872: Winners

Ira Glass

OK. So here's something that I learned about myself this last week. Today's show, we're doing a show about winners. And as we talked about this idea here at the radio show, I learned that there is something I apparently say all the time here at our office as we make the show. And I really had no idea I said this at all until a few months ago when somebody on staff pointed this out. And back when that happened, I thought, sure, yes, I guess I have said that every now and then over the years. But this week, I learned I had that wrong.

Diane Wu

Yeah, you say it all the time.

Ira Glass

I am joined in the studio now by my coworker, Diane Wu. Hey there, Diane.

Diane Wu

Hi, Ira. It's something that I have noticed, but I didn't talk about it with my coworkers until this week. And when I went to them and taped those conversations, everybody knew what I was talking about.

Ira Glass

I have to say, that is so weird to hear everybody talking about that. Because I think I just was saying this without thinking. I think that's why I didn't realize I was saying it and how often I was saying it. It's not this deeply calculated "I must motivate the troops" thing. It's just that some part of me, just chemically, just feels like, come on. Let's go.

Diane Wu

We're winners. Let's go.

Ira Glass

Thank you.

Diane Wu

And some people find this really motivating when you do it. But others, when you're saying this stuff about winners, it just does nothing for them. They just don't get it.

Ira Glass

Wait, really?

Diane Wu

Yeah. They're like, why does he keep doing this? What is he talking about?

Diane Wu

This, of course, is our coworker, Nadia.

Diane Wu

The winner thing also doesn't work for our coworker, Lilly.

Ira Glass

[LAUGHS] Can I just stop the tape? That is such a funny thing to hear somebody say out loud.

Diane Wu

This was like some kind of personality test to see how mentally tough and competitive you are.

Diane Wu

And so for years here at the show, she really didn't get it, the winners thing. But then at some point a couple years in, when we were working on that story-- I think she said it was when we were working on that story about Albertville. You remember that one?

Ira Glass

Oh, yeah. Of course. We were traveling together and spending a lot of hours together, you and me and her and Miki.

Diane Wu

Yeah. Super, super long days, right? At some point when we were working on that story, she felt it shift. Like, she was so worn down. And one day, you said it. And it just sounded different to her.

Ira Glass

Ladies and gentlemen, I know how corny this idea is and gets said in a thousand locker room pep talks and Nike ads and movie speeches before the big climactic whatever, but it is nonetheless true. Deciding you're a winner, deciding you can do it has a power. It creates possibilities. And deciding you're a winner isn't just something that Americans do, but it is such a fundamental thing for so many Americans.

It's Muhammad Ali and Billie Jean King and Zohran Mamdani but also Donald Trump and Simone Biles and Frank Sinatra. And so much of this country was made by outsiders who traveled here, so many of them just deciding and believing that they could succeed here and have a better life. Maybe that's why this mentality is so common here and feels so American. We are the mule.

Today on our show-- winners. We're going to watch them in action in a tough game, where the rules are literally being made up as they go along. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, Act One, Winners Welcome. We've done a lot of stories this year about people who were negatively affected, in one way or another, by big new policies rolled out by the Trump administration-- people who've been detained by ICE, or who lost government jobs, or had their funding cut, or been kicked out of the military, or found their Black student union can no longer be called a Black student union.

But the story we're about to tell is about other people-- people who saw new Trump administration policies, who saw one of the hundreds of executive orders that the president has signed. And they thought to themselves, holy cow, that's great news for me, personally. They were targeted by some new policy and happy about it.

This particular group of winners is in the news this week, but Chana Joffe-Walt has been following the story from the beginning through many turns. You're about to hear drama, suspense, rivalry. This is a true story about trying to win in 2025 America. Her story begins, as so many do these days, with an announcement from the White House. Here's Chana.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The word went out in February of this year. It was Executive Order 14204. Title-- Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Joost Strydom-- fresh faced, serious, Afrikaner, a white minority in South Africa. Joost is the leader of a whites-only town. Yes, one of those exists. It's all Afrikaners in the Northern Cape in the desert. It's called Orania. Joost grew up there. So it's 3:00 AM, and he's reading this executive order from President Trump. It talked about a, quote, "shocking disregard of citizens' rights" happening in South Africa, "unjust discrimination" against Afrikaners.

Joost has been talking about these exact issues-- the egregious actions mentioned in the executive order-- for years. President Trump was using the same words he uses, calling for the same changes.

