Out of Africa: Apartheid, Wealth, and Trump’s Immigration Policy

The red carpet laid out for white South African immigrants is a blatant display of the Trump administration’s overt racism.

ICYMI, at the same time that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the rest of the pitiless sadists that comprise this administration are sending heavily militarized ICE operators to raid restaurants and conduct mass arrests of immigrant laborers, and dispatching masked agents in plainclothes to kidnap international graduate students right off the street (or from their homes) and disappear them into foreign gulags, they also did this:

They rolled out the red carpet for 54 white South Africans who were given preferential, expedited treatment and welcomed into the United States on the specious grounds that they are being persecuted in their home country.

ICYalsoMI, these people are Afrikaners, members of the privileged white minority that for close to a hundred years were central to the oppression of their country’s Black majority under apartheid, one of the most egregious crimes against humanity in the 20^th century.

Does that mean each of them is culpable for their ancestors’ sins, or participated in that travesty themselves? Not in and of itself. (Though many are old enough to have grown up under apartheid, which only ended in 1990.) But they are undeniably its beneficiaries, and the claim that they are now being persecuted because of their race is spurious at best. There is certainly no credible case to let these people jump the line when the US is turning away actual, legitimate refugees from many other countries, and worse, when legal permanent residents (and even some US citizens) are being rounded up and renditioned without even a whiff of due process, largely because of their skin color and/or political views.

Like Trump’s recent raft of pardons, his Afrikaner policy seems consciously designed to reward the very worst people possible.

Reportedly, Elon Musk was a prime mover in this fiasco, whispering in Trump’s ear about a “white genocide”—a longstanding and self-serving canard among South African racists—and spreading other pro-Afrikaner disinformation. (That must have been in between snaking Stevie Miller’s wife and getting in a fistfight with Scott Bessent—probably while shrooming.)

For extra cruelty, Axios reports that the same day the administration welcomed those white South Africans into the US, it also announced it was ending deportation protections for refugees from Afghanistan, including many who served valiantly alongside US forces and who face lethal retaliation from their country’s new Taliban rulers should they be forced to return. So much for the GOP’s howling, sanctimonious outrage over Biden allegedly “abandoning” our allies.

But I bet you didn’t hear much about that in your local news, did you?

In fact, it gets even worse. At least one of the Afrikaners given political asylum has an ugly history of antisemitic social media posts…..at a time when the Turmp™ administration is on its high horse about allegedly battling antisemitism in the US. (Zero tolerance!) That horse-riding, of course, is really just transparently fake cover for attacking the independence of American universities, as well as the Democratic Party and others on the left full stop. Indeed, “antisemitism”—which the administration conveniently defines as any criticism of the Netanyahu government, especially over its atrocities in Gaza—is a specific reason cited for the arrest and deportation of people like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Oztruk.

This Afrikaner episode is such a blatant example of this administration’s shameless, overt white nationalism that I can hardly wrap my head around it. Team Trump no longer even tries to hide it, as the crypto-racists of previous Republican regimes did: it’s right there in the open—highlighted, no less. Even as he knows that these actions will thrill his white supremacist base, Trump is all but rubbing it in the faces of the people of color who—incredibly—supported him in the last election. And in all our faces, of course.

Not long after the Afrikaners’ arrival in the US, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa paid a state visit to Washington and met with Trump in the Oval Office. It was—uh—awkward. During their meeting, Trump showed pictures of alleged black-on-white homicide in South Africa that were actually from fighting in Congo, and a video depicting a field of white crosses that he falsely claimed represented thousands of murdered white people. (Hold onto your hats: they didn’t.) Ramaphosa firmly rebuffed those lies, for all the good it did with his opposite number. Trump also bragged about his new Qatari jet—lying that it was a gift to the US Air Force, not to him personally—prompting Ramaphosa to say, “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.” (“I wish you did,” Donald replied.)

A HISTORY LESSON AND THE LESSONS OF HISTORY

To better understand the context of this Afrikaner debacle, it’s necessary to know a little bit about the history of South Africa. Why does that matter, you ask? For the same reason history always matters: because its distortion is used to justify contemporary policies, including the howling injustice of giving these white Afrikaners special treatment in emigrating to the US.

