WSM: Why South African refugees are real - despite media denial
Key topics:
SA media uses scare quotes to delegitimise refugee status claims
US EO14204 expands asylum to racially targeted South Africans
International courts reexamine SA's "safe country" designation
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By William Saunderson-Meyer
It’s the brattish kid who sticks its fingers in its ears and goes ‘la, la, la…’ to drown out what it doesn’t want to hear.
I’m referring to the South African media’s almost unanimous practice of putting quotation marks around the word refugee when describing their fellow citizens granted asylum in the United States. What an embarrassingly juvenile refusal to accept facts.
To start with, it’s journalistically unprofessional. The use of what linguists call ‘scare quotes’ — signalling doubt or derision — while acceptable in opinion pieces, is inappropriate in news reports. It’s an attempt to delegitimise; a rhetorical device deployed to disparage the motives, character and legal status of these newly minted émigrés.
This is the insecure shorthand of a scorned and angry nation saying: ‘That buffoon Donald Trump might call them refugees, but to us, they are opportunists, racists and traitors.’
It parrots the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), which rages against the refugee designation because of the reputational, diplomatic and legal consequences. As DIRCO knows, President Trump’s executive order (EO) not only challenges the myths of a rainbow nation but has implications that are as yet only dimly comprehended by the jingoists.
Already the US Refugee Resettlement Program has been expanded from offering sanctuary to ‘Afrikaners who are victims of unjust racial discrimination’ — contrary to what is often asserted in the media, the words ‘white’ and ‘genocide’ do not feature — to include all racial minorities. Whites, Indians and coloureds qualify if they can credibly show that they are being racially discriminated against by any of what the EO describes as ‘countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fuelling disproportionate violence against the racially disfavoured … including property confiscation.’
The South African diaspora officially numbers over a million people — in reality, it’s probably close to double that — and the rate of departure is accelerating. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, approximately 108,000 South Africans left officially.
With the changed criteria, a further substantial exodus looms. Following the EO in February, the US State Department has received nearly 50,000 inquiries and around 8,000 applications from people wanting to leave.
This will no doubt shock Cyril Ramaphosa, our perpetually perplexed president, who had confidently asserted that the EO would tempt very few to go because leaving would be a ‘real cowardly act’. True South Africans, he said, were resilient and did not run away.
The other comfort blanket that the government and its supporters cling to is the view that these minority-race émigrés are illegitimate in that they don’t meet United Nations criteria for refugee or asylum status. This is to misunderstand international law and how nations align their immigration policies with treaty obligations.
The UN Refugee Convention of 1951 is not a checklist enforced by bureaucrats in Geneva. It’s a benchmark that the signatory nations incorporate into their own law and interpret according to their unique social norms and, most importantly, shifting political winds.
No less than Trump and the US, customising the Convention to suit ideology is exactly how the South African government treats Zimbabweans. Because the ANC is much enamoured of the ZANU-PF regime, only a tiny proportion of the 1.1 million Zimbabweans that are officially here, succeed at negotiating the deliberately difficult process of getting refugee status. But, oddly enough, the media doesn’t use scare quotes to impute economic opportunism when referring to this particular set of would-be émigrés.
The UN definition of a refugee hinges on ‘persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’. South Africa’s systemic racial discrimination and violence arguably meet this standard. Also, the violence does not have to be at the genocide level; repeated threats and ‘well-founded fear’ qualify as grounds for asylum.
The nub of it is that refugee status in the US is a matter of national sovereignty. When someone is granted such protection by the US, that person is a refugee under American law and, for that matter, under international law. It doesn’t matter the slightest whether the South African government or local commentators approve.
Trump’s order will have international ramifications. Until now, South Africa has been viewed generally as a ‘safe country of origin’ — that’s a classification many countries use to speed up asylum processing by allowing them to exclude at the stroke of a pen ‘manifestly unfounded’ claims. EO14204 is going to move that balance. Judiciaries will be more willing to hear appeals from South Africans who claim persecution but have been arbitrarily rejected on ‘safe country’ grounds.
Take Canada. In 2009, its Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) briefly granted a white South African, Brandon Huntley, refugee status based on racial persecution and multiple violent attacks. The decision was controversial — South Africa denounced it as racist and harmful to ANC efforts ‘to build a nonracial society’ — and it was overturned on appeal.
In 2014, a landmark Canadian case signalled a shift. Charl and Naira Nel’s asylum application, based on fears of rape, as well as fears of black-on-white violence, had been rejected by the IRB. The ruling was reversed on appeal, with Justice John O’Keefe describing the IRB’s lack of consideration of our high rate of sexual violence as ‘puzzling’ and ‘suspicious’.
O’Keefe then turned to the ‘kill the Boer’ chant, which a fortnight ago also featured so large in Ramaphosa’s and Trump’s Oval Office fracas. The judge said it was inexplicable that the IRB had not considered the singing of the song as ‘legitimately inspiring a subjective fear of political persecution’.
Similar things are happening in Ireland, where South Africa is regularly among the top ten countries of origin for asylum seekers. In 2022, a record year, there were 450 South African asylum applicants, most of them black. The number of South Africans granted asylum was not publicly detailed — the overall Irish approval rate is around 80% — but because of the ‘safe country’ classification, it’s likely to have been very few.
For those who can afford the expensive judicial appeal process, it’s a different story. When applicants go to court, the Irish judiciary has shown itself to be open to persuasion. Some black South African applicants have succeeded in getting asylum on the grounds of homophobia, xenophobia, and intra-ethnic (Zulu versus Venda) threats of violence.
In the past, white applicants have not fared well with claims of racial persecution because of the ‘safe country’ designation. This is now being tested. There is currently an appeal in process that challenges the ‘safe country’ assumption and it will be interesting to see whether the latest US moves have any resonance in Ireland.
However, it is in the United Kingdom, a country highly attractive to South African minorities because of historical and language ties, that Trump’s EO may have its furthest-reaching effects. UK courts historically have been extremely liberal in their interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights. They already rule in favour of asylum seekers in about a third of the challenges to Home Office refusals.
One might say that the British judges lean over backwards to be accommodating. Recent court reversals based on ‘exceptional circumstances’ include an Albanian jailed for three years for running a cannabis factory, on the basis that his deportation would deprive his daughter of a male role model. The family of another Albanian criminal were allowed to stay because it was ruled ‘unduly harsh’ to force the 10-year-old son to return, since he is averse to the taste of the Albanian-made chicken nuggets.
In comparison with Albanian criminals, and with a Trumpian wind now at their backs, South Africans should surely be at least as persuasive, especially given the greater than nugget-sized threats that they face here. Of course, while they might convince immigration authorities all around the world that they are refugees, one thing won’t change.
To our parochial and petty media, they’ll always be ‘refugees’.
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