The Trump administration has unveiled a plan to boost white immigration to the United States, in stark contrast with its efforts to expel immigrants from largely nonwhite countries as varied as Nepal and Nicaragua.
On Monday, the U.S. Embassy in South Africa announced that a group called Amerikaners will serve as an official “referral partner” to help select candidates for settlement in the U.S., following Trump’s bogus portrayal of white Afrikaners, who are primarily of Dutch descent, as victims of racist oppression by South Africa’s government.
Amerikaners appear to have branded its organization specifically to appeal to a Trump administration that has demonized nonwhite immigrants, non-Christian immigrants and immigrants with poor English-speaking abilities. As Reuters noted Tuesday, a memo the group sent to President Donald Trump in May identifies itself as “mainly Christian, conservative, and English-speaking,” while boasting about “a strong Western cultural orientation.”
The organization also pushed bogus claims of systemic anti-white racism in the memo, including the allegation that government-backed programs designed to subvert the lasting impact of South African apartheid — which has left the country’s white minority with a hugely disproportionate amount of the country’s wealth — are discriminatory.
According to the U.S. Embassy’s announcement, Amerikaners will help “consider eligibility for U.S. refugee resettlement for people who are of Afrikaner ethnicity or a member of a racial minority in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” As you may recall, earlier this year Trump signed an executive order calling for the prioritization of white Afrikaner immigration to the U.S. after forcing South Africa’s president to watch a misinformation-filled video at the White House that Trump falsely claimed was evidence of anti-white genocide in South Africa.
As NPR noted in May, claims of white genocide in Africa — whether in South Africa or in other nations, such as Zimbabwe — have been peddled by white supremacists for decades.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
