Illustrative image | The Statue of Liberty with a US flag in the background. | Asylum seekers’ silhouette. (Photos: iStock) 
On Sunday evening, 59 people left OR Tambo International Airport on a chartered flight, destined for the US.
They were the culmination of what appears to have been weeks of effort by US authorities to find people who could be argued to harbour a risk of persecution because they are white and Afrikaans.
While very little is known about them, and none have so far spoken publicly about their choices, it is presumed that they were judged by the Trump administration to qualify for “refugee status”.
As many have pointed out, this is virtually unique in US history. Certainly, since the end of World War 2, the US has never sent officials to a particular place to literally look for refugees.
Read more: ‘We’re sending a clear message’ — US welcomes Afrikaner ‘refugees’ in Washington
Coming as Trump’s officials are looking for reasons to stop so many other people from coming into the US, the reason is obviously political. This could solve several problems for him.
First, his campaign was fought on the myth that white people are victims, that efforts under what Americans call “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” policies discriminate against them.
As there is a vanishingly small number of white victims of discrimination in the world, Trump has to make them up.
The South African group might help him in this. They are likely to be paraded around as proof that “white people are victims” and thus need special protections.
The numbers here reveal the desperation. Only 59 people were on that flight on Sunday. But the New York Times reported that 8,200 people had applied for the programme.
Which means that of all of the people who went through the process, only 0.6% qualified.
In other words, the officials who came to South Africa looking for refugees had to look really, really hard to find them.
What underpins this is Trump’s antipathy towards South Africa as a whole. As previously pointed out, if Trump hates DEI, then he pretty much hates our Constitution, which explicitly recognises redress measures.
As a result, South Africa will be a convenient target for his administration for as long as he is president.
Also, as Quanitah Hunter has pointed out, it may suggest that he could use this definition of these people as “refugees” and the claims of “genocide” to take further action against South Africa. It would be right to be concerned that more action might follow.
Sound and fury
It is becoming apparent that Trump’s presidency is more about spectacle than substance. While he makes big promises and issues executive orders on an almost daily basis, in reality, very little of it results in long-term change.
At about the same time that the “Afrikaans refugees” would have been landing in the US, Trump’s administration was announcing that it would cut its tariffs on goods from China by 115%. After all the disruptions to global trade over the past few months (and to international markets), he has accomplished virtually nothing.
This shows that he has no proper solutions to long-term problems.
It also means that, while what he says can sound (and often is) threatening, one has to wait some time to properly assess it.
His tariffs against China are just one example. His apparent threat to end Agoa may well turn out to be another, particularly because there are people in the US who will lobby against in their own interests (for example; orange producers in California rely on our oranges to keep the market interested during the period they are not producing – without our oranges, they will sell less of the fruit during their season).
This means that our government must realise that Trump will both keep issuing threats, and that the threats cannot be assessed at face value.
In short, it probably needs to try to calm things down to ensure that tensions are not further escalated.
This probably informs the government’s response to this action.
It has said that “It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy; a country which has in fact suffered true persecution under apartheid rule and has worked tirelessly to prevent such levels of discrimination from ever occurring again, including through the entrenchment of rights in our Constitution, which is enforced vigorously through our judicial system”.
All of this is correct; this is what the US is doing.
Read more: Pretoria challenges Trump’s plans to resettle Afrikaners as refugees
Importantly, the government has not tried to stand in the way of these people leaving.
To do so, as officials have pointed out, would be illegal. People must always have the freedom to leave South Africa if they wish (it was a startling feature of the Cold War that only communist countries and apartheid South Africa prevented people from leaving their territories).
To prevent them from leaving would be as pointless as investigating or charging AfriForum with treason for its disinformation campaign in the US (although AfriForum has never stated there is a “white genocide” in South Africa).
The move by the Trump administration to seek out these refugees may well have another, slightly deeper aim.
Pawns in a power game
As Patric Tariq Mellet pointed out on Facebook on Monday, this may also have to do with the charges of genocide brought by our government against Israel.
If the Trump Administration can try to claim that South Africa is guilty of a “genocide” of white people, then it might weaken Pretoria’s charges at the International Court of Justice.
While most South Africans will reject this as simply absurd, the fact is, we are not Trump’s constituency. White Americans who voted for him are, along with Israelis who support that country’s actions in Gaza.
In other words, this small group of people may well find that they are pawns of some kind in a much bigger game.
Read more: ‘Beyond catastrophic’ — conditions worsen in Gaza as Israel continues aid blockade
Some South Africans will worry that this might lead to a change in the way many other countries around the world view South Africa. That somehow the charge of “genocide” might stick.
But apart from a few places where many people are predisposed to agree with Trump (Israel being one), this is unlikely. Rather, the impact of Trump on other democracies has been to move those voters away from people who behave as he does.
People in both Canada and the US have voted against candidates who most resemble Trump, while many others simply ignore him. This means that it is unlikely that our standing in the international community will change much.
What is likely to happen is that Trump (with Israel to an extent) will inflame international divides as much as he can. He will try to force countries to either be “with us” or “against us”.
This means that countries such as ours, that prefer non-alignment, will be forced into more and more difficult situations. We will see Trump using the very dynamic of our society to score political points.
He does not care about South Africa, South Africans or even the small group of people who have now arrived in the US. He cares only about his political power and the spectacle that he can create. DM