Michael Meeropol, professor emeritus of economics at Western New England University, taught classes on the history of South Africa for many years. “I think very few people in our country understand South Africa at all,” he told me. “Most Americans can only see it through the lens of the Black/white situation in the United States—an American paradigm—which doesn't map exactly on to that very complicated crisis.”

Meeropol notes that the US became a wealthy nation in large part because we had massive numbers of immigrants to build that wealth: ironic, given the repulsive xenophobia resurgent in right wing America today—with the aforementioned Mr. Miller as its poster boy—and the ass-backwards argument that immigrants hurt us economically. In reality, the very opposite is true. “That multicultural European immigration was the beginning of the American labor force that basically gave us our industrial development,” Meeropol says.

The situation in South Africa, however, was very different. “The Boer—the white settlers from the Netherlands who colonized South Africa, and who are the forefathers of its modern Afrikaner minority—didn't have a labor force like that.”

Meeropol explains that, as far back at the late 1800s, the Boer had control of South Africa’s vast mineral wealth, but needed a large workforce to extract it. “Imagine a United States where the Cherokee and the Sioux and the Navajo and Comanche comprised 80% of the population, and the white minority—having conquered those peoples with the US cavalry—now had to figure out a way to make them work in mines and factories. That’s where apartheid came in.”

Meeropol describes the policies—including a punishing tax system—used by the Pretoria government to make it impossible for rural Black South Africans to continuing practicing subsistence agriculture, forcing them to move and go to work in the mines.

“The Natives Land Act of 1913 gave Blacks the right to own just 13% of the land within the four former colonies that comprised the Union of South Africa—a self-governing dominion of the British Commonwealth—while the rest went to the white minority. That accelerated the destruction of subsistence agriculture. Then there were so-called ‘black spots’—Black-owned land—that were systematically taken from the people who had farmed that land for generations. That kind of expropriation went on as late as the 1970s.”

“Over the years, the rights of Blacks and Asians were further restricted and restricted and restricted until finally, with the victory of the National Party in 1948, apartheid was instituted, and white South Africa claimed they were setting up independent, self-governing African nations within the country who would have an economic relationship with the white regime. They called this ‘separate development,’ but it was absolute nonsense.”

“Famously, one of these was Sun City—aka Bophuthatswana—a short bus ride away from Johannesburg. If you were a white person and you wanted to see Blacks dancing with no clothes on, you could go to Sun City, and also gamble, which was illegal in South Africa. So there was an effort to boycott Sun City.”

Indeed: Miami Steve Van Zandt’s 1985 record “Sun City”—as in, “I ain’t gonna play”—credited to Artists United Against Apartheid, was one of the best all-star social consciousness-raising songs of that era. (Little Steven’s E Street bandleader—his boss, you might say—is on that record, too. See end of blog for more.)

DESTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT

Redressing this economic inequity was a chief objective of the post-apartheid government—and a daunting challenge.

“During the anti-apartheid struggle,” Meeropol explained, “the ANC was very clear about the need for redistribution of wealth, and as a result, was attacked as a revolutionary communist organization. In fact, early on in the era of apartheid, there was a law passed called the Suppression of Communism Act, which banned the ANC and the South African Communist Party and made them illegal organizations, from the 1950s until 1990.” But as part of the deal to avoid a “bloodbath,” which so many American conservatives direly predicted would ensue if apartheid came to an end—often as an excuse for preventing it from ending—the ANC agreed to an incredibly generous compromise.

“In the negotiations to end apartheid and minority rule, it was a conscious decision by the ANC to let the privileged white minority retain a vast amount of the wealth it had usurped over many decades. In other words, the white folks and everybody else who had property and wealth got to keep it. That concession was why the South African transition to Black majority rule in 1994 occurred with very little violence.”

“But Mandela and his South African Communist Party allies had made a pact with the devil. They basically said to the whites: you get to keep your riches, even though many of those riches were ill gotten gains from years of oppression. They said, we will work things out. And what they did is they started a program of affirmative action for Black Africans to fill the upper reaches of corporations, and of political appointments, so that there was a growing sliver of successful Black Africans—many of them politicians in the African National Congress who climbed the ladder with some government help. And of course, one of the arguments that white critics have is that affirmative action means there's less opportunity for whites. If they weren’t born into wealth and just go to school and get jobs, they don't have as easy a time achieving success because the government has these very, very strong affirmative action programs.”

