Quite a lively, if somewhat one-sided, discussion over at Jay Currie's place about the government appeal against the refugee status recently accorded a white South African by our Immigration and Refugee Board. The adjudicator had ruled that Brandon Huntley would "stand out like a sore thumb" anywhere in South Africa because of his colour, a walking target, it seems, of a violent, seething mass of Blacks.As one satirical writer in South Africa put it, he "was mugged several times by black people. It was a clear case of persecution. They also called him names." His lawyer*, with a straight face, argued before the Board that his client was also a victim of affirmative action programs. (The white unemployment rate in South Africa stands at 4.6%, versus 27.9% for Blacks.)
I won't reiterate what I wrote here, but the general tenor of the discussion by the Usual Suspects is that I and other progressives would be up in arms about this appeal if the person's skin colour were, say, mocha or ebony. Why, here's a hard-working, law-abiding sort who would make just the kind of citizen Canada needs. And South Africa has become a hell-hole since the kaffirs were put in charge. It'll be Zimbabwe in ten years, etc.
The CIA appears to disagree with that assessment, by the way:
South Africa is a middle-income, emerging market with an abundant supply of natural resources; well-developed financial, legal, communications, energy, and transport sectors; a stock exchange that is 17th largest in the world; and modern infrastructure supporting an efficient distribution of goods to major urban centers throughout the region. Growth was robust from 2004 to 2008 as South Africa reaped the benefits of macroeconomic stability and a global commodities boom, but began to slow in the second half of 2008 due to the global financial crisis’ impact on commodity prices and demand. However, unemployment remains high and outdated infrastructure has constrained growth. At the end of 2007, South Africa began to experience an electricity crisis because state power supplier Eskom suffered supply problems with aged plants, necessitating “load-shedding” cuts to residents and businesses in the major cities. Daunting economic problems remain from the apartheid era – especially poverty, lack of economic empowerment among the disadvantaged groups, and a shortage of public transportation. South African economic policy is fiscally conservative but pragmatic, focusing on controlling inflation, maintaining a budget surplus, and using state-owned enterprises to deliver basic services to low-income areas as a means to increase job growth and household income.
In other words, South Africa is a struggling but vibrant post-apartheid society with a lot of inherited problems to overcome. But the folks over at Jay's--and Jay himself--aren't having that. Clearly this honest, put-upon white man, well-off enough to fly back and forth to Canada, who says he never told the police of his alleged problems because he didn't trust them, is a victim of racial persecution. William Davis, the IRB adjudicator, certainly took that position. (Does he know that "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?)
There is no evidence whatsoever that race entered into this man's difficulties in his native land, but the very folks who want to shut our borders to immigrants, and even to citizens if they're of the dusky persuasion, are clamouring on his behalf. One scamp even saw fit to underline that the announcement of the government's plan to appeal came from Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's EA, Alykhan Velshi: "I’m just guessing here but not of W.A.S.P extraction?" Just another Canadian with a funny name now, but they lurved the guy when he went after George Galloway.
There isn't even a pretence of a hidden agenda here. Some of their favourite targets are in place: affirmative action, unruly Blacks, immigration policies that favour beige over pallid, and the Left, for once opposing the admittance of a refugee claimant, just because he's white. Race-traitors, we are, although the Usual Suspects tend to avoid the bad optics of using a term like that.
Meanwhile: if Brandon Huntley is really a victim of Black racism, why did he have to drag himself all the way to Canada, when all he had to do was move to the sore-thumb colony of Orania?
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*Russell Kaplan, a South African ex-pat. The linked article makes good reading.
