not how loudly it can be advertised, but how quietly it can uphold the principle of shared humanity. Anything less tears at the fabric of global solidarity and leaves us all more divided.
• Pizzocri is CEO at Eisenberg & Associates.
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