Dem
47
GOP
53
If they are white, that is. At one point, Donald Trump wanted to ban all immigration, but now he has softened. Today's immigration policy (but maybe not tomorrow's) is to admit 7,500 people/year. However, 7,000 of the slots are reserved for Afrikaners—white South Africans who speak Afrikaans, which is kind of 18th-century-kindergarten Dutch. Trump sees them as refugees because they come from a Black-majority country. The other 500 slots will be used for white, English-speaking Christian people from other countries who feel they are being persecuted. For example, someone who drew some flak for being a Holocaust denier or for supporting the neo-Nazi AfD in Germany would qualify as being persecuted. Needless to say, people from sh**hole countries are not welcome.
The basic idea is to import white people and deport brown people. In other words, MAWA.
This policy contrasts with the admissions policy of the Biden administration, where people from war-torn countries got priority. Also, the immigration cap in the last year of the Biden administration was 125,000 refugees, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Afghanistan being the top two suppliers of refugees.
But the Trump administration couldn't even get this right. For example, apparently in its haste to admit the white Afrikaners, some bureaucrat reserved 50 seats on a commercial flight from South Africa to the U.S., went through the list of Afrikaners who had applied for asylum, picked 50, and told them to go to the airport. Only 3 did. The others wanted to do silly things like sell their houses and businesses, buy enough suitcases, pack, etc. first.
Normally, refugees have already sold or lost everything they had and indeed can get on the next available flight at any time of the day or night. But these people weren't refugees in the usual sense. They were normal people who just wanted to move to the U.S. So far, only 400 Afrikaners have been resettled, and many of them are having trouble finding jobs, as 18th-century-kindergarten Dutch is not widely spoken in the U.S. They are also discovering that the cost of living is much higher in the U.S. than in South Africa. Charl Kleinhaus, a South African farmer who was sent to Buffalo but quickly moved to South Dakota, got into a bit of hot water for an interview in which he said his biggest problem in the U.S. was the lack of help: "There's no kitchen lady you call to sweep the house, or clean the house, or stuff like that. You do the work yourself." Back home, white folks had lots of Black servants to do all the work. Moving was kind of a step backwards for him. (V)