The Trump administration on Wednesday proposed raising the refugee cap for the coming year to 17,500 people, which is a historically low figure, and which President Trump argued should primarily be given to white Afrikaners. The move raises by 10,000 last year’s refugee cap – the lowest proposed rate in the history of the program...
Page T2From§Eachthe supper edition — 23 September 2026
Refugee cap set at historic low of 17,500, most of it reserved for white South Africans
As it ran on the front
Seventeen thousand five hundred people. That is the coming year's entire allowance — every war, every camp, every queue on the planet — and you are invited to read it as thrift. Do not. A ceiling admits nobody; a ceiling states how many, and the determination that sets the number states also who the number is for, and this year it is to go primarily to white Afrikaners.
Ten thousand above last year's figure, mind you, and last year's was the lowest proposed in the history of the program. Raised. Raised, not opened.…
…(cont) And where did the claim come from? On 7 February 2025, a freeze on all foreign aid to South Africa, citing a law said to allow land to be forcibly seized from white farmers, and a call to accept Afrikaner refugees from "government-sponsored race-based discrimination". On the fifteenth, hundreds of white South Africans outside the American embassy in Pretoria, in support. In May, the first group arrived; Trump said they faced a "genocide"; South Africa's government rejected the claims ... and last week Washington barred some South Africans over claims of anti-white discrimination. South Africa's president has called the policies racist.
Nothing was smuggled. The cap is public. The allocation is public. The rest of the world receives what is left.
At the low well, a man waters his own goats. Other buckets stay empty.
“They tell you the country is full — the fewest refugee slots in the history of the program — and in the same breath they tell you which people get most of them. That is not a cap, that is a guest list. Everybody else running from a war waits behind a claim that South Africa's own government says is false.”
“Persecution is persecution, I don't see color — did I say that? That doesn't sound like me. The point is they raised the ceiling ten thousand over last year, raised it, so this is an expansion, and nobody is excluded, there are just, you know, a limited number of slots and priorities, and I'd have to see the actual document.”
The receipts
· Trump Bars Some South Africans Over Claims of Anti-White Discrimination from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· The first group of Afrikaners arrive in the United States after U.S. president Donald Trump grants refugee status to the white minority group, who Trump says face a "genocide" in the South African far from the morgue, 12 May 2025
· Hundreds of White South Africans hold a protest outside the U.S. embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, in support of U.S. President Donald Trump's claims that the South African government is discriminati from the morgue, 15 Feb 2025
· U.S. President Donald Trump orders a freeze on all foreign aid to South Africa citing a South African law that allegedly allows land to be forcibly seized from white farmers. Trump also calls for the from the morgue, 7 Feb 2025
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.