As Donald Trump offers U.S. asylum to Afrikaners, thousands are already working in the country on agricultural visas. Boyce Upholt writes.
The best-known landmark in Chatham is Roy’s Store, on Roy’s Store Road, which has a gas station, a bait shop, and a restaurant. The owners have a few rental cabins, too, for people who want to fish in Lake Washington, an oxbow of the Mississippi River.
Otherwise, Chatham is just a crossroads surrounded by turnrows and a few swampy stands of cypress trees. And yet, in recent years, it has attracted a growing population of white South African workers. Ramsden, who is thirty-one, grew up in the Lowveld region of South Africa, where his family managed a game reserve, farming livestock and sourcing wildlife, including lions, hippos, elephants, and rhinos, for export. In 2021, he moved to the U.S. to take up work at Nelson-King Farms. The job was gruelling: during harvest, he sometimes worked hundred-hour weeks. It helped, though, that thirty other young men whom he’d known back home, and more than a hundred more whom he didn’t know, were within about a half hour’s drive. At certain bars in the area, it had become commonplace to find groups of young South African men—distinguishable by their accents and their extraordinarily short shorts—knocking back beers. “It’s such a small community. You get to know each and every person around here,” Ramsden told me as he drove. “We really enjoy it. People are good out here.” South Africa has been an obsession of the second Trump Administration. The President has seized upon the claim by right-wing groups that white South Africans, particularly farmers, are victims of an ongoing genocide. In February, 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order freezing foreign aid to South Africa, citing what he called “violent attacks on innocent disfavored minority farmers.” Later that year, he set a thirty-per-cent tariff on imports from the country and announced that its leaders would not be invited to the 2026 G20 summit, in Florida. Trump aims to slash refugee admissions to the U.S. by more than ninety per cent; last fall, a federal notice announced that the remaining asylum slots would be primarily allocated to Afrikaners, white South Africans of mostly Dutch or French descent. Such special treatment has set off a fierce debate about the purpose and future of America’s refugee program. What has been mostly undiscussed, though, is that there are already quite a few South Africans here: in 2024, nearly fifteen thousand arrived in the U.S. through the H-2A agricultural-visa program, which allows migrant laborers to spend months—sometimes years—working on farms across the country. At this point, the majority of the agricultural workforce in some communities in the Mississippi Delta appears to be South African. Mississippi residents who are not involved in agriculture are often shocked by their first encounters with men like Ramsden in the Delta, a place where Black sharecroppers once supplied the workforce on the region’s sprawling farms, and where the percentage of Black residents remains one of the highest in the country. Debates arise on Facebook: a few years ago, one user wondered whether the workers were there on “a gap year for the sons of South African plantation owners.” It only adds to the confusion that men like Ramsden do not fit the stereotype of an H-2A worker. The vast majority of U.S. agricultural visas go to Mexican citizens, and a great deal of the work is what is sometimes called “stoop labor,” ripping out weeds, handpicking fruit, hauling crates of produce. Kitted out in boots and a safari shirt, Ramsden looked more like a tourist than a farmhand. Sometimes, Ramsden and his peers in Mississippi might hop down in the mud to lay irrigation pipe. But their work typically involves operating machinery. The region’s farms mostly grow commodity row crops such soybeans, corn and cotton, which require modern tractors running complex software; laborers monitor G.P.S.-guided equipment that automates planting depth and seed spacing. Jason Holcomb, an emeritus professor of geography and global studies at Morehead State University, told me that South African H-2A workers in the U.S. first found jobs on the Great Plains in the nineteen-nineties, working on custom harvesting crews that travelled from farm to farm, to cut crops. Historically, this work had been a rite of passage for high schoolers and college students in the region. But in the nineteen-nineties, as regulations tightened, local interest waned. Now South Africans represent the fastest-growing source of H-2A farm labor in the U.S.: from 2011 to 2024, the number of visa holders has increased by more than four hundred per cent and the number of South Africans in the program has increased fourteenfold. Ramsden told me that on a flight from Atlanta to South Africa, in November or December, at the end of the working season, you might find that two hundred and fifty of the three hundred