South African farmers flock to the USA

The US issued a record number of visas to South Africans who do seasonal work on American farms last year.

These workers received 15,159 such permits in the US fiscal year through September, 19% more than a year earlier, Department of State data shows.

The vast majority of South African agricultural guest labourers in the US are White — descendants of the Europeans who colonized the nation in the 1600s.

While the country’s citizens are the second-biggest recipients of these so-called H2-A visas, they garner far fewer permits than people from Mexico, to whom the US issued 285,919 in the period, the data shows.

The US granted 310,767 temporary visas to migrant workers in fiscal 2023, more than triple the amount distributed a decade earlier.

American farms depend on more than 850,000 crop workers, almost half of whom the Department of Agriculture estimates are undocumented.

In an executive order Friday, President Donald Trump said that the US would promote the resettlement of so-called Afrikaners and their families as refugees, an offer Pretoria quickly contrasted with Trump’s immigration crackdown at home. He issued the directive after falsely claiming that the South African authorities are confiscating private property under new land legislation.

The order stated that the Expropriation Act, signed in December, enables the government “to seize ethnic-minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.

It follows “countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”

The bill is similar to eminent domain laws in the US, which allow the government to expropriate land in some cases. South Africa’s second-biggest political party, the Democratic Alliance, on February 7 asked the High Court for an order that would nullify the act in its current form.

Under apartheid, most Black South Africans were forbidden from owning property. White people continue to control the vast majority of farmland despite accounting for only 7% of the population.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress, blamed White Afrikaans rights group AfriForum for Washington’s move, saying that its years of lobbying right-wing US politicians have “misled the global community and protect apartheid-era land-ownership patterns.”

While some groups have said that White farmers have been targeted in violent attacks, crime in South Africa is broadly rampant, with many blaming extreme inequality for rising levels of murders and assaults on residents of all races.

Economic growth has averaged less than 1% annually for the past decade, and the jobless rate is among the highest in nations tracked by Bloomberg.

More than 20,000 Afrikaners have already asked the South African Chamber of Commerce in the USA about Trump’s offer for refugee status, Netwerk24 reported, citing the chamber’s president, Neil Diamond.

source:South African farmers flock to the USA – Daily Investor