Bigotry, Hypocrisy, and Trump’s Admission of Afrikaner Refugees
Last week, the first group of South African white Afrikaners admitted by the Trump Administration as refugees, arrived in the United States. They were admitted under an executive order issued by Trump in February, even as his administration has tried to block all other refugee admissions (a court order has partially restrained the administration’s plans in this regard).
In this post, I am going to simultaneously offend many on both right and left by arguing 1) the federal government is right to admit the Afrikaners, 2) the decision to do so while simultaneously barring all other refugees is an instance of incredible hypocrisy and bias by the administration, and 3) if allowed to stand, the admission of the Afrikaners might set some useful precedents for advocates of expanded migration rights; if the Afrikaners qualify for expedited admission as “refugees,” so too do a vast range of other people!
Why it is Right to Let Afrikaners Migrate to the US
I have long argued that migration rights should not be restricted based on arbitrary circumstances of ancestry, parentage, place of birth, or race and ethnicity. Afrikaners – and other white South Africans – should not be an exception to that principle.
Some on the left who accept that idea in most other contexts might balk at doing so because of the association of Afrikaners with the evils of apartheid. But it is wrong to ascribe collective guilt to entire racial or ethnic groups. The Chinese government perpetrated the biggest mass murder in the history of world. That does not mean all Mandarin Chinese bear an onus of collective guilt, and Chinese migrants should be barred from the West. Germans don’t bear collective guilt for the Holocaust (I say that even though, like most other European Jews, I lost many members of my own family to that atrocity). Russians are not collectively response for Vladimir Putin’s atrocities, or those of the communist regime before him. And so on.
Moreover, many of today’s white South Africans were either not even born when apartheid ended in 1994, or were minors at that time. Such people obviously are not responsible for apartheid-era injustices.
A more plausible justification for excluding white South Africans is the idea that, even if most don’t bear personal responsibility for apartheid, they may have horrible racist attitudes, that we should keep out. I would argue the government should not be restricting migration (or any other liberties) based on judgments about people’s political views. Speech-based deportations are unconstitutional and unjust, and the same goes for speech-based and viewpoint-based restrictions on migration. If we (rightly) don’t trust the government to censor the speech and viewpoints of native-born citizens, the same principle applies to migrants.
Moreover, it is far from clear that most white South Africans today are still virulent racists. The Democratic Alliance – the party supported by most South African whites today (and led by Afrikaner John Steenhuisen) is a multiracial party that favors racial equality (while opposing affirmative action preferences for blacks).
If some white South African migrants do have awful racial views, we should have confidence in the assimilative power of our own liberal values to to mitigate them. In my my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, I describe how most American Muslims (a large majority of whom are immigrants or children thereof) support same-sex marriage, in sharp contrast to the homophobia prevalent in most of the Muslim world. I see a similar pattern among my own immigrant community – those from Russia and other post-Soviet nations. Racism and homophobia are common in their countries of origin, but largely disappear by the second generation among immigrants. Overall, the evidence strongly indicates that home-grown nationalists, not immigrants with illiberal values, are the main threat to liberal democratic institutions in the US and Europe.
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