Want to travel to the US for business? Well then, don’t be African

About 60 people from at least a dozen African countries, including South Africa, were reportedly denied visas by the US State Department for an annual African trade summit in California that took place last week, The Guardian reports.

Event organisers for the African Global Economic and Development Summit told the newspaper that all the African citizens who requested visas to attend the three-day conference were rejected, sparking speculation that the denials could be linked to US President Donald Trump’s controversial anti-immigration policies, which have barred entry to the country to six majority-Muslim countries.

Event organiser Mary Flowers told The Guardian that roughly 60 to 100 Africans were denied entry to the conference, which was held at the University of Southern California. The event went ahead as planned but there was a much smaller group in attendance.

The African Global Economic and Development Summit gathers delegations from across Africa to meet with US business leaders and build partnerships. Well, it would have, had anyone from Africa actually been allowