A kerfuffle over a handful of Amerikaners

THE granting of refugee status by the US to a small group of white Afrikaners - an offer that has since been extended to include members of other racial minorities who can credibly demonstrate to US authorities that they are being discriminated againstwill have profoundly negative implications for South Africa.

- WILLIAM SAUNDERSON-MEYER

It puts the ANC-led Government of National Unity in a quandary about a slew of controversial legislation regarding hot-button issues such as race quotas in employment, black economic empowerment, property and language rights, and hate speech.

Beyond the silly hyperbole about genocide and rampant land seizures, what is still for the moment the world's most powerful nation has laid down a marker that there are indeed "bad things happening in South Africa", to quote US President Donald Trump, and these amount to racial discrimination against minorities.

While the local media childishly insists on putting the word refugee in quotation marks whenever they refer to those going to the US under Trump's executive order, that word is now a juristic definition of their status. It's a hugely important legal distinction that has far-reaching implications. It not only opens the door to many thousands of minority-group South Africans not just farmers, not just Afrikaners, not just whites fleeing to the US, but will undoubtedly also influence immigration authorities elsewhere.