Manufacturers Say Trump Has Made Opening U.S. Factories Impossible

Some feel as if the Afrikaners are simply using the reversal of the apartheid-era systems that they’ve benefited from for generations as justification for their resettlement in the U.S., casting themselves as victims in a situation where they’ve historically been the victimizers.

“Historically, in fact, farmers have been quite oppressed in South Africa, but those are Black farmers. Those are the people whose land was alienated over centuries of colonization and who, in many cases, worked as really poorly remunerated menial laborers in horrific conditions on white-owned farms,” said Yale professor Daniel Magaziner. “And so in many ways, what [Trump is] doing is he is implicitly, not explicitly, but implicitly downplaying the reality of South African history.”

“You do have the reality that a lot of Black South Africans are still without any wealth, are still in very deep poverty and saying, hey, since the end of apartheid, those scales have not been equaled,” said John Eligon, The New York Times’ Johannesburg bureau chief.