US resettled 10,258 refugees in 2025-26. All but three were white South Africans

The United States admitted 10,258 people through refugee resettlement in the 2025-26 fiscal year. All but three of them were white South Africans.

That figure comes from a Guardian opinion piece published on 2 September by Heba Gowayed, a sociologist who studies refugee resettlement and who has consulted for the US Office of Refugee Resettlement. The three exceptions were from Afghanistan.

Gowayed’s argument is that the Trump administration is running two immigration systems at once. One is spending billions to arrest, detain and deport Black and brown people. The other is reportedly doubling the initial cash grant that resettled refugees receive, to $4,500 per person, at the same moment that white South Africans are the only group arriving through the programme in any number.

At an exchange rate of roughly R18,60 to the dollar, that grant is about R84,000 per person.

A South African reader will notice two things the piece does not dwell on. The first is the size of the number. Just over ten thousand people is a small share of the millions who leave South Africa or who move between countries every year. It is not a mass emigration event. It is a narrow, deliberately selected pipeline into one country.

The second is the legal category. Resettled refugees in the United States are one of the few immigrant groups eligible for any form of cash assistance at all, a status that exists because they are supposed to be chosen on humanitarian need. Under the programme Gowayed describes, those who arrive are eligible not only for the doubled welcome money but also for cash support through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or Refugee Cash Assistance. A year after arrival they can apply for legal permanent residence. Five years after that, citizenship.

Holders of temporary protected status have none of that. TPS is granted to people whose home countries are unsafe to return to. Gowayed writes that the administration is cancelling the status for 350,000 Haitians, detaining and shackling them, and that TPS holders were never eligible for the same cash support in the first place. They paid taxes into a system they could not draw on, and they had no route to citizenship.

Gowayed’s own position is that she spent years arguing for higher resettlement support and was not heard while the refugees in question were Syrian families who had fled war. Her book, published in 2022, documented what she describes as the inadequacy of the support on offer. She consulted the Office of Refugee Resettlement on the same question.

She traces the machinery behind this back through American welfare history. The 1996 welfare reform law signed by Bill Clinton, she writes, turned assistance into workfare and excluded most immigrants from cash help, with refugees and asylum seekers carved out as exceptions. The political language that justified it, she argues, placed the blame for poverty on the individual rather than on the conditions that produced it.

None of this is a South African scandal. The people arriving in the United States under this programme are private individuals exercising a legal right, and the South African government has no say in who the United States admits. What the figures do show is how a rich country’s immigration system sorts people by category, and how quickly the categories can be rewritten.

For South Africans watching relatives leave, the practical details matter more than the argument. The resettlement route runs through the United Nations refugee agency and a US admissions programme, not through an embassy visa queue. It is slow, it selects for people who can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution, and it admits a few thousand people a year at most. The white South Africans who arrived in 2025-26 were selected under that test.

What the Guardian piece does not say is how those applications were assessed, who adjudicated them, or what the South African applicants told US officials about the threat they faced. Those are the questions a South African reader would ask, and the published material does not answer them.

What it does establish is the contrast Gowayed set out to draw. One group of arrivals is being offered money, a green card in a year and a passport in five. Another group, already living in the United States, is being told to leave, and the protection they held has been withdrawn.

That is the story as the Guardian told it, and it is one South Africans can read without flinching. The people who took the resettlement route did what anyone would do. The argument is about the country that chose them.

Source: The Guardian, Trump admin spends billions to deport Black and brown people while doubling dollars for white ‘refugees’ | Heba Gowayed, published 2 September 2026.