“There is a real issue with South African farmers being killed or violently attacked, experts told us. But most of the violent acts are committed during robberies in a country where most of the wealth and land post-apartheid is still owned by a relatively small white minority.
“Yes, white farmers are being killed in South Africa,” political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, co-director of the Observatory of Political Radicalism at the Jean Jaurès Foundation in Paris, told us via email. “However, there is nothing like a ‘white genocide.’ And the issue needs to be seen in the broader context of a country plagued by crime and gang activity.”
Although police statistics are imprecise on the issue, there have been about 50 farm murders per year over the last several years. That’s less than 1% of all murders in the country.
“Murder victimization is far more correlated to class, gender and location than race,” Lizette Lancaster of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told us via email.
“Farm attacks, including murders, do occur in South Africa, and many are undeniably brutal,” Anthony Kaziboni, a political and critical sociologist at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development in Africa, told us via email. “However, South Africa must be understood in its broader socio-economic and historical context.” South Africa has “extreme inequality, with approximately 10% of the population (largely white) owning over 80% of the wealth. It also has a deeply violent past, and the country’s structural violence persists today alongside physical violence, economic violence, and many other forms of violence.”
“Violent crime affects all sectors of society, not just farmers,” Kaziboni said.”
“A group of 49 white South Africans departed their homeland Sunday for the United States on a private charter plane having been offered refugee status by the Trump administration under a new program announced in February.
The group, which included families and small children, was due to arrive at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on Monday morning local time, according to Collen Msibi, a spokesperson for South Africa’s transport ministry.
They are the first Afrikaners — a white minority group in South Africa — to be relocated after U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Feb. 7 accusing South Africa’s Black-led government of racial discrimination against them and announcing a program to offer them relocation to America.
The South African government said it is “completely false” that Afrikaners are being persecuted.”
“President-elect Donald Trump has promised to halt refugees from coming to the US in his second term — a promise that will largely be within his power as president to keep.
Trump has said he plans to “suspend refugee admission, stop the resettlement, and keep the terrorists the hell out of our country” on his first day back in office. The rules for refugee admissions were established by Congress, including in the 1980 Refugee Act, but also via legislation directly following World War II. Therefore, any effort to formally end the refugee program would take an act of Congress. However, the president has lots of authority over refugee admissions — and Trump exercised that authority during his first term.
It is up to the president to decide how many refugees will be allowed to enter the US in any given year, and Trump significantly lowered the cap on refugee admissions during his first term. Presidents can also pause admissions, as President George W. Bush did in the wake of 9/11.
“Every president has used their powers to either expand or contract as circumstances might fit,” Eric Welsh of Reeves Immigration Law Group told Vox. “It’s something that is very, very susceptible to his influence.”
Given how significantly Trump eroded the US’ refugee program during his first term, it’s not unreasonable to fear that he would do even more damage this time around. While there are technically legal limits to how much Trump can do to dismantle the refugee program, there is plenty the administration could do practically to gut it.”
“Since the Refugee Act of 1980, the United States has resettled more than 3 million refugees. That’s more than any other country, making America’s refugee resettlement program the largest of its kind in the world.
That doesn’t mean it’s big enough, and the annual number of people admitted through the program — people fleeing war, persecution, or violence — has fluctuated over the years, especially recently. The Trump administration slashed the annual cap on refugee admissions to a historic low of 15,000, while the Biden administration raised it to 125,000. That’s just a small fraction of the world’s total refugee population of 36.4 million, according to the United Nations.
But for the people admitted, the program tends to work really well. “Congress set up this elaborate coordination and support system for resettled refugees and it was very deliberately done,” said Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International.
From the start, coordination between the federal government, states, and private resettlement agencies helps refugees land on their feet when they arrive. They qualify for health care, for example, and through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, they have access to services such as job training and case management. “They are also usually eligible for state benefits, like Medicaid, SNAP, food support, cash assistance if needed for families,” Schacher said. “Basically it puts resettled refugees in a position where they’re able to get all the benefits that citizens can get very soon after arriving.”
That assistance is crucial to helping refugees begin to rebuild their lives — especially as they do so after enduring traumatic circumstances — and it also benefits the communities that accept them. Studies have shown that once refugees resettle, they end up positively contributing to the economy: They eventually earn enough income to more than pay back in taxes the costs of the public assistance they initially received, and their spending helps boost local businesses and creates jobs. A study in Michigan, for example, found that refugees in the state pay some $130 million in state and local taxes each year. In 2016 alone, refugees in southeast Michigan contributed over $225 million to the regional economy in new spending and helped create thousands of new jobs.
The refugee program, in other words, benefits everyone involved. Yet despite its proven success, not all migrants have access to it. Asylum seekers, for example, don’t generally have access to federal benefits and, barring some exceptions, aren’t granted work permits. That’s in part why many cities have struggled to meet recent migrants’ needs, resulting in overcrowded shelters, a rise in homelessness, and overwhelmed local and state services.
As the country continues to face a growing migrant population, it’s worth considering what has worked in the past. “The only model we have for something like this is the refugee model, which acknowledges that that’s a national challenge,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “The fact that all these people are seeking asylum, makes it a problem that is akin, in our view, to the refugee problem. And the refugee [program] is the only time when the government gets involved in finding housing for migrants.””
“Lawmakers are warning a “catastrophic situation” in Haiti may worsen the migrant crisis as a loose alliance of armed gangs threaten to seize control of the nation, where the acting leader is missing.
Gang violence has plagued the Caribbean nation for more than two years since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise. But the crisis has escalated in recent days, when armed gangs overran two of Haiti’s biggest prisons, released thousands of inmates and tried to take control of the country’s main airport.”