America sharply reduces asylum requests and gives priority to whites from South Africa news

The administration of US President Donald Trump announced a new policy to reduce the number of refugees accepted annually to a record level of only 7,500 people during fiscal year 2026, compared to 125,000 refugees in the previous year set by former Democratic President Joe Biden.

According to a memo issued by the White House, the vast majority of those who will be accepted during the fiscal year – which began on October 1 – will be white South Africans and “other victims of unlawful or unfair discrimination in their homelands,” in a radical shift from the United States’ traditional approach to receiving those fleeing war and persecution.

According to the memorandum and a notice published in the Federal Register (the official journal of the US government), accepting this limited number of refugees is “justified by humanitarian concerns or in the national interest,” with a focus on “victims of unlawful or unfair discrimination in their home countries,” without mentioning other specific groups.

The first batch of these refugees, which includes about 50 descendants of the first European settlers in South Africa, arrived in the United States last May.

This step comes within the framework of a broader trend of the Republican administration towards tightening immigration laws and preventing the entry of foreigners who it considers a threat to the country’s security or a threat to job opportunities in the United States.

This shift has led to tighter immigration enforcement in cities, borders and points of entry, and is shaping up to be a very different landscape in a country that has long been viewed as a beacon for immigrants.

This transformation has begun since Trump returned to the White House in January. He campaigned on his pledge to deport millions of irregular immigrants, and signed an executive order in January suspending the refugee admission program in the United States, with the exception of white South Africans, despite the Pretoria government’s denial that they were being persecuted.

This trend sparked criticism from immigration experts, as researcher Aaron Reichlin-Melnick from the American Immigration Council described the decision as “the fall of the crown jewel of international humanitarian programs in America,” noting that the program – which has received more than two million refugees since 1980 – is now being used as a path for “white immigration.”