The Left Plays into Trump’s Hands on Admission of South African Refugees

We find ourselves in the midst of a dramatic role reversal. All of a sudden, the Trump administration is positioning itself as a champion of the rights of oppressed minorities abroad yearning for the liberty and security that can be found only within America’s borders. Democrats, by contrast, are up in arms over the importation of a refugee population facing persecution abroad. If the population in question weren’t white South Africans, this would not fit within the political rubric to which we’ve all become accustomed.

But because we’re talking about Afrikaners, it makes immediate sense. To a particular type of leftwing activist, it might as well still be 1993 in South Africa -- a nation plagued by apartheid-style abuses executed by its tyrannical white minority. They must think: How could such a population ever be oppressed, much less deserving of resettlement in the United States? Likewise, among the president’s more performatively provocative defenders, agitating all the right people is a virtue in and of itself. Indeed, there is utility in showcasing the Democratic Party’s hypocrisy when it comes to refugees and asylum seekers.

Rick Stengel, a onetime Time editor and Obama-era government official, provided a typical example of how the left has responded to this initiative when he called it “deeply and morally wrongheaded and repulsive.”

“These are the descendants of the people who created the most diabolical system of white supremacy in human history, apartheid,” he said of the roughly four-dozen Afrikaner refugees eligible for resettlement in the United States. While Stengel acknowledged that these individuals were not directly responsible for that oppressive system, he argued they indirectly benefited from it. “But what has happened in this strange, bizarre world we’re living in is that the Afrikaners have become the darling of these right-wing white supremacist movements around the world,” he continued. “It’s like the lost cause for them. It’s like the old Confederacy.”

Doubtlessly, there are outliers within Trump’s movement who think in the base terms Stengel outlined. There are also plenty of Democrats who believe that a karmic comeuppance should be meted out to individuals who have committed no offense themselves but have a tenuous trans-generational association with one. Indeed, Stengel himself appears to be one of those Democrats.

Irrespective of the politically relevant theatrics the Trump administration’s maneuver has inspired, the Democratic lawmakers who denounced this initiative as “clearly politically motivated and an effort to rewrite history” are contradicting themselves.

A variety of media outlets have attempted to indicate, without claiming outright, that the absorption of this small number of migrants is predicated on a racist reading of the social covenant in South Africa. After all, white South Africans have a lower unemployment rate than their black counterparts, and more Afrikaners own desirable private property than blacks.

Those statistics have no bearing on whether this population is subject to persecution.

Democrats need only to turn to arch-conservative outlets like The Atlantic, the Associated Press, and Voice of America for evidence of what looks like state-sponsored repression and violence targeting South Africa’s white population. Moreover, Trump is justified in his assessment that the South African government is no friend to the West. It has cultivated relations with Iran, justified Hamas’s atrocities, and demonstrated that its sympathies lie with Russia amid Moscow’s war of conquest in Ukraine. It is in America’s interests to put pressure on the Ramaphosa government’s illiberal tendencies and its Bandung-style attachment to anti-Western regimes, whatever their character.

The question Democrats should be asking is not “why Afrikaners?” Rather, it should be asking why the Trump administration would make an exception in this case when there are equally deserving refugees with compelling asylum claims. Why not the Venezuelans who are desperately fleeing a repressive socialist state? Why not the Ukrainians, who will otherwise be delivered into a country at war or even into Russia’s hands? Why not the Afghans who served loyally alongside American soldiers and who now face the prospect of being spirited directly into the Taliban’s torture cells? If the Afrikaners can make a compelling case that their repatriation would be a humanitarian crisis, why is the Trump administration seemingly deaf to the petitions of similarly, if not more, deserving potential refugees?

If this did become the Democratic line, it would not stop the left from arguing the Trump administration has predicated its policy on skin color alone. That’s a reflex. It would, however, allow Democrats to stake out a morally consistent approach to refugee resettlement controversies that would compel Trump’s defenders to articulate the distinctions they observe between various deserving and threatened populations.

That’s why, despite the excitable protestations of the left and their allies in media, the Trump administration has the upper hand here.

Trump and his defenders are utterly unfazed by the allegation that their policies are thinly veiled sops to white supremacists and fascists. The power of that argument is exhausted. It resonates with no one save devotees of and converts to the Democratic cause. Worse still, Democrats are wagering whatever authority they retain on immigration issues by seeming to adopt a racially discretionary standard when evaluating the relative level of persecution about which they should care. If oppression is oppression, and if America remains the last best hope of mankind -- the shining beacon on the hill -- it should not matter whether the victims of foreign oppression have the correct lineage and approved genetic markers.

That is probably asking too much of Democrats. They’ve drunk so deeply from the identity politics well that applying race-neutral standards -- even just to make a politically advantageous argument that they don’t honestly believe -- is a heavy lift. But the Trump administration has the upper hand insofar as the facts are on its side. Trump officials want Democrats to sacrifice their own credibility by indulging in hypocrisy or, worse, intimating that Afrikaners as a blanket category are owed a violent comeuppance. So far, Democrats are giving the Trump White House exactly what it wants.