Under international law and practice, no country is forced to accept people of other countries, whether as legal residents or refugees, for all sorts of reasons that almost any adult can easily enumerate.

It is from the milk of human kindness that flow efforts to accept other members of the global family, some under the umbrella of immigration policy or rescue programmes for people fleeing violence, political and religious persecution, starvation, national disasters and other misfortunes over which they have no control.

In this area, the United States, blessed with an outsized share of the Earth’s developed resources, has been awesome in sharing its good fortune with countless people in need across decades of time, long before Lady Liberty declared: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

That America is slowly appearing to be turning her back on the “wretched refuse of (Haiti’s) teeming shore” by, come August, ending the Temporary Protected Status enjoyed by an estimated 500,000 of them, is serious cause for concern.

The US Administration is not arguing that it cannot financially afford to continue to accommodate the Haitians fleeing one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters — a combination of violence, rape, famine, and inhuman squalor.

Indeed, far from that, the US has just taken in a first group of 54 white South Africans under speedily created refugee status, saying they were being racially targeted in their country. The difference between the situation facing the Haitians and the Afrikaners could not be more stark.

The New York Times reported that many Afrikaners say they are denied jobs, targeted by criminals and ignored by the Government because of their race, and the Donald Trump Administration accused South Africa’s Government of legislating the right to seize land from private owners without providing compensation in rare instances.

But the paper also quoted the president of HIAS, a Jewish resettlement agency, as saying that while it was committed to welcoming Afrikaners: “… We are profoundly disturbed that the Administration has slammed the door in the face of thousands of other refugees approved months ago, notwithstanding courts ordering the White House to let many of them in. That’s just not right.”

After assuming office in January, the US Administration stopped nearly all other refugee admission programmes which, in any event, usually take years to bring in refugees. But under the specially crafted programme put together for them, the white South Africans had to wait no more than three months.

In comparison, according to the United Nations International Organisation for Migration, 85 per cent of the Haitian capital is currently under gang control, and communities are constantly being uprooted by violence and instability, resulting in one million people being displaced.

The Afrikaners are being offered assistance with housing, basic home furnishings, essential household items and cleaning supplies, groceries, weather-appropriate clothing, diapers, formula, hygiene products, and prepaid phones, anything needed for comfortable daily existence.

The Haitians are not asking for anything more.