This “reverse discrimination” argument is of course the same argument that we see in the United States from people who are opposed to affirmative action. Obviously, it's incredibly ironic that whites in either country would complain about people getting preferential treatment on the basis of race when that is a chief reason for their own success, or the success of their ancestors which was passed on to them. And with their lobbying of the Trump administration to allow this special immigration to the US by white Afrikaners, these same people are again asking for preferential treatment and falsely casting themselves as victims, when in fact they are some of history’s greatest villains.

Needless to say, that false narrative dovetails beautifully with Trump’s own right wing agenda. The Bizarro World / DARVO strategy in which white people purport to be the real victims of racism feeds perfectly into Trumpism and the whole ethos of this retrograde presidential administration.

But some Afrikaners—like these recent migrants and their advocates—have taken complaints of anti-white discrimination even further, to the lie that the Black majority government of South Africa is carrying out (or at least condoning) a deliberate program of killing whites and taking their land. It’s South Africa’s version of the Big Lie, or the Weimar-era Dolchstoßlegende—the German “stab in the back” myth that paved the way for the rise of the Nazis and World War II (which of course gave birth to the Biggest Lie of them all—Holocaust denial).

Here’s the truth. Despite the Trump administration’s best fearmongering efforts, the situation in South Africa is not at all analogous to what happened in Zimbabwe under the brutal dictatorship of Robert Mugabe, when white farms were in fact seized and their owners killed. When it comes to white farmers in South Africa, Meeropol notes that while there is potential danger because of the isolated areas in which their farms are located, “there's very little interest on the part of the people who live near the white farmers to harm them. Many of those neighbors are working for those farmers.”

“Yes, there have been examples of whites being killed,” says Meeropol, “but there are many, many more examples of Blacks being killed. The numbers are very, very clear. There is no higher rate of whites being murdered than Blacks—in fact, the other way around. The percentage of Blacks who are murdered is higher than the percentage of whites who are murdered.”

But that has not stopped a subset of Afrikaners from trying to spread that lie and exploit it.

As Meeropol points out, the lie is especially galling when the post-apartheid rulers of South Africa have gone out of their way to do the opposite, most prominently with the nation’s historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In fact, South Africa’s efforts at healing are often held up as a model of what the United States—eventually—could do or should do to recover from Trumpism, if and when that glorious post-Trumpist day arrives. (No wonder Donald hates it.)

“For Donald Trump to suggest that there is this is epidemic of revenge killings of whites is a calumny, it’s defamation, and it flies in the face of exactly what South Africa did to try to create a sense of reconciliation,” Meeropol says. “Did it work 100%? Of course not. But Trump is playing this unbelievably horrible racist card, and exposing that depends on people who know about South Africa spreading the word here in the US.”

THE SPIGOT AND THE TUB (NOT AN ENGLISH PUB)

You may have noticed that the injustice we are discussing hinges on the concept of wealth, which at first blush would seem very intuitive. But in truth, the topic suffers from a woeful lack of clarity in most public discourse. I confess to being quite ignorant about it myself, until I spent five years co-directing the new feature documentary Death & Taxes, with Justin Schein. (More on that in an upcoming post.)

“In South Africa, you have incredible wealth inequality,” Meeropol notes. “It’s just horrendous. But many people don't really understand the difference between wealth and income.”

“Income is the flow that you get in a particular period of time. The analogy is: you turn on the bathtub faucet and, over an hour, how much comes out of that faucet? That's income. The level of water in the tub is wealth. That’s the accumulation of assets for your entire life. So if you've had an income from the time you turned 21 that allowed you to save and invest as opposed to just spending every penny of it on living, then you accumulate wealth. And if there's enough income so that you don't have to spend it all on necessities, the water in the tub rises and rises and rises.”

“Now, the great thing about wealth is, if your income shuts off, wealth can be used to give you more income. If I have a house and I deed it to my kids, now they've got something they can borrow on, they can rent it out, they can sell it. That’s why wealth is the key to security, and why it’s so much more important than income. Income inequality can come and go. You lose your job, your income goes to zero, and you're in trouble. But if you have a significant amount of wealth, you can ride it out while you wait for your next job. It's almost as simple as that.”

