Less than a quarter of Americans (22%) agree with President Trump’s policy of prioritizing white Afrikaners for resettlement in the U.S. over refugees from other countries, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
In contrast, a majority of Americans (52%) think the U.S. should not “accept Afrikaners as refugees before resuming acceptance of refugees from other countries.”
The survey of 1,560 U.S. adults was conducted from May 22 to 27, 2025, shortly after the Trump Administration welcomed 59 Afrikaners into the country while the rest of the U.S. refugee program remained on indefinite hold — and just days after Trump surprised South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office by repeating the widely discredited claim that Afrikaners are victims of "white genocide."
“We have many people that feel they're being persecuted, and they're coming to the United States," Trump said during the meeting. "So we take from many ... locations, if we feel there's persecution or genocide going on.”
"There is just no genocide in South Africa," Ramaphosa later told reporters.
A split over whether Afrikaners deserve refugee status…
To test Americans’ views, Yahoo News and YouGov first had respondents read the following description of the situation:
Afrikaners are the descendants of white Europeans who came to South Africa centuries ago and later created its system of apartheid. Today, South Africa is more than 80% Black and some Afrikaners say they are being denied jobs and targeted with violence because they are white.
Respondents were then asked if they “think the U.S. should accept Afrikaners as refugees.” They seemed divided, with slightly more than a third of Americans (36%) saying yes, slightly less than a third saying no (31%) and about the same number (32%) saying they’re not sure.
To some degree, initial attitudes on the Afrikaners diverge along partisan lines, with Republicans (50% yes, 19% no) and independents (40% yes, 29% no) largely in favor of accepting them as refugees and Democrats (25% yes, 47% no) largely opposed. Still, roughly equal numbers of Democrats (28%), Republicans (30%) and independents (31%) say they’re “not sure” what to think.
… but clear opposition to fast-tracking them
Things get a lot less murky, however, once respondents are exposed to more information about how the Afrikaners fit into America’s current refugee system under Trump.
In general, few Americans think the Afrikaners are either more (10%) or less (24%) deserving of coming to the U.S. as refugees than people from other countries. A far greater share (47%) say they are equally deserving.
The issue for Trump is that he has effectively treated the Afrikaners as if they are the most deserving of refugee status — and Americans do not agree with that.
One of the president's first actions on his first day back in office was to sign an executive order freezing America's refugee resettlement system, contending that "the country has seen an influx of immigrants in recent years and that communities across the United States were not in a position to welcome refugees," as the New York Times put it in February.
Various groups have sued to restart the program, but it remains almost entirely suspended today — leaving "tens of thousands of refugees [who] were conditionally approved to resettle in the United States… still waiting abroad amid increasingly dangerous conditions," according to Church World Service, a leading resettlement organization
Meanwhile, the 59 Afrikaners who arrived in the U.S. on May 12 saw their applications fast-tracked.
This context is crucial. Overall, far more Americans approve (61%) than disapprove (19%) of
"accepting refugees from other countries" after reading that such refugees "are people who flee their own country and seek safety in another country, usually because of persecution or violence.” But they also think that “in recent years,” the U.S. has accepted too many refugees from other countries (43%) rather than not enough (13%) or the right amount (23%).
Nonetheless, they still narrowly oppose — at 38% approve to 42% disapprove — Trump’s decision to sign an executive order "indefinitely halting the arrival of all refugees coming into the U.S."
And when they learn that "typically, refugee resettlement takes years," but "for the Afrikaners, it took three months," that opposition grows considerably. Asked whether they "think the U.S. should accept Afrikaners as refugees before resuming acceptance of refugees from other countries," again, only 22% of Americans say yes. More than half (52%) say no.
‘White genocide?’
Likewise, just 26% of Americans accept the false claim — long circulated by right-wing groups and now echoed by the president — that Afrikaners are victims of “white genocide”; the other three quarters of U.S. adults either reject the claim (40%) or say they’re not sure (34%).
The only demographic group that mostly believes that Afrikaners are victims of white genocide is 2024 Trump voters (54%).
In February, a South African judge dismissed the idea of genocide as "clearly imagined" and "not real." According to Reuters, South African police recorded 26,232 murders nationwide in 2024. Just 44 of them were linked to farming communities (where Afrikaners predominate); only eight of the victims were farmers themselves. And while Trump and others have criticized a new South African land reform law that Reuters says is intended to "redress the injustices of apartheid by allowing for expropriations without compensation when in the public interest, for example if land is lying fallow," the truth is "no such expropriation has taken place, and any order can be challenged in court."
In the end, a plurality of Americans (again, 43%) may say the U.S. has recently accepted too many refugees from other countries — but few actually know how many refugees the U.S. typically accepts. According to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, that number has hovered around 65,000 refugees per year since 1990 (many of them from countries such Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
But when Yahoo News and YouGov asked respondents how many refugees they “think the U.S. accepts per year, on average,” just 21% selected the correct category (between 50,000 and 100,000). A third (33%) opted for a higher number; even more (36%) said they weren’t sure.
Only 11% picked a number that was too low.
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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,560 U.S. adults interviewed online from May 22 to 27, 2025. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2024 election turnout and presidential vote, party identification and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Party identification is weighted to the estimated distribution at the time of the election (31% Democratic, 32% Republican). Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.9%.