passengers are farm workers headed home. “If this program went away tomorrow, farming would cease,” Walter King, one of the co-owners of Nelson-King Farms, said. In the twentieth century, Afrikaners seized power in South Africa. Eve Fairbanks, the author of “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning,” told me that, in the Afrikaners’ narrative, farmers were “the total backbone of the country—the great ones, the heroes.” They talked about themselves as a people who had tamed an empty place, making nationhood possible. To maintain the illusion of democracy in a country that was majority Black, Afrikaners created the apartheid system, which, nominally, created smaller, independent states for different ethnic groups, but effectively denied citizenship to Black South Africans, stripping them of the right to participate in politics, own land, or move freely. In 1992, after decades of external pressure and internal resistance, the country voted to end the system. But imbalances in property ownership persisted: today, white South Africans, who make up around seven per cent of the country’s population, still own seventy-two per cent of its private farmland. Meanwhile, millions of Black South Africans still live in informal settlements. The workers in Mississippi often voice the same complaints that many South Africans have about their country, such as its sluggish economy and widespread crime. Back home, the men had experienced difficulties finding farming jobs—or any jobs at all. “The country has gone to shit,” one farmhand told me. But many of the workers also presented themselves as victims of racially motivated government policies. In South Africa, legislation in the early two-thousands codified a program called Black Economic Empowerment, which, among other initiatives, incentivizes employers to hire Black South Africans; a more recent law allows the government to expropriate private land, sometimes without compensation. There was a pervasive sense among the workers that the government was ignoring—if not outright encouraging—violence against white farmers. Many South African farms are ringed in barbed wire and outfitted with security cameras; one of the migrants told me a story about confronting armed robbers. “Your firearm is out next to your bed,” Ramsden said. “You need to always be prepared.” Another worker noted that he had two acquaintances who had been murdered, but described these as “normal crime.” “It’s difficult to say what the motivation was,” he said, adding that, whatever the reason, such violence was frequent. Other farmhands were less circumspect. “The party that’s in control of South Africa now, they need to be wiped off this earth,” Franco Hendriks, a twenty-six-year-old worker at a farm in Boyle, Mississippi, said. “They need to be thrown in jail.” For some white South Africans, the case for persecution is summed up neatly by the rhetoric of Julius Malema, a member of parliament and the founder of an opposition party called Economic Freedom Fighters, who sometimes sings a controversial anti-apartheid anthem called “Kill the Boer.” But Malema was convicted of hate speech for making threats last year, and his party won less than ten per cent of the national vote in the most recent South African election—hardly a ringing endorsement of his ideas. Uncompensated seizure under the land-expropriation law can only be pursued under narrow circumstances—when land is unused or has been abandoned, for example—and the program seemingly has yet to seize any property. Many white South Africans reject the claim of genocide, and mock the Trump Administration’s refugee policies. On social media, the first plane flights to the U.S. under Trump’s resettlement plan were dubbed the “Great Tsek”—a pun using an Afrikaans vulgarism that means, basically, “good riddance.” According to Fairbanks, who moved to South Africa from the United States more than fifteen years ago, attacks on farms appear to be mostly economically motivated crimes. Rural properties are soft targets because they tend to store money and guns and are far from police stations. Fairbanks concedes that it is now more dangerous to be a white farmer than it was under apartheid, but this is, in part, because South Africa was then a police state that protected white people. “So you have a cohort of people who were not exposed to crime under apartheid, who now are more exposed to it,” she said. The fact of violence alone does not imply a genocide; “it is still safer to be a white South African farmer, just purely statistically speaking, than it is to be a young Black male,” Fairbanks noted. Crime affects many types of people in South Africa, but this fact is left out in the narratives that have inspired Trump’s resettlement policies. Fairbanks told me that, in her time in South Africa, she has noticed that a sense of Afrikaner victimhood has persisted in various forms. “It floats free of any actual events and just attaches itself to any possible evidence of a