Posted on May 16, 2025

The Mask Slips Over Afrikaner Refugees

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, May 16, 2025

Sometimes, the issue is so simple that you feel as though something is being hidden. It cannot really be so straightforward. There must be a complicated plan, a hidden agenda, some occult and nefarious goal that is concealed behind layers of misdirection.

American conservatives are especially prone to this unnecessary conspiratorial thinking. Many say the issue is not race. It is communism or atheism or a plan by “elites” to implement global government. Indeed, the elites want racial division because this helps them somehow. If you mobilize on behalf of your people, you are somehow doing what “they” want, even though the history of recent politics is the story of identity politics triumphing over abstract policy programs. Politics is, above all, about concrete interests, and principles are often just after-the-fact rationalizations to justify the pursuit of those interests. The closer one examines politics, the more it seems all politics is identity politics.

There are a few cases, insignificant in themselves, that are important because they are a way of cutting through the rationalizations. They are moments when the mask slips and we see the core of an issue. The OJ Simpson trial was one such case. The Karmelo Anthony case is another. Now, we have the issue of Afrikaner refugees.

Mass immigration in the last few years has been overwhelmingly driven by the supposed need for asylum. The Council on Foreign Relations claims there was a backlog of 1.5 million asylum cases by the end of fiscal year 2024. Under American law, there is a supposed “right” to asylum on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The statutory basis for asylum was created by the Refugee Act of 1980, which imposed no limits on the potential number of asylum claims. The Biden administration repealed Title 42, which had limited the ability of migrants to claim asylum. With that gone, migrants could say they had a “fear of return” and receive a date in an immigration court under Title 8.

Of course, given the backlog in the system, and the fact that migrants were released into the United States anyway, there was no guarantee they would appear at their court dates or that it would matter. The Center of Immigration Studies says that a half-million migrants skipped their dates in immigration court during the Biden years, even though the administration removed another 700,000 pending cases. In July 2024, the Government Accountability Office said there were 3.5 million pending cases for immigration removal. In more than a third of cases, the migrants do not show up to their hearings. If they are not rounded up, and if states and localities refuse to work with federal law enforcement, the court dates do not matter. Thus does the rule of law function in modern America.

One obvious problem is that a person can claim asylum based on identity, so migrants will inevitably claim whatever victimized identity is most likely to win them legal status. For example, within just a few decades of sodomy being decriminalized nationwide in the United States and gay marriage being legalized, homosexuality is now a protected category. It is therefore advantageous for migrants to claim to be homosexual, precisely because that allows them to claim oppression and therefore legal status.

One does not actually need to be homosexual to claim asylum for that reason. One must prove only that he is “perceived” that way and therefore subject to oppression. For example, in 2023, a federal appeals court reinstated an asylum claim for a woman who claimed she was persecuted because she wore pants to work and was therefore attacked as a homosexual in her native Guatemala. The result of all this is that we are not just importing non-whites from around the world, we are bringing in people with victim identities that practically guarantee lifetimes of left-wing, anti-white political activism.

The United States government also provides billions of dollars to facilitate “refugee” resettlement. In fiscal years 2022 and 2023, the Office of Refugee Resettlement spent $20 billion on “refugee and entrant assistance.” Such funding is authorized by Congress. For comparison’s sake, the House refused to earmark $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall in 2019.

Many of what we disingenuously call “Non-Governmental Organizations” are essentially arms of the government dependent on taxpayer funding. For example, the combined revenue of Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. grew from $597 million in 2019 to $2 billion by 2022. This included funds for programs such as pet or music therapy.

Religious organizations including Episcopal Migration Ministries, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society enjoyed contracts with the State Department under President Biden, which made their “charity” lucrative work. Episcopal Migration Ministries made an estimated $53 million in 2023. This did not prevent female Episcopal “bishop” Mariann Budde from lecturing newly inaugurated President Donald Trump from the pulpit about the need to protect “gay, lesbian, and transgender children,” as well as those who “pick our crops and clean our office buildings.” The combination of progressive sexual fetishes and a defense of cheap labor from a church pulpit is almost too good for parody.

Yet even that is nothing compared with what just happened. The State Department this week welcomed 59 Afrikaners to the United States. They arrived as families with small children, clutching American flags. It is a remarkable contrast to the usual image we get of “refugees”: mostly military-age males waving their home countries’ flags and barely concealing their resentment and hatred of the West and white people. “Welcome to America,” said Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. “I want you to know you are really welcome here.”

Many do welcome the Afrikaners, but unfortunately, not everyone. Anti-white hatred has destroyed Rhodesia and ruined South Africa, but the disease has metastasized throughout the West, including in the United States. Thus, the arrival of a few dozen white refugees, who arrived as families with plausible asylum claims, was met with an unhinged reaction on social media and in mainstream media. Rick Stangel said on MSNBC that Afrikaners are the darlings of “white supremacists” and that they are not suffering from injustice. Indeed, he insisted, “These folks have never had anything happen to them.”

CNN mildly reported that the “Expropriation Act,” which allows the South African government to confiscate land without compensation, merely sought to “undo the legacy of apartheid.” This should be remembered when leftists propose similarly vengeful policies to confiscate white property in the United States to combat “white privilege.” Non-white hosts on CNN raged that what white South Africans face is “not a genocide.”

Former Biden staffer Ashley Allison said the Afrikaners could just “go back to Germany,” though most Afrikaners historically did not hail from Germany and have been in Africa for about as long as white people have been in America. Of course, that may be her point. She also endorsed the South African government’s policies as “racial reconciliation,” something “this country has yet to do.” These policies are explicitly anti-white penalties that make it almost impossible for whites to get certain jobs and have led to the ruin of South African infrastructure as an incompetent black government struggles to keep the power on.

On MSNBC, Donna Edwards accused the President of “not hiding his racism,” bizarrely linking the welcoming of Afrikaners to laying off government workers.

Another MSNBC guest suggested that welcoming the Afrikaners constituted “white nationalism.” This implies that President Biden’s aggressive importation of far more non-white migrants was an expression of blood-and-soil nationalism for his own preferred demographics.

Assorted blacks in the United States also responded with complaints and threats, as did some liberal whites.

In contrast, President Trump’s message was clear: What is happening to South African whites is genocide, and journalists do not want to write about it.

The remarkable lack of flexibility in left-wing arguments is revealing. Progressives do not even seem able to admit that the South African government disadvantages whites today. Instead, they fall back on blanket denials that anything bad is happening at all.

Even the South African government, in an official statement, could barely restrain its rage that some whites were able to get away.

The claim that South African whites are fleeing from a punitive “transformation” brings to mind the deluded serial killer in the movie Red Dragon (2002), who “changed” his victims through home invasions not dissimilar to what Afrikaners endure. Squeezing the white population through taxation, legal disadvantages, restrictions on self-defense, and a refusal to stop violent crime are admittedly short of a deliberate campaign of extermination. However, in the long term, the result will be the same. In some ways, it is more torturous, because the victims are forced to subsidize their dispossession.

Perhaps the most remarkable statement comes from the Episcopal Church in the United States. Bishop Sean Rowe said:

The reality is we can’t be ourselves in the Episcopal Church and take the step of resettling Afrikaners. Our church has a long commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and historic ties with the Anglican Church of South Africa, Desmond Tutu has been a partner. We’re just not able to take this step. It’s not in line with anything we’re about.

We should be grateful for such clarity. Arguments about helping the less fortunate, showing universal empathy, or even loving one’s enemy utterly vanish, and the truth is revealed that this was always about punishment. What is most chilling is that if America falls, there will be nowhere left to flee to. Few learned from the collapse of Rhodesia, and fewer still from South Africa’s descent into savagery. Those sincerely committed to egalitarianism are determined to pursue the path to its ruinous end, and no amount of suffering or failure will make them change their mind. All we can do is fortify America ideologically, legally, and above all demographically against the racial chaos engulfing the Western world.

Donald Trump’s refuge for a few Afrikaners is, in many ways, a small gesture — quite literally the least he could do. However, it has revealed more about the true nature of liberal morality than any speech or book. Our President deserves gratitude for that.

Welcome to America, our white brothers and sisters.

About Gregory Hood

View all posts by Gregory Hood
Mr. Hood is a staff writer for American Renaissance. He has been active in conservative groups in the US. You can follow him on Gab.