Chana Joffe-Walt

An incredible win, a high-- and then, suddenly, a bit of a crash. A few sentences later in the executive order, Joost saw the order's solution to address this unjust targeting of Afrikaners was for the United States to resettle, quote, "Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored, race-based discrimination," end quote.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Refugees? Joost thought-- as in, leave the country? He didn't want to leave the country. He wanted President Trump to help Afrikaners get their own territory in Africa. And he wanted President Trump to pressure the South African government to get rid of what he sees as racist laws against white people. He was not looking to come to the US and become American.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The history that you may know about Afrikaners is that they invented apartheid, that for nearly half a century, Afrikaners maintained a brutal and violent system of racial segregation in South Africa that denied Black South Africans political and economic power-- the right to vote, the right to own land, to equal housing, education, wages, to move freely, speak freely, and choose where to live, to run businesses.

Joost is referring to the Afrikaner history before all of that, the mostly Dutch settlers who came to South Africa and became Afrikaners more than three centuries ago, set up farms, fought the British.

Chana Joffe-Walt

When South Africa became a democracy after apartheid in 1994, it was one of the few countries in the world that was trying to build a democracy with lots of different people, different races, religions, with 11 official national languages. The new South Africa branded itself the Rainbow Nation. Rainbowism emphasized unity. And Joost felt the Afrikaner identity was shoved aside and threatened. Afrikaners were expected to be just South African.

Chana Joffe-Walt

A word on the trampling of white South Africans-- they own nearly three times the farmland of Black South Africans and hold more than 60% of the top corporate jobs in South Africa, while being around 7% of the population. There was no massive wealth or land redistribution after apartheid fell. Instead, the government has adopted various policies to try to rectify vast racial imbalances in employment, education, resources, everything over time, bit by bit.

These were various affirmative action type efforts, like requiring companies to diversify their shareholders, and recently, a new land reform law that would allow the government, in rare cases, to take property without compensation. That's the trampling Joost is talking about and President Trump's executive order is talking about. The only problem for Joost with the executive order was that whole refugee bit.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The two big Afrikaner advocacy groups in South Africa were on the same page. Thank you. You see us and our plight. And no thank you on that whole refugee part. Help us here. Joost went with the delegation of Afrikaners to America to lobby in DC and New York. And the message seemed to land. They made international headlines. No, thanks. White South Africans turned down Trump's US immigration offer. Afrikaner communities reject Trump's resettlement offer.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Sam Busa fuming from her home on the eastern coast of South Africa, KwaZulu-Natal-- these big Afrikaner membership groups going to America, acting like they're speaking for everyone.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Joost's efforts might have been the end of things, except for Sam popped up. She saw that executive order, and Sam had different ideas for what to do with it. Sam is 60 years old, semi-retired businesswoman, white, constitutionally busy. She is rarely doing one thing at a time.

She told me the story.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The word refugee was totally foreign to Sam, just like it was to Joost. But Sam still felt sure the executive order was intended for her. And she wanted it to be for her. Sam wanted to move to America. She was convinced there was no future for her young adult sons in South Africa, that the country was too dangerous, and that as white men, they'd be discriminated against and unable to succeed. So this seemed like a great opportunity if she could figure it out.

This executive order, like most of the 200-plus executive orders that have come out this year, it's not a detailed document. It's two pages. It's a broad announcement that injustice is happening in South Africa, Afrikaners are the victims, and they're invited to be refugees in America. What it does not say is how this will work, how many people, who qualifies, how to apply. How do these particular people fit within the existing laws that govern the refugee program? How will they get through the vetting process? It leaves all those details to be sorted out at some other time by someone else.

Sam took it upon herself to be that someone. The first thing to tackle was that word refugee. Sam was not a refugee. Or was she? Could she possibly be one?

Chana Joffe-Walt

A key thing Sam wanted to know-- could she qualify as a refugee if she hadn't fled the country? In all the government websites she went to, the answer seemed pretty straightforward-- no. A refugee is someone who is living, quote, "outside any country of such person's nationality." Refugees are people who flee. Sam was living at home in her home country.

But then she found a section of immigration law, 101(a)(42)(B), which allows a refugee to be in country under special circumstances specified by the president. Aha, this is how President Trump could do it. Maybe she could qualify.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This was her first stab at interpreting the language in the executive order, figuring out how she could fit the word refugee legally and comfortably. Next, the executive order uses the words, quote, "unjust racial discrimination." It says it's for the victims of discrimination. Sam was confident her family qualified for that. She says specifically, her young adult sons have been denied or would be denied jobs in South Africa because they're white.

