Refugees are not Poor People

Nor is there any such thing as "Economic Asylum"

Jewish refugees flee Nazi Germany aboard the St Louis.

The Episcopal Church is confused about a number of things (including most of the Bible’s content), but this week it is in the news for its decision to permanently end its participation in a government program that pays it to help resettle refugees in the United States. The decision was made out of spite, as the church is unhappy that some of the refugees in the program are, for the first time, Afrikaners. 49 Afrikaners, so far, vs over 100,000 total refugees settled in America last year. But that’s still to many for the Episcopalians, whose spokesman declared, “In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step.”

Why would ties to an Anglican Church preclude accepting refugees? It wouldn’t. Clearly the statement was intended to obscure the real reasoning. The Wall Street Journal gives more of the game away, uncritically quoting the president of South Africa’s insistence that his government’s racist policies are not persecuting anyone. This would be the same president who just signed legislation allowing land seizure without compensation.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa

Denial of the dangers facing Afrikaners is clearly part of the kerfuffle, but it still seems strange that doubts over the legitimacy of these threats would arouse such a response from resettlers.

But then, the real reasons are obvious, aren’t they? The Online Left and Right have been more than eager to explain them to us. To the Right, the Left’s posture towards “refugees” has been a part of its general oikophobia; a clear preference for the nonwhite over the white. It’s the same thing motivating the Left’s support for Hamas. These Afrikaners are white, ergo they aren’t supposed to be part of the “refugee” campaign. The mask is dropped yet again; “diversity” is just code for “we hate white people”.

The Left’s version of this argument is what really gets interesting, though. Of course there’s the counter-version of the “it’s all about race” argument, with complaints about the Donald Trump’s “All we needed was a new president” securing of the border juxtaposed with the fact that Afrikaners have been newly granted refugee status to argue that America’s refugee system is trending “white supremacist”.

But a lot of the chatter makes a different assertion: That Afrikaners can’t be “refugees” because they’re not poor enough.

Of course this is stated in the left-wing way, with general statistics about the average wealth of black and white South Africans presented and no regard for the particular financials of the refugees, but that’s not the primary problem. The problem is the assertion that wealth has anything whatsoever to do with refugee status.

It doesn’t.

Dictionaries have been complicit in a lot of Orwellianism recently, most notably when the Biden Administration spent months insisting that the United States was not in recession because a recession is “two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth” and then, once that definition was met, decided that it was never the definition of “recession” at all. Online dictionaries and Wikipedia changed their definitions of “recession” overnight to align with the administration. Despite this precedent, the definition of “refugee” remains - for the moment - unedited by the Postmodern Thought Police.

Merriam Webster definition, as of May 13, 2025.

Notice what’s missing from these entries? Poverty. A person who flees a country because he is poor is not a refugee. He never has been. Even when he’s not shopping for welfare systems as so many do today. That simply isn’t why the refugee concept exists. A refugee is someone who is likely to be harmed if he remains where he was, either with the blessing of his government or with its tacit approval through inaction. The balance of his 401(k) is irrelevant.

Would we argue that Jews fleeing the Holocaust were not “real refugees” if they had fat wallets? Perhaps I shouldn’t ask. But that’s not how the concept has been defined outside recent trends among members of the Western Left.

A person can be a refugee if he stands to be robbed without recourse in his home country, but not if he’s simply never earned money in the first place.

Economic Asylum

The root of a lot of this foolish thinking is a concept that has been subtly and undemocratically introduced into Western Law in the 21st century: Economic Asylum. This perversion of the asylum concept has served to legitimize welfare shopping throughout the West, and was also the entire foundation of the Biden Administration’s border policy in the United States.

Let’s look at the dictionaries again.

Cambridge again

Oxford. Merriam-Webster’s definition page is littered with other concepts, such as “insane asylums”, and doesn’t lend itself to a clean screenshot of the definition we care about.

Once again, there’s no notion that simple poverty is the basis of an asylum claim. Such a system is completely unworkable; it would allow everyone in the world to claim “asylum” in the United States, which is considerably wealthier than other societies. Granted, the Biden Administration tried exactly that as policy, but it subsequently cost the party even the popular vote.

I’ve argued since before that election that if Republicans won, one of their first legislative priorities should be to formally state something that shouldn’t require formally stating: That there is no such thing as economic asylum. The Trump administration has achieved as much using executive power and an “emergency” declaration, but these are more constitutionally dubious and lack staying power. Even if Democrats filibustered in the Senate, the argument would play well for Republicans in the polls. It’s silly that they’re not pressing it.

Back to our Afrikaners. Whether they have wealth back in South Africa or not, the Afrikaners are experiencing legitimate, targeted persecution. Similar cases have not been made for central and South Americans attempting to enter the United States. If we’re to retain any sensible meaning of “asylum” or “refugee”, it is proper to accept certain Afrikaners as refugees, and it is not proper to accept every Venezuelan or Columbian who shows up at America’s door.

Race has nothing to do with it, and wealth has nothing to do with it either.