Click to expand Image Some of the dozens of white South Africans who accepted an invitation from the Trump administration to come to the United States as refugees arrived at an air hangar near Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia on May 12, 2025. © 2025 Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The Trump administration is poised to mount a two-pronged attack on refugee resettlement. The first prong is quantitative: refugee admissions would be slashed from 125, 000 in the fiscal year that just ended to 7, 500. The second is qualitative: selecting who among the world’s 42. 7 million refugees would be chosen for rescue. The US refugee resettlement program historically rescued persecuted people from all racial and religious backgrounds, but according to documents obtained by the New York Times, the administration may now prioritize resettlement for “refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate.” What does that mean? Well, the only groups specifically identified are white: Afrikaner South Africans, who have already been prioritized for admission, and now, specifically, Europeans supposedly persecuted because of their “opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.”In other words, the Trump administration will prioritize the immigration of people who oppose the immigration of other people. And the racial implications of these policy shifts are easily inferred. Refugees are defined not only as people with well-founded fears of being persecuted, but also as people who have fled their countries. But have they? US officials looking for 7, 500 refugees to resettle will be hard pressed to find teeming camps in Namibia overflowing with white South Africans or right-wing xenophobes from Germany huddled for safety in Swiss camps. That’s because there aren’t any. Such camps do exist, but they hold Myanmar refugees in Bangladesh, Sudanese refugees in Chad, and Afghan refugees in Pakistan. What has stopped many countries of first arrival from forcibly returning refugees to danger has been third-country resettlement programs that relieve some of the pressure on local host states and remind them that the world is watching. A prime example is what is happening to Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The Washington Post recently reportedon Mursal, a 28-year-old Afghan woman who had a protection letter and resettlement offer from the US government. She is one among the many Afghans who the Pakistani authorities have forced back into Afghanistan since President Trump suspended resettlement. Now in hiding, she told the Post: “Everyone knows we worked with the U. S. We fear what will happen if someone informs the Taliban’s intelligence unit.” It’s bad enough that the refugee lifeline has been cut, but the insertion of nonrefugees into the few remaining refugee admission places adds deep insult to even deeper injury.
