While Donald Trump has been busy learning about the CBC and watching Snoop Dogg videos with Ben Carson, other arms of his government have been doing their part to help make America white again.

Days after the Atlanta Black Star reported that ICE agents have been targeting African immigrants with increased prejudice under the Trump administration, comes a report from The Guardian that a recent U.S.-African trade summit was forced to proceed without any Africans due to all of its African attendees being denied visas.

The University of Southern California planned to host a three-day event, The African Global Economic and Development Summit as it had in years past. The summit’s organizer, Mary Flowers, invited businesspeople and politicians from Nigeria, Cameroon, Angola, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Ghana and South Africa, among others.

And every single African person she invited, between 60 and 100 people, was denied a visa.

Now, getting a visa to the United States isn’t easy — you’ve got to bring bank statements, explain why you’re coming, provide a personal history and prove you’re not going to stay here after you’ve completed your business.

And the Muslim ban, despite the efforts of Hawaiian judge Derrick Watson and others, doesn’t make it any easier. In fact, although Flowers wanted to invite businesspeople from the African countries covered by the ban (Somalia, Sudan and Libya), potential attendees from those countries didn’t even bother to try getting a visa.

The purpose of the summit, Flowers said, is to put, “Americans in touch with real people so they can do real business.” The connections made over the course of the three days help “create jobs for both America and Africa.”

Flowers doesn’t understand who would be against anything that could promote economic growth. She said, “I don’t know if it’s Trump or if it’s the fact that the embassies that have been discriminating for a long time see this as an opportunity, because of talk of the travel ban, to blatantly reject everyone.”

The State Department responded to Flower’s concerns by saying that nothing was wrong, commenting, “We cannot speculate on whether someone may or may not be eligible for a visa, nor on any possible limitations … applications are refused if an applicant is found ineligible under the Immigration and Nationality Act or other provisions of U.S. law.”

Likely story. Embassies do not tell rejected applicants why they were not successful, so we’ll never know just which “provision of U.S. law” kept African businesspeople from interacting with their American counterparts.

Despite the setback, the summit went on as planned; however, only 50 to 75 people came rather than the expected 200. “We can’t have the government telling us to go do business with Africa and then you slam the doors in their face,” Flowers lamented.

According to The Washington Post, Africa’s consumer spending will reach $2.2 trillion by 2030. Other countries have been quick to try to grab a piece of that pie — China recently delivered the first half of a pledged $60 billion to the continent, and enjoyed a $103 billion return on exports in 2015. The United States, on the other hand, reaped only $27 billion that same year.

Not to fear-monger, or to China-bash, but Trump’s own National Trade Council head, Peter Navarro, wrote in his book, Death by China, that when it comes to Africa, China has been busy “locking down strategic resources, locking up emerging markets and locking out the United States.”

If the situation really is as dire as Navarro suggests, the rejection of every single one of this summit’s African businesspeople becomes even more puzzling.

Feeling that something had to be done, California representative Karen Bass, who is the ranking member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights, got involved. She’s working with Flowers to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, criticizing the embassies for hurting “opportunities between U.S. and African business entities.”

Representative Bass told The Guardian, “I encourage the Department of State … to encourage the free flow of business ideas and opportunities.”

Yeah State Department, let the ideas flow. And the money too.

Mary Flowers

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