But if Sam went to the officials who screened refugee applications to America, she wasn't sure discrimination would actually be enough to qualify as a refugee. She read the main law governing US immigration, the Immigration and Nationality Act. And--

Chana Joffe-Walt

Another puzzle for Sam to figure out. Meanwhile--

Chana Joffe-Walt

Amerikaners is Afrikaans for Americans. She registered the domain and set up a Facebook page. This became a hub for other white South Africans who'd heard about the executive order.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Pause. This was surprising to me. Sam was running a website for people interested in Trump's offer to Afrikaners. Afrikaners are generally descended from Dutch settlers, speak Afrikaans as their first language. White South Africans who are not Afrikaners-- generally English ancestry. We were 20 minutes into talking. It hadn't actually occurred to me to ask if she indeed was Afrikaner. She's not.

But this was another spot where the word in the executive order did not precisely fit Sam until Sam figured out how it could fit.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Almost everyone who came to the Amerikaners Facebook page had the same question Sam had. Do I qualify to go to the US under this executive order? Here's a comment. "Not a funny or rude question, just want to know, what criteria is acceptable candidate? How bad does your experience need to be?"

Another-- "How will the USA decide if I'm suitable? I'm white, Afrikaans, male, hardworking with strong Christian beliefs, in a country where I'm prosecuted for my skin color, my language, my beliefs. Does that make me, quote, 'suitable,' or must I first be shot and stabbed?" There were other questions too.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This is the level of detail Sam was helping people to think through. One problem she still had to solve-- the question of persecution. To qualify as a refugee, one must be able to articulate a past experience of persecution or fear of future persecution.

Chana Joffe-Walt

South Africa does have terrible crime, crime that is experienced by every demographic group. But Sam looked at the precise definition.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This became a big topic in the Amerikaners group, what counts as future persecution. In the various group chats and on the Facebook page, there was one video that got passed around often as potential evidence. It's a video of a Black politician from a minority party in South Africa leading a chant called kill the Boer at a political rally. Boer is farmers in Afrikaans. Kill the Boer is an old anti-apartheid chant. Afrikaner groups say it's clearly intended incite violence. And the lyrics are pretty stark. Kill the Boer, the farmer.

There have been several court cases about the use of the song over the years. Most recently, in an appeal, the judge at the constitutional court wrote that a reasonably well-informed person would understand that the politician was using a historic struggle song as a provocative way to advance a political agenda. It was a form of political speech and therefore protected under the country's freedom of speech laws. Elon Musk posted the video on X. Musk, South African born, wrote, quote, "They are openly pushing for a genocide of white people in South Africa."

Chana Joffe-Walt

Sam had made it through each tricky word in the executive order-- refugee, Afrikaner, discrimination. She'd interpreted the order and translated it and figured out how it would work, how it was legal, and who could qualify-- her and all the other like-minded people she'd organized into a group through her website.

Six weeks after the executive order came out, Sam wrote her own message to President Trump. Joost Strydom's communiqué had a polite, three-point summary. Sam's did too. But her message was very different. Sam says hers was signed by 27,000 people in two weeks.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The Amerikaners delivered their memorandum to the US embassy in Pretoria. And Sam posted a photo to the Facebook page. She wrote, "We've gathered. We've organized. We've collaborated. We've spoken. We've succeeded."

Chana Joffe-Walt

May 12, 2025-- 59 white South Africans. Sam Busa was not one of them. She was watching from South Africa. While Sam was organizing Amerikaners, the US government had been rapidly putting together a small group of South African refugees, bringing them over on a private chartered plane to Dulles Airport. At Dulles, they stood in a loosely arranged line, holding small American flags, their children in pajamas, smiling, unsure which camera to look at as they were personally welcomed by the deputy secretaries of both the US State Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I have looked at the photos of this press conference so many times, zoomed in on every detail, just trying to make my brain take in this picture, this photo op and everything that it means about America and about South Africa. Those two countries have always played off each other in my mind. My parents grew up in South Africa. I grew up in America watching South Africa. It's where our family was. And South Africa has always been a symbol.

In my lifetime, it was a global pariah, boycotted by everyone. And then apartheid fell, and South Africa became a model of justice and reconciliation. American leaders tripped over themselves to celebrate the new South Africa, practically deified Nelson Mandela, photos of President Clinton applauding as Mandela and then-President de Klerk shook hands and Clinton, quote, "thrilled at the peaceful election process and national unity," photos of Mandela winning the Congressional Gold Medal, Newt Gingrich on one side, President Clinton on the other.

America was eager to share in the symbolism of this new multiracial democracy because it added some nice shine to our own. Their story was our story and their redemption ours. Their success was ours too. Now, these photos of Afrikaner refugees in the Dulles Airport, this is a new kind of symbolism, a new way for America to use South Africa to say something about ourselves.

