The Trump administration’s rhetoric echoes the same old fantasy of racial purity that animated the 20th-century right.
On an otherwise unremarkable spring day, the Trump administration’s lawless assault on the rights of immigrants was interrupted by a government-chartered plane landing at Dulles International Airport. In a revealing reverse-image set piece, some 50 white Afrikaner immigrants from South Africa had arrived, in pursuit of an array of generous resettlement provisions. In February, Trump had signed an executive order granting them streamlined refugee status and a smooth path to US citizenship. The newcomers were feted with welcoming statements from the president, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and scores of MAGA-aligned commentators and pundits.
The same day that the Afrikaner “refugees” were getting the red-carpet treatment, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was ending temporary protected status for immigrants from Afghanistan—many of whom had assisted the US war effort there and would thus face potential reprisals from the Taliban should they be deported. At a press conference after the Afrikaners’ flight landed, a reporter asked State Department spokesman Christopher Landau about the vast disparity in treatment between white immigrants with dubious claims of violent persecution in their homeland, and a group of their nonwhite counterparts who were exposed to real personal and political danger. Landau replied that “one of the criteria” in assigning refugee status to an immigrant population is making sure they can be “assimilated into our country.”