threat,” she said. In 2021, six Black farmworkers in Sunflower County, an hour northeast of the Nelson-King Farms, filed a federal lawsuit that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions about the South Africans’ presence. Employers are only meant to use the H-2A program when they cannot fill their workforce with Americans, and they are required to pay local workers and visa holders nearly equal pay. But, according to the lawsuit, Pitts Farms, a sprawling corn, cotton, and soybean operation, had paid Black locals as much as four dollars and fifty cents less per hour than South African H-2A workers; a few of the workers had been pushed out of their jobs entirely, and one was forced to move out of farm-supplied housing. One of the plaintiffs’ families had worked for Pitts Farms for generations. A wave of similar suits followed, and the Department of Labor launched “Operation Delta Force,” which sent a swarm of investigators into the region to investigate employers. The department eventually helped a hundred and sixty-one workers recover on average roughly three thousand dollars in wages each. Pitts Farms and others have settled out of court, and according to attorneys plaintiffs have received “significant wage recoveries.” The H-2A visa program is complicated, and some farmers in the Delta said that they hadn’t understood the requirements. But the employers I spoke to pointed to a different issue: the Black farmworkers in the Delta tend to be fifty or older—men whose age might limit their capabilities. Across the country, the number of workers interested in agricultural labor is shrinking. Any jobs for which farmers request H-2A workers must also be listed with local job centers, but Walter King said that, in a typical year, he gets only a single phone call from a local, and when he asks for a résumé he never hears back. Just before my visit, a motor on one of the farm’s grain bins needed repairs. “It’s an eighty-foot ladder you have to climb up to get up there,” King said. Almost ten years ago, before his farm started hiring South Africans, he said he had only one or two employees who could manage that climb while weighted down with the necessary tools. For now, King retains his longtime employees, who, in the wake of the lawsuits and investigations, receive higher wages. But as they retire his crew grows increasingly South African—and white. On my way to visit Looney Farms Partnership, a farm that grows soybeans and corn south of Leland, Mississippi, I passed a strange-looking flag hanging from a telephone pole. Closer up, I could see that the Stars and Stripes of the U.S. flag had been blended with the Y-shaped colored bars of the South African flag. Mark Looney, the farm’s owner, said that his neighbor had put it up to honor his crew’s work. Looney told me that he approved of Trump, who is generally supported by the region’s farmers. In 2025, Trump’s sharp tariffs prompted China to stop importing U.S. soybeans, the biggest crop in the region—King called it a “gut punch” amid rising input costs and a broader nosedive in commodity prices. But in December the White House announced a twelve-billion-dollar bailout to row-crop farmers. The Administration introduced separate rates for lower and higher-skill workers, a change that enabled farmers to significantly reduce the wages that they are paying to many H-2A workers. The Department of Labor recently eliminated a requirement that Delta farmers advertise their H-2A-eligible jobs in local newspapers; an official from the Department of Labor told me that it had “ceased all operations” from its Biden-era investigations into discrimination. On the farm, I chatted with two of Looney’s South African employees as they huddled in the shade of a tree, working to repair a backhoe. One of them, Deon Oliver, wore a safari shirt and a short beard. He told me that he’d arrived in the Delta a decade ago; because he’d rushed through an agricultural high school in just two years, he was still a teen-ager. He had come with clear intentions: work for five years, save up money, then head back home. He’d planted macadamia trees on his family’s farm before leaving, and knew that after about a half decade they’d mature into a profitable little orchard. But, two years into Oliver’s stay, he met a woman from the Delta while he was fishing from a bridge. “It’s kind of a funny story,” he said. He was twenty years old, but she didn’t believe him. So she asked for proof. “She looked at my I.D., and she said, ‘Ain’t no way,’ ” Oliver said. It turned out that they’d been born on the same day on different sides of the world. They got married, had a daughter, and moved out of the housing that Looney was required to provide to his foreign workers into their own house on Route 61, the famous blues highway. “I’ve got my wife over here, and I got a kid over here, so I got responsibilities to stay with,” he said. “I’m definitely going to stay.” ♦
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