What Are the Requirements for Asylum?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns asylum and who is eligible to apply. Democrats and other liberals proclaim support for the United States accepting into the nation all refugees who claim persecution and need for protection. Yet, they do not believe a group of people from South Africa deserve asylum because they are White.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in February that designated the group as refugees needing asylum. Jarrett Stepman recently reported on the situation in his article at The Daily Signal. 

One would think the Left would be happy about this. After all, Democrats are allegedly the party of refugees. All are welcome, right? Wrong.

Left-wing media commentators and Democrat politicians are apoplectic.

What’s going on here? I think it’s obvious, but let’s start with an important note: It’s not like Trump is letting in millions, or hundreds of thousands, or even hundreds of asylum-seekers, for that matter. According to reports, the administration has brought in 59 people. That’s not even enough Afrikaners to fill a trans-Atlantic flight to the U.S. More unvetted, bogus “asylum-seekers” than that were let in every few minutes on some days under President Joe Biden.

So, this is hardly something to get worked up about. But they are worked up. Very worked up. In fact, some organizations seem to be willing to light their “pro-refugee” work on fire to avoid getting involved….

The reason the Left doesn’t like the Afrikaners is clear. These refugees are white, as my colleague Tony Kinnett rightly said on his show “The Tony Kinnett Cast” on Monday night.

Here’s former Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., confirming the suspicion: “In my view, what makes it different is that they are white South Africans. The president, in my view, has not hidden his racism behind a bushel,” she said on MSNBC.

MSNBC is really concerned about bringing in these five-dozen people.

Here’s Ashley Allison, the former national coalitions director for the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign, who said on CNN that if the Afrikaners don’t want to be in South Africa, they can “leave”:

When conservative commentator Scott Jennings responded that that’s what they are in fact doing, she said that they can “go back to Germany.”

The Afrikaners are mostly descendants of Dutch arrivals who began arriving at the Cape of Good Hope Colony in 1652. That’s before the ancestors of even many of the current black residents of the country today.

Regardless, why should they go to Holland or Germany or some other vague and distant place of “origin” after four centuries? That’s an extreme form of blood and soil nationalism from any perspective.

[Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. is pro-refugee – as long as they are not white, even gang members and criminals.]

“Trump and [Elon] Musk are about to give refugee status to 60 white South Africans – who do not need it – while Trump locks up and deports refugees here who face genuine dangers in other countries,” Van Hollen wrote on X. “This is the sick global apartheid policy being adopted by this lawless administration.”

To the contrary, it seems clear that at least some of those Afrikaners, who are mostly engaged in farming, do need protection.

There have been hundreds of attacks on, and dozens of killings of, Afrikaners in recent years. South Africa is a dangerous country in general, but it seems like many of these incidents have been racially motivated acts of black-on-white violence.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, who originally hails from South Africa, certainly thinks so. Here’s what he said on X in March.

The South African government has frequently threatened to outright confiscate land from white landowners to give it to blacks as a form of “reparations.”

In case you think that the threats are idle, just read this ominous statement from the African National Congress, the ruling party in South Africa. It insists there are “no Afrikaner refugees in South Africa.”

If there is no problem, why not just let these people go?

“What the instigators of this falsehood seek is not safety, but impunity from transformation. They flee not from persecution, but from justice, equality, and accountability for historic privilege,” the message says….

There is clearly a pattern for why the Left wants to reject the Afrikaner refugees. The latter are supposedly descendants of those guilty of the colonization and apartheid of their ancestors, the thinking goes, so we really shouldn’t have sympathy or help them.

Now they are blasting the airwaves with messages about how helping a few white farmers is actually racist.

It’s quite a revealing self-own. The Left could have just let this go and said they want to bring in more refugees. They could have said nothing. Instead, they are clearly saying the quiet part out loud. For asylum, whites need not apply.