Why Visas are Being Cancelled for African Students

Angry liberals on social media are calling racism because the Trump administration granted asylum to white South Africans facing persecution, while simultaneously restricting or denying entry to asylum seekers from dozens of other countries.

These same liberals and their media allies have claimed that the genocide against white South Africans is untrue, despite the fact that Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the third-largest party in the South African parliament, has repeatedly closed his campaign rallies by singing “Dubul’ ibhunu,” an isiXhosa song that translates to “Kill the Boer” or “Kill the farmer.”

Just four days after Trump called for his arrest, Malema launched into the chant again at a rally in the Free State, shouting, “Shoot to kill. Kill the Boer, the farmer.”

In August 2025, the Equality Court found Malema guilty of hate speech over a speech in which he called for a white man to be killed, with the court ruling it was “a clear attempt to promote hatred” and stating that “whilst calling out someone who behaves as a racist may be acceptable, calling for them to be killed is not.” Malema has appealed.

As for the murder statistics, both sides cite data selectively. According to the Transvaal Agricultural Union, a group sympathetic to Afrikaner farmers, the total number of farm murders in South Africa between 1990 and 2024 stood at 2,229, including 1,363 white farmers, 529 relatives of white farmers, and smaller numbers of white workers and visitors, alongside 88 Black farmers and 188 Black workers. On average, 56 white South Africans were killed on farms per year over that 35-year period.

The most recent full-year data from South African police records 25,423 total murders in 2024/2025, an average of 69 per day, of which 358 occurred on agricultural land, with only 42 involving individuals classified as part of the farming community.

When we look at the actual numbers involved in the Trump resettlement program, the scale is negligible. On May 12, 2025, the first group of 59 white South Africans arrived at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, welcomed by Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and granted P-1 refugee status. A second group of nine arrived shortly after on June 2, 2025.

This is set against a U.S. asylum system that is overwhelmed at a completely different order of magnitude. As of the end of FY2025, there were 2,424,061 pending asylum applications in immigration courts alone. At the end of FY2024, a further 1,446,908 affirmative asylum applications were pending with USCIS, with the total immigration court backlog exceeding 3.7 million open removal cases as of January 2025.

In other words, the 68 white South Africans admitted represent approximately 0.003 percent of pending asylum cases in the U.S. system, a rounding error. The liberal outrage is not proportional to the numbers.

The visa situation for sub-Saharan Africans is a much larger issue. In the 2024–25 academic year, there were 65,385 students from sub-Saharan African nations studying at U.S. colleges and universities.

That sub-Saharan figure does not include North Africa. Adding Egypt, Morocco, and other North African countries pushes the total for the African continent higher, with the combined number including North Africa estimated at approximately 80,000–85,000 for that year.

The Trump administration halted visas for African students as a collateral effect of broader national security proclamations. Proclamation 10949, issued June 4, 2025, and Proclamation 10998, issued December 16, 2025, and effective January 1, 2026, suspended both immigrant and nonimmigrant visas under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

That provision grants the president broad authority to suspend the entry of any class of foreign nationals deemed detrimental to U.S. interests, authority the Supreme Court upheld during Trump’s first term.

Because the nonimmigrant category explicitly includes F, M, and J visas, students from affected countries lost their visa pathway as a direct consequence.

Proclamation 10949 originally targeted 12 countries: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Proclamation 10998 expanded the full suspension to include Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan, and Syria, bringing the total under complete suspension to 19 countries, with partial restrictions extending to 30 sub-Saharan African nations overall.

The proclamations cited six justifications drawn from State Department, DHS, and intelligence community reviews: deficient civil documentation systems unable to verify births, marriages, or basic biographical data; fraudulent document markets where civil records are handwritten and easily altered; refusal by at least one government to provide passport exemplars; government instability leaving portions of national territory outside state control; high visa overstay rates, with countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe cited at 15 to 21 percent; and law enforcement records too unreliable to provide accurate criminal histories to U.S. authorities.

Two additional policies compounded the impact on African students. Starting January 21, 2026, the State Department suspended immigrant visa processing for applicants from 75 countries, citing public charge concerns and the need to ensure financial self-sufficiency. The measure is broader than Africa but affects many African nations.

Separately, the Student Criminal Alien Initiative led DHS and the State Department to terminate F-1 visas for thousands of foreign students who appeared in the National Crime Information Center database, including many never arrested or convicted of any crime. This initiative applied globally, though African students were among those affected.

Of course, a federal judge in Boston ruled that a lawsuit by the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration challenging the mass revocations as arbitrary and capricious can proceed and that the administration’s actions are subject to judicial review.

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