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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 11, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So- small scale question. I read up on apartheid, Rhodesia, and colonialism in Southern Africa after the discussion of Rhodesia and decolonization in the main thread a few weeks ago, and I think I got a pretty good mental model of why South African whites behaved the way they did in setting up apartheid. But does anyone know why they didn’t make more of an effort to attract white immigration? In particular, segregation in the south was collapsing shortly before apartheid started showing serious cracks and the shortage of whites became obvious as minority rule’s official #1 problem. Why didn’t the apartheid regime put more effort into attracting racist white Protestants? It seems like they managed to maintain a fairly good economy with a skilled labour shortage and a lack of white bodies for their security services.

Is there an obvious problem I’m missing? Yes, Afrikaner nationalism was a factor, but they seemed happy to welcome Portuguese immigrants from Angola.

Are you asking why they did not try to entice whites from the Southern USA to move to South Africa? I don't know what your mental model of South African whites is, but your model of whites in the South seems a bit off; I rather doubt that oppression of blacks, or of anyone, was so central to the lives of very many Southern whites that they would be willing to move to another country just for the opportunity to keep doing so.

The lack of actual mass migration from the dominant group in a wealthy society doesn’t seem too difficult to explain, the question is why SA didn’t try to encourage it- after all, they claimed to be aiming for a white majority country and periodically welcomed groups of white immigrants to that end. And racist white protestants seems like both what segregationists mostly were and what SA wanted living in their country.