In these photos, South Africa is not an inspiring symbol of multiracial democracy anymore. That story is over. The photos are like a reset. South Africa is a cautionary tale. It's a DEI nation, a place where white people can no longer be safe, where the tables have turned, where they've gone too far. This is where efforts toward equality lead us. A rainbow nation only ends in disaster. And the photo op communicates something else too. It says, look, this is our new refugee policy.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Stephen Miller, presidential advisor, seems to be the guy coming up with our immigration policy. The Trump administration suspended refugee admissions to the United States. It was one of the president's first executive orders on his first day in office. Refugees waiting in camps all over the world, sometimes for generations, were cut off. Most refugees wait years for the chance to be vetted to possibly get a chance to come to the United States. These South Africans arrived in three months.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This is not true. For instance, 12,000 refugees had already been approved to resettle in America when the Afrikaners arrived. They were approved, meaning they'd been through the security clearance, the health check, background check, interviews, and were arranging their travel to the US. Some of them already had flights booked.

Those 12,000 people were approved not because they were fleeing poverty. They were fleeing war, religious persecution, political persecution, Congolese families who fled to Rwanda after their neighbors were killed, Rohingya from Myanmar who were fleeing kidnappings, rape, and genocide, some Afghans who supported US troops in America's war effort. Those people, Miller is saying, are not the textbook refugees. These are.

After the photo op, back in May, two different schools of thought emerged about what was going to happen next. This is a fancy way of saying Sam and I disagreed. We are the schools of thought. I figured, after seeing those photos and videos of the new South African refugees, I figured, that's probably it for the whole alleged refugee program. It's pretty effective symbolism. I think they got what they wanted. The Trump administration has a lot of other goals to pursue. They're not likely going to bother building a whole program to bring over more people like Sam.

Sam, back in South Africa, had gotten in her application for resettlement to the US and was waiting with her thousands of Amerikaners. And she had a different thought.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Sam says she'd read everything everyone was saying, everything every person in the administration, adjacent to the administration--

Chana Joffe-Walt

She had no doubt. I had some doubt. One of us was right.

Ira Glass

Chana Joffe-Walt. Coming up, secret moving companies and a joke about cars-- that's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program-- winners, people who decide "I can make this happen" as the first step to making it happen. If you're just tuning in, we're in the middle of a Chana Joffe-Walt story about Amerikaners, white South Africans who want to come to the United States as refugees. Where we left off-- the United States had brought over a small group of 59 of them. And back in South Africa, Sam Busa had organized thousands of others who were waiting, hoping the United States was about to ramp up a big program for them. Here's Chana.

Chana Joffe-Walt

From the moment the 59 South Africans landed in the US, Sam's life was transformed. She was inundated with phone calls, emails.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Everyone who had applied but had not been included in that first small group that went to America wanted to know what this meant. Would they get a call soon? Had Amerikaners heard anything? Reporters wanted to know, what is Amerikaners? How many are you? Who are you? And Americans who saw the news on X or Ben Shapiro or Megyn Kelly wanted to send their support.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Sam responds to each person who reaches out and tells them, we don't have anyone for you yet, but as soon as they ramp up this program, we'll be in touch. Thank you so much.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And then she puts their name, the state they're from, and contact information into a spreadsheet for the future. Sam said there were 70,000 people interested in going to America.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Maybe. But in the meantime, they were still living in South Africa. And their fellow countrymen also saw all the photos from Washington and the press conferences from the White House about persecution, targeting, and murder of white South Africans. South Africans were not, as a whole, happy about this. The government spent weeks repeating, there is no persecution. Crime in South Africa affects everyone, irrespective of race. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called the South Africans who left for the US cowards--

Chana Joffe-Walt

--which made news.

Chana Joffe-Walt

A populist political party made a show of filing a criminal complaint against one of the Afrikaner lobbying groups, calling them treasonous for spreading lies to the United States in order to influence President Trump. Reactions from regular South Africans ranged from confusion, like this Afrikaner interviewed by Reuters--

Chana Joffe-Walt

--to mockery. Here's a white comedian on TikTok talking to a Black comedian.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The Black comedian sitting next to him says, oh, yeah, we're killing every day.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And there were lots of angry South Africans on social media.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Trevor Noah-- South Africa's own-- on his podcast, asked his friend Eugene Khoza about it.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The arrival of white South Africans in America was enough of a national spectacle, an in-joke, that some advertisers got in on it-- for instance, a car commercial where a bunch of white men in Jeeps pull up outside a Black man's house, wake him up, revving their engines. The man comes out of his house in his robe, saying, what's going on? And the white men yell, you haven't heard?

