Gowayed: 10,258 US refugees in fiscal 2026 were white South Africans

TPS terminated for Haitians as Afrikaner aid reportedly doubles to $4,500

Heba Gowayed, a resettlement policy expert who has consulted for the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, published an opinion column Tuesday in The Guardian in which she argued that the Trump administration’s refugee resettlement policy reflects racial prioritization. The piece cites federal resettlement data showing that 10,258 refugees admitted through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in fiscal year 2025-2026 were white South Africans, while three admissions were from Afghanistan.

Gowayed reported that the Afrikaner admissions occurred under a February 2025 executive order granting the white South African minority refugee status. She wrote that the administration is doubling the initial resettlement payment — known as Resettlement and Placement or “Welcome Money” — to $4,500 per person. Afrikaners admitted under the order are also eligible, she reported, for cash assistance through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Refugee Cash Assistance, and may apply for legal permanent resident status within one year and U.S. citizenship five years after that.

Gowayed placed the Afrikaner admissions alongside the administration’s termination of temporary protected status for 350,000 Haitians, which she said exposes approximately 1.3 million TPS holders in total to deportation. TPS holders, she wrote, were never eligible for the cash assistance programs available to resettled refugees, and TPS holders from Haiti, Venezuela and Somalia never had a pathway to U.S. citizenship.

The column situates the policy choice in a longer arc of U.S. welfare and refugee law. Gowayed cited the Refugee Act of 1980 and the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act — a centerpiece of Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” signed into law by President Bill Clinton — as the legal architecture that excludes most documented and undocumented immigrants from federal cash assistance while preserving eligibility for refugees and asylum seekers.

Gowayed also cited archival research by sociologist Cybelle Fox showing that social workers in the Progressive Era and New Deal extended assistance to white European immigrants without regard to legal status and shielded them from immigration enforcement. Most immigrants to the United States at the time were white, she wrote, owing to racial quotas that limited entry to people from Western Europe.

The column traced a shift in U.S. welfare policy after the civil rights movement, with Gowayed arguing that the Reagan-era assault on cash assistance for poor families of color was supported by the caricature of the “welfare queen.” She noted that the actual woman accused in the original “welfare queen” case, Linda Taylor, was white according to census records. Gowayed wrote that the policy goal in both the Refugee Act and federal welfare law became “self-sufficiency” — language she characterized as placing responsibility for poverty on individuals rather than on structural conditions.

Gowayed wrote that the level of resettlement support has historically been inadequate, pushing newly arrived refugees — people she described as once business owners and skilled artisans who had lost everything in war — into menial work and U.S. poverty within months of arrival. She argued that the downward mobility was “by design,” with refugee support drawing from a social safety net she described as “eroded by anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism.”

“Where the wealthiest country in the world allocates money has always been a question of political will over political way,” Gowayed wrote, in language The Guardian featured as a pull quote. Gowayed authored a 2022 book on resettlement support based on interviews with Syrian refugees, and said she had consulted for the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement on the inadequacy of existing support systems. The Guardian published her column in its “Comment is Free” opinion section.