Trump's Racist Refugee Policy Depends on Who's Coming to Dinner

on May 15, 2025

SAN DIEGO -- Racists take care of their own. And so naturally, President Donald Trump is offering affirmative action to Afrikaners.

Recently, the Trump administration put out the red carpet to welcome into the United States several dozen white South African refugees. In response, Black and brown migrants who are turned away at the U.S.-Mexico border and can no longer even apply for asylum are green with envy. Meanwhile, Americans who detest racial bias are feeling blue.

Basically, Trump's second term is a patchwork of scams and schemes. And one of the latest scams is applying a color scheme to the process by which migrants can enter the United States legally.

The lighter your skin, the better your chances of getting asylum. If you're white, you'll be all right. But if you're brown, the odds go down. Also, here's a tip: To get on Trump's good side, all you need to do is recite the magic words: "I'm a white person being unfairly persecuted in my home country by uppity Black or brown people who are subjecting me to reverse discrimination."

Of course, white Afrikaners could write a library of books on discrimination. They benefited from decades of it under a brutal apartheid system in South Africa that gave them preferential treatment and unfair advantages over Black people who make up the vast majority of the population that country.

Now that Black people run the government in South Africa, Trump believes the Afrikaners are victims of anti-white racism that includes seizing from white people parcels of land that Black people were never allowed to own in the past. The president has even gone so far as to say that the Afrikaners are victims of "genocide."

So Trump signed... wait for it... an executive order to expedite the process for admitting and resettling "Afrikaner refugees."

Letting U.S. immigration policy be so heavily influenced by race and ethnicity is vile. But it's hardly breaking news.

In the mid-1700s, Benjamin Franklin bashed German immigrants as culturally and intellectually inferior. The Founding Father warned that Pennsylvania was becoming a "colony of aliens" and that German immigrants would "Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them."

In 1882, Congress went full nativist by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act over concerns that Chinese immigrants -- who helped the cause of western expansion by building the railroads -- were just too different from other Americans and thus "unassimilable."

In 1896, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, R-Mass., gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he warned of the perils of "unrestricted immigration" and worried that Irish immigrants in particular were harming the "quality of U.S. citizenship."

Then came the main event of anti-immigrant nativism. The Immigration Act of 1924 was a field day for eugenicists and racists. Sponsored by Rep. Albert Johnson, R-Wash., a eugenics advocate, and Sen. David Reed, R-Pa., the bill sought to protect America against "a stream of alien blood." It built a quota system that dictated how many people from each country would be admitted to the United States, with a preference for migrants from England, Germany and Ireland. The bill enjoyed the support of the Ku Klux Klan and other nativist groups because it sought to keep out migrants from Southern or Eastern Europe -- most of whom were Italian, Jewish or Greek.

If there were a museum built to highlight the most despicable U.S. laws ever penned, the display on the Immigration Act of 1924 would take up an entire floor.

With Trump in the White House, it feels like Americans have entered the Bizarro world. Up is down, and right is left. Not only is MAGA without shame when it comes to its own racism, but if you point it out, they'll shamelessly turn the tables and say that you're the racist.

It seems that Trump and his minions are not just hostile to immigrants, the rule of law and the concept of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). They can also be pretty brutal to the English language.

In 2025, at least half of the raucous immigration debate is fueled by racism and xenophobia. The other 50% gets divvied up into concerns over public safety, lost jobs, border security and other worries.

Under the Trump administration, there are days when it feels like racism and xenophobia is driving 100% of U.S. immigration policy.

With white South African refugees getting the royal treatment while migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua get the shaft, this is one of those days.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.