“And losing wealth takes time. If the water in the bathtub is pretty full, and all of a sudden the stopper is pulled out, that draining takes time. Three generations of very rich kids might squander grandpa's money, but it could take them their entire lifetimes to do it.”

“So wealth increases security, it increases the ability to get more income, and—most significantly—it creates political power because people can use their wealth to influence politicians. The most obvious example, of course, is Elon Musk, who took the wealth that he had accumulated and spent a tremendous amount of it supporting Trump and other Republicans.” (The best estimate of Musk’s contribution is about $288 million dollars.) “I'm not so sure, but I wonder if you take Elon Musk out of the equation, whether Trump actually wins in 2024. He might very well have, because of certain issues related to policy and inflation. But Musk certainly made it easier.”

Similarly, Musk’s fellow billionaire tech bro Peter Thiel got J.D. Vance into the US Senate with a $15 million contribution to his campaign in 2022, the largest single donation to a Senate campaign at the time. (Not counting Mehmet Oz’s self-funded campaign to the tune of $27 million of his own money in a failed effort to win a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, a state he did not live in.) Musk, Thiel ,and their tech friends then convinced Trump to make Vance his running mate in ‘24.

“And of course Musk is South African and grew up under apartheid, emigrating before it ended, and he has been whispering in Trump's ear about these terrible things that are allegedly happening to whites in South Africa.” (Worth noting: although he was German born, Thiel also lived in South Africa as a young child.)

Of course, now it looks like Elon’s days as a Trump whisperer are over.

LONESOME JUBILEE

Wealth inequality, inextricably connected to (and turbocharged by) systemic racism, is therefore at the core of South Africa’s troubles—and of the United States’s as well. Meeropol:

“The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who believed in free markets, argued that even if everybody is using their God-given talents and developing income and working in the marketplace and getting jobs, etc., there are going to be some inequalities that develop. So in order to make sure that people get a fresh start every generation, there needs to be a ‘jubilee’ where we redistribute wealth so that people start with a level playing field. Obviously this was a theoretical thing that never went anywhere because the people with money had the power to say ‘not on your life.’ But that idea comes from traditional laissez faire economics.”

Wealth is like speech. (In fact, wealth is speech, according to Citizens United.) In principle, the idea of an unfettered ability to accumulate wealth and pass it on to your children, like pure absolutist free speech, makes a certain kind of appealing intellectual sense…..but it's so warping to democracy that we have to have common sense restrictions on it. Chief among those restrictions is taxation, which, as Prof. Darrick Hamilton of the New School argues, goes far beyond mere revenue collection to a reflection of our national values and priorities and a strategic direction of national resources. The big question, Hamilton asks, is for whom?

“Obviously, if you start with a tremendous amount of wealth inequality, it's going to perpetuate itself,” Meeropol says. “And that is why, for instance, a wealth tax not only raises money, but also reduces the ability of wealth to perpetuate itself in such a dramatic way. But when I would tell my students that, of course, a lot of them would say, ‘I don't know about that. I'd like to be wealthy someday’.”

Meeropol notes that the highly successful American economy of the 1950s and 1960s was also a time of extremely high marginal tax rates by contemporary standards—as high as 91% on the richest citizens at one point under Eisenhower. (Marginal referring to the rate paid on the highest dollar of income after deductions and exemptions.) More typically, it was around 70% in that era. JFK, a Democrat I would remind you, is actually the president who later lowered those rates.

And did those tax rates destroy innovation and investment and prosperity, as conservatives consistently claim when such policies are proposed today? Quite the contrary. The economy boomed, as a prosperous middle class formed. We can call that “demand side economics,” rather than “supply side,” in that it was bottom-up in nature, driven by the creation of a large chunk of ordinary people who can afford to buy consumer goods, not just a small sliver of ultra-wealthy at the top.

