The South African government has criticised the US's decision to prioritise refugee applications from white Afrikaners, saying claims of a white genocide have been widely discredited and lack reliable evidence.

It highlighted an open letter published by prominent members of the Afrikaner community earlier this week rejecting the narrative, with some signatories calling the relocation scheme racist.

The limited number of white South African Afrikaners signing up to relocate to the US was indication that they were not being persecuted, it added.

On Thursday, the administration of US President Donald Trump announced its lowest refugee annual cap on record - to just 7,500.

The exact figures of the number of white South Africans who have been admitted through the US scheme are not available. 

South Africa's latest crime statistics do not indicate that more white people have fallen victim to violent crime than other racial groups. 

Earlier this year President Trump offered refugee status to Afrikaners - who are mostly descendants of Dutch and French settlers - after South African President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a law allowing the government to seize land without compensation in rare instances.

Most private farmland is owned by white South Africans who make up just over 7% of the population.

Several months ago, South Africa's ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled after accusing Trump of "mobilising a supremacism" and trying to "project white victimhood as a dog whistle".

In the Oval Office in May, Trump confronted South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa and claimed white farmers in his nation were being killed and "persecuted".

President Trump held up a photo purporting to show body bags containing the remains of white people in South Africa, but the Reuters news agency later identified the photo as one of their own - taken thousands of miles away in the war-struck Democratic Republic of Congo.

Washington did not comment on the claim that they had misidentified the image.

The White House also played a video which they said showed burial sites for murdered white farmers. It later emerged that the videos were scenes from a 2020 protest in which the crosses represented farmers killed over multiple years.