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On the basis of their home language, historic expropriation of land without compensation, and exposure to the most extreme levels of violence in South Africa, many residents of the gang-ravaged Cape Flats should qualify for consideration by the US as potential refugees.

The only reason they do not is colour.

South Africa’s official crime statistics for the final quarter of last year recorded a single murder of a white farmer. That is the “genocide” that the Trump administration appears to have bought hook, line and sinker from Afriforum et al.

By comparison, God-fearing residents of the Cape Flats live with multiple murders in their communities on a daily basis.

To be clear, no South Africans should be subjected to violence, discrimination or fear of persecution because of their colour, beliefs, where they live, or their social or economic status. 

Nor should any South African be subjected to the arbitrary dispossession of their land, which would be both unconstitutional and illegal under the law.

While tens of thousands of Cape Town residents had their land expropriated under apartheid, due only to their skin colour, receiving no compensation and being forcibly removed to ghettoes far from the city centre – where they still live – the number of White farmers who have had their land expropriated without fair compensation is ZERO.

Cape Flats residents don’t fear losing their land; they’ve already lost it. They don’t fear the potential for violence; they live with the consequences every day.

If fear of targeted harm is the benchmark, then township residents who endure the lethal realities of gang warfare and government abandonment have a case that is not only comparable, but it may also be even more urgent.

In communities like Manenberg, Hanover Park, Bonteheuwel, Nyanga and Langa, people of colour live with bullets ripping through their windows, children being recruited into gangs, and extortion replacing local governance. 

The threat is not hypothetical; it is immediate, intimate, and unrelenting. The horror of gang violence is not accidental. It is the direct result of apartheid spatial planning, underinvestment, unemployment, broken policing, and the abandonment of public services.

If land expropriation and fear of violence are the real benchmarks to qualify for refugee status in the US, the only reason to exclude Cape Flats residents from consideration is that the US policy is racist.

The refugee system, at its core, is supposed to protect those who are unable to live in safety because their state cannot or will not protect them.

If land reform and fear of crime can grant white South Africans a pathway to asylum, then gang violence, systemic abandonment, and the inherited trauma of apartheid townships must be equally valid grounds for refugeehood for people of colour.

The current refugee narrative, however, packages privilege disguised as fear. Those who were excluded from White areas of Cape Town are re-excluded by the US today.

Issued by GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament Brett Herron