“During the time that the top rate was 70%, the economy did great,” says Meeropol. “And it's not that rich people didn't get rich. They did. We just didn't have the same kind of unbelievable increase in inequality that we've seen since the early 1980s with Reagan’s policies, and continuing right up through the first Trump term. And it's only going to exacerbate now because the 2017 tax cuts for the richest Americans are likely to be made permanent. And the thing that's so disgusting about it is that many of the painful cuts to services have been postponed, so nobody's going to feel that between now and November 2028. So they think they can get away with it.”

So what does that have to do with racist South Africans? Everything. Because apartheid-era South Africa was a textbook example of self-perpetuating, extreme wealth inequality, and how hard it is to redress even decades after it formally comes to an end. That it was racially based only makes it worse. South Africa’s failure to address centuries of oppression and inequality through workable, common sense measures—including affirmative action, baby bonds, tax policy, reasonable wealth redistribution that did not create resentment and instability, and other ways to build wealth for those who had none—is part of why it has the problems it has today. And the same can be said of the United States.

WITH GOD ON THEIR SIDE

The Afrikaner sense of entitlement is deep in its cultural marrow. And you’ll be shocked to hear that it is religious in origin. (How often does that happen????)

Meeropol: “To this day Afrikaners celebrate what they call the Battle of Blood River, when—in their mythology—God wiped out these heathen Zulu. They call it the Day of the Covenant, indicating that they’re God’s chosen people, just like the children of Israel who were allowed to go into Canaan while the Canaanites were wiped out by God. They said that the Black South Africans were descended from Ham, the child of Noah who disrespected his father by seeing him naked and drunk in the tent, and as a result the sons of Ham will be cursed forever. They will be ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’.” (Joshua 9:21.)

“The white South Africans said, ‘Those people were put here by God to serve us. That’s why God sent us the kaffirs’—that's the South African version of the n-word in the US. It's actually an Arabic word that means infidel.” (Worth noting: Pete Hegseth has the word kaffir, in Arabic, tattooed on his right arm. Also, in case you missed it, Pete Hegseth is the United States Secretary of Defense.)

Trump’s willingness to help this group of privileged white people, with their long and ugly history, and at the same time screw over Black and brown people, could hardly be more blatant, even in defiance of ideology, partisanship, and reason full stop. “He doesn't want to let in people from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela,” says Meeropol, “even though many of those Venezuelans were opposed to the left wing Chavez regime. You would think that the United States want to give them political asylum, just as we did for so many Cubans.”

When you see this happening, particularly for a person of color who maybe even voted for Trump, how can you deny the inherent racism? Could it possibly give some of those folks buyers’ remorse? Maybe. (For some Trump supporters, of course, it’s a feature not a bug.) Then again, for tens of millions of Americans, not even trying to overthrow the government was enough to turn them against Trump, so I don't imagine this will. But it does seem to me that the South African travesty, the Qatari jet, and the reverse Robin Hoodery of the budget bill are the kinds of things that are so brazen and so shameless that for at least some Americans, they have to be having some cumulative effect. I have to believe that in order to get up every morning and go on.

You just could not make it up. If a writer scripted this in a movie, the studio would say “No, not a chance—nobody would believe it.” But a lot of things are happening in America today that, a few years ago, no one would have believed.

********

Photo: Pro-Trump South Africans in hats reading “Make Afrikaners Great Again,” outside the US Embassy in Pretoria, February 2025. Credit: Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

“Sun City,” written by Steven Van Zandt, produced by Van Zandt and Arthur Baker. Featuring Little Steven, Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, DJ Kool Herc, Melle Mel, The Fat Boys, Rubén Blades, Dylan, Herbie Hancock, Ringo and his son Zak, Lou Reed, Run-DMC, Peter Gabriel, David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Darlene Love, Bobby Womack, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, Jackson Browne, Daryl Hannah, Bono, George Clinton, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Peter Wolf, Bonnie Raitt, Hall & Oates, Jimmy Cliff, Big Youth, Michael Monroe, Peter Garrett, Ron Carter, Ray Barretto, Gil Scott-Heron, Kashif, Nona Hendryx, Pete Townshend, Pat Benatar, Clarence Clemons, Stiv Bators, and Joey Ramone.

Check it out—it has aged WAY better than any other celebrity-studded charity anthem of the Eighties (except maybe “Tears Are Not Enough”—sadly not the ABC song, but the product of an all-star lineup of Canadian rock stars calling themselves Northern Lights).