The 'white genocide' myth is shaping immigration policy

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2026

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Since October 2025, the U.S. has admitted more than 6,000 refugees — and all but three are white South Africans. The Trump administration says Afrikaners are fleeing a "genocide." They're not. This week, we look at how we got here: a conversation with a reporter who was in the Oval Office when Trump pushed this conspiracy theory on South Africa's president — and what his fixation on white South Africans reveals about anxieties over white replacement here in the U.S.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR.
0:03.6	I'm Gene Demby. And I'm B.A. Parker. Okay, so since President Trump has taken back the White
0:08.2	House for a second time, he's been tightening the screws on all the ways that people can come to the
0:14.9	United States to work and to live, right? So the administration's been much more stingy with work visas. There's
0:21.3	slow walking people's applications for green cards. And as we talked about on the show just a few
0:25.6	weeks ago, people who came here as small kids but got special protections from the government
0:30.4	to be in the country, even though they're not citizens, they're seeing those statuses lapse.
0:36.2	Yeah, and it's not as people who come here to live or work.
0:39.7	It's also a play.
0:41.1	There are all these stories of people flying in for the World Cup and finding out at the last
0:45.6	minute that their tourist visas have been revoked.
0:48.7	And then there are refugees, right?
0:50.8	So the Trump administration has either suspended or outright denied applications for asylum and refugee status for people fling war and famine and political persecution all over the world. You know, you got Afghans and people from Sudan and Ukrainians and the Rohingya. But the Trump administration has made one gigantic exception, and that's for white South Africans,
1:13.0	known as Afrikaners. Of the more than 6,000 people who have been admitted into the U.S. as refugees
1:17.8	since October 2025, every single one, except for three, came from South Africa. The administration
1:24.8	set up a special program for these Afrikaners just to make it easier for them to come to the U.S.
1:30.3	And just last month, Trump raised the cap on how many refugees the country could let in, and it added 10,000 spots, but it reserved all 10,000 of those spots for Afrikaners.
1:39.3	And what's wild about that is that the claims of persecution behind this refugee program are based on this wildly
1:47.0	debunked far-right conspiracy about South Africa, that white farmers are being killed by gangs of
1:54.7	black South Africans and that their land is being seized by the government. Yeah, they claim that they
2:00.6	are the victims of an anti-white genocide.
2:04.0	And this used to be kind of a weird, fringe conspiracy theory.
	...

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