Andrew Veitch left South Africa (SA) after being held up at gunpoint in his car. But now he feels there are greater threats in the United States, he said, citing mass shootings in public ​places as well as violence by United States (US) immigration officers.

“People are being shot in broad daylight. American citizens are being shot and killed,” said the 53-year-old, who moved to California in ‌2003. “I don’t want to live in a place like this.”

US President Donald Trump’s officials have said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were justified in firing the shots that killed two US citizens in January, although video evidence has contradicted their accounts.

Veitch plans to return to SA this year, one of thousands of white South Africans coming back, despite Trump’s statements that the white minority is being persecuted by the country’s Black majority government.

Pretoria says there is no evidence of discrimination or persecution against whites. Many have left since the ​end of white minority rule in 1994, some citing crime and difficulty getting jobs, but many are also returning.

Veitch is among 12 000 people who have checked their citizenship status in an online portal ​launched by the government in November after the overturning of a 1995 law that stripped citizenship from some South Africans who left.

They represent a fraction of South Africans ⁠abroad. The latest official statistics on returnees, from 2022, show that almost 15 000 white South Africans returned that year.

SA Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber said 1 000 people had reclaimed their ​citizenship, a number he expected to grow significantly as the programme takes off.

“There is definitely a sense of optimism for South Africans abroad,” said Schreiber, part of the white-led Democratic Alliance party that has ruled in coalition with ​the African National Congress since 2024. He is a returnee himself, having spent time in the US and Germany before coming home in 2019.

Two recruitment agencies that help expats relocate said the number of inquiries had jumped, and Reuters spoke to 10 South Africans who had either returned or were planning to, seven of them from across Europe and three from the United States.

Their reasons, echoed in a 25 000 strong “Return to SA” Facebook group some belong to, included being closer to family, lower living costs and ​political turmoil abroad.

The Trump administration is ramping up its new refugee programme for white South Africans, focusing on Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch settlers. About 3 500 South Africans have entered the US as refugees since the programme ​started in May 2025.

Applicants interviewed by Reuters complained of being victims of racially motivated crime and employment equity laws that favour non-white candidates in order to redress decades of white minority rule.

Other Afrikaners, like Naomi Saphire, take a different view.

She had been ‌settled in ⁠the US for two decades when she came back for a holiday and realised how much she missed home.

Last year, she left North Carolina for a seaside town in SA’s Western Cape province, where she said her three children spend more time outdoors, health insurance is affordable and she prefers the schools.

“My heart is just full of gratefulness to be here,” the 46-year-old said from her home in Plettenberg Bay. “The US has been really good to me (but) I just felt like I was depriving my kids of this life.”
Saphire said she knows many people who are returning home.

–Reuters–