(Corrects year to 2016 from 2019 in paragraph 10)
JOHANNESBURG, March 11 (Reuters) - Andrew Veitch left South Africa 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 U.S. 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."
President Donald Trump's officials have said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were justified in firing the shots that killed two U.S. citizens in January, although video evidence has contradicted their accounts.
Veitch plans to return to South Africa 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.
EXPATS SAY SOUTH AFRICA MEANS LOWER COSTS, LESS TURMOIL
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 U.S. and Germany before coming home in 2016.
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 South Africa" 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 United States 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 United States for two decades when she came back for a holiday and realized how much she missed home.
Last year, she left North Carolina for a seaside town in South Africa's Western Cape, 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 U.S. 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.
RETURNEES USE REMOTE WORKING TO KEEP THEIR JOBS
Crime and joblessness are major issues in South Africa, but the unemployment rate is 35% for Black people compared with 8% for whites, according to the latest figures from the national statistics agency Stats SA.
Police statistics released last year showed that even farm murders, which Trump has focused on, killed more Black people than whites. Reuters has found that photos and videos Trump has presented on the matter were taken out of context or misrepresented.
Still, Stats SA estimated a net outward flow of half a million whites since 2001, including 95,000 from 2021 to 2026. There is no regular data on returnees, but a Stats SA analysis showed that 28,000 South Africans returned in 2022, 52.9% - or some 14,800 - of whom were white.
Anton van Heerden, CEO of employment agency DNA Employer of Record, said inquiries from white South Africans seeking to return had jumped 70% in the past six months. Angel Jones, CEO of Johannesburg-based recruitment firm HomecomingEx, reported a roughly 30% rise in inquiries since 2024.
A boom in remote working since the COVID-19 pandemic has also helped; three of the returnees interviewed by Reuters kept their jobs abroad.
Many South African professionals have extensive private security at home which minimizes crime risks, Van Heerden said.
"If you can afford to live in a safe environment, you can have a much better life than I think in most places in the northern hemisphere," he said.
Several returnees also said they felt life in South Africa had improved since they left. Power cuts, which used to be daily, for example, have largely stopped.
Thirty-eight-year-old engineer Eugene Jansen, who returned from the Netherlands in December with his wife and two children, said the returnees he knows feel things are getting better.
"The opinion is that the country is improving," he said.
(Reporting by Nellie Peyton and Tim Cocks; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Philippa Fletcher)