Chana Joffe-Walt

They rev the engines more. The Black man walks over to one of them.

Chana Joffe-Walt

These jokes and comments, they were coming from people who all went through something together not that long ago-- the end of apartheid, the transition to democracy, a process that was painstakingly designed to happen peacefully, to take white South Africans' worries into account and to keep them in the fold. Nobody gave up land or wealth. Nobody tore down institutions. So much of that went unchanged.

On Trevor Noah's podcast, his friend, comedian Eugene Khoza, says the white refugee thing has him thinking back to that time after apartheid fell and how quickly Black South Africans were asked to move to reconciliation while white South Africans still held so much power over day-to-day life.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Everyone moves forward. That was the whole agreement of post-apartheid South Africa. The white people, who used to have all the power and now only had some of the power, would accept things and move forward. And Black South Africans, who used to have no power and now had a little more, would agree to forgive the architects of apartheid and just move forward. Nobody looks back. Nobody complains. We all just get on with building the country, together. The white South Africans who wanted to be refugees in America, they were breaking that agreement.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Sam continued what she'd been doing-- managing the Amerikaners site, preparing people, responding to questions. But Amerikaners were a thing now for everyone, from social media to moving companies-- and not a positive thing.

Chana Joffe-Walt

So she figured out a workaround. On her website, Sam put a tab called Packing Up in SA.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I'd been focused on whether large numbers of South Africans would be allowed to come to the US. I hadn't imagined just how much the possibility of them coming here would change their lives, even if they never left.

Chana Joffe-Walt

A few weeks ago, seven months after the executive order, I got a text from Sam. "I can't chat to anyone in the media at the moment." I went to the Amerikaners website, and it had changed. It now said, "Amerikaners is an official referral partner for the US Refugee Admissions Program." Sam couldn't talk to me anymore because she was now officially working with the US State Department. Amerikaners, this group she had invented, was helping the US government identify eligible refugees to the United States. Sam was right, and I was wrong.

The US government is processing refugee applicants in Pretoria right now at record speeds. I'm hearing people are being processed within weeks. Everything about the way the program is structured, it's the way Sam imagined it would go. To qualify, you do not need to be Afrikaner. You have to be from a racial minority population in South Africa, i.e. everyone except Black people. You do not need to provide documentation of past persecution. The chant "kill the Boer" qualifies as credible fear of future persecution. And you do not have to flee, as other refugees do. You can be processed for resettlement from your home.

I haven't talked to Sam in a while now. I'm not even sure where she is. Is she here or there? I do know, from talking to her before, a little bit about what she pictures her life here will be like.

Chana Joffe-Walt

A new American archetype-- I think about Sam Busa this way now. And I think of her often. Every week, every few days, the president puts out a big declaration, a broad intention of things he'd like to see in the world-- an executive order on paper straws or a rant against Tylenol, the Riviera of the Middle East. And it becomes the job of the people who work for the president to figure out the practical details of if and how these things could actually happen.

But then there are also people like Sam, an ordinary person who's not in the government, but who is tireless, skilled, and paying attention, someone with the confidence to say, I think this is what you mean here, right? When the administration issued this executive order in February, this wasn't the plan. They didn't know Sam was out there. She didn't know they were going to do this. But once the opportunity existed, there was Sam, willing to work with what was there to make this a reality, to turn it into a win.

Ira Glass

Chana Joffe-Walt is one of the producers of our show. Nancy Updike edited her story. Just this week, the Trump administration published its official number of how many refugees the United States is going to take in the next year. The number is 7,500, a record low. And usually, the number is for people from all over the world. This year, it'll mostly just be South Africans.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike, Diane Wu, and Chana Joffe-Walt. The people who put together today's show include Phia Bennin, Michael Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Suzanne Gaber, Sophie Gill, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, and Julie Whitaker. Our Managing Editor's Sarah Abdurrahman. Our Senior Editor's David Kestenbaum. Our Executive Editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Adrian Allman, Angel Heard, Laynasia Crew, Diundra Norman, Jon Nelson, Sandile Swane, Timothy Young and Global Refuge, Chris George, Brian Kahn, Sara Joffe, and Sherrilyn Ifill. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. A reminder that if you like our show, if you listen to us a lot, please consider signing up as a This American Life Partner. Do it for the stuff you get, or do it simply because you want us to be able to keep making the show. Join at thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners.

Thanks this week to Life Partners Roland Moore, Mark Kim, Christine Woodhouse, and Ross Boucher.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, who, for some reason, always gets lots of questions from people this time of year about trick or treating.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.