“Send me your bitter. Your huddled masses of racists. Your wretched, sun-worn, and paranoid, waving the flag of a dying empire, terrified of DEI, hallucinating about genocide, and teeming with desperation to Make Anywhere Great Again.”
The Neanderthalic Donald Trump is certainly no Emma Lazarus, the poet whose 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus” is cast onto a bronze plaque on the Statue of Liberty and inspired the satirical flip I just delivered. But this is essentially what he said before rolling out the red carpet for a planeload of salty, land-losing colonizers who’ve been recast as “refugees” because Black South Africans have the audacity to reclaim what was stolen from them generations ago.
These Afrikaner welfare recipients, who descended mainly from Dutch colonists, have received preferential treatment over many other groups who’ve been waiting in limbo in refugee camps and other dangerous conditions for years. The Afghan and Iraqi interpreters who risked their lives to assist American troops in wars. The Haitians being deported after fleeing violence and natural disasters. The Syrians still trapped in camps in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon. The Congolese languishing in East Africa, the Uyghurs from China, along with Somalis, Rohingya Muslims, Yemenis, South Sudanese, Central Americans from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the Eritreans, and Ethiopians.
These Afrikaners aren’t refugees. They aren’t fleeing war. They aren’t being persecuted based on their religion. They aren’t stateless. They aren’t politically dissident exiles. They haven’t endured famine or climate collapse.
But Trump and top officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, compared post-apartheid South Africa to Nazi Germany. Invoking his family’s history, Landau said: “My own father was born in Europe and had to leave his country when Hitler came in … We respect what you had to deal with these last few years.” He added: “We’re sending a clear message that the United States really rejects the egregious persecution of people on the basis of race in South Africa.” Where was this same energy during the apartheid era?
Trump went even further, accusing the South African government of committing “genocide” against its white minority. But there is zero evidence of a genocide. Zero! What does exist is a slow, contested, and deeply uncomfortable effort to decolonize, undo historical injustice, and redistribute land, wealth, and opportunity. But the descendants of colonizers across the diaspora treat such developments as an existential threat.
Racial equality is treated like a zero-sum game and a prelude to white annihilation. They even traffic in hyperbole by calling racial equality “genocide.” Land reform becomes “persecution.” Statistical parity equals “reverse discrimination.” Reckoning with the colonial past feels like attempted extermination. But this ain’t about actual danger to white lives. It’s about the fear of no longer being able to dominate.
So, of course, the U.S., a white supremacist nation built on the bones of enslaved Africans and Indigenous genocide, is providing sanctuary to its colonial kin. Let’s not split hairs and call this political maneuver what it really is—ideological rehoming of a people mourning the loss of racial hierarchy.
Be clear—that planeload of disgruntled Afrikaners is not on US soil because they are in danger. They’ve been imported as reinforcements with rage because whiteness is.
They’ve arrived at a moment in U.S. history when the president has engineered an aggressive full-scale white identity project. People of color in this country are being deported, snatched off streets, hidden away in secret prisons, displaced, and denied resources. We’re also seeing government-sponsored fertility campaigns and abortion bans to push white women into birthing more white babies, regardless of the circumstances surrounding conception. These faux refugees are here to breed, vote red, promote white Jesus, and help fortify the architecture of a white ethno-state by any means necessary.
Emma Lazarus didn’t write The New Colossus for this. And if Lady Liberty could move, she’d be giving that plane full of apartheid leftovers a hard side-eye. Her torch was meant to light the way for the suffering, not to guide entitled colonizers back to the throne.
But then again, the Statue of Liberty has always been more complicated than the poem at her pedestal. For generations, she welcomed European immigrants who were quickly consolidated into whiteness to reinforce its power. They came not as threats to the system, but as new blood for its preservation.
Perhaps Lady Liberty wouldn’t flinch at all. Maybe she’d just tighten her grip on the torch, glance at the tarmac, and whisper into the Afrikaner ears: “Rraight on toime. Mehyk Amerrrica Greyt Again.”
SEE ALSO:
Trump Prioritizes White Afrikaners Over Black and Brown Migrants
Trump’s Brazen Takeover Of The Library Of Congress Is Another Direct Threat To Democracy