White South Africans clamour for US resettlement after Trump order

Cape Town in South Africa, where a new law would allow the government to decide on land expropriations without compensation - but only in exceptional circumstances. Photo / 123RF

A deluge of more than 20,000 queries crashed the email server of the South African Chamber of Commerce in the United States after President Donald Trump said he would prioritise white South Africans in a refugee programme, the chamber has said.

Washington and Pretoria are locked in a diplomatic row over a land expropriation act that the US says will lead to the takeover of white-owned farms.

Trump, whose tycoon ally Elon Musk was born in South Africa, said last week that the law signed in January would “enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.

It allows the government, as a matter of public interest, to decide on expropriations without compensation – but only in exceptional circumstances.

The Afrikaners are descendants of European colonists, mainly of Dutch extraction, and are often engaged in farming in South Africa.

English and Afrikaner colonists ruled South Africa until 1994 under a brutal system in which the black majority were deprived of political and economic rights.

“Our email server crashed over the weekend just due to the sheer volume of inquiries we have received,” Neil Diamond, head of the South African Chamber of Commerce in the US (SACCUSA), told AFP in an email.

“Given the scale of interest, SACCUSA estimates that this figure could represent over 50,000 individuals looking to leave South Africa and seek resettlement in the United States,” he said.

Trump order ‘flawed’

Diamond warned this could lead to a skills shortage in South Africa that would impact agriculture and other sectors of the economy.

“If we look at the EB-5, which is an investor visa, you need roughly about 15 to 20 million South African Rand (NZ$1.4m to NZ$1.9m) to be able to immigrate ... What is alarming to us is the large volume of people that is interested in taking up this opportunity,” he said.

South Africa’s foreign ministry has said Trump’s order “lacks factual accuracy and fails to recognise South Africa’s profound and painful history of colonialism and apartheid.

“It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship,” it added.

Trump has asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to “prioritise humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination”.

There were no details of how the plan would be enacted as Trump halted refugee arrivals immediately after taking office.

Land ownership remains a contentious issue in South Africa, with most farmland still owned by white people three decades after the end of apartheid.

However, some Afrikaner farmers say the new land laws could lead to the confiscation of white-owned farms as carried out in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

The second largest party in South Africa’s national unity government, the Democratic Alliance, has launched a court bid to annul the land law.

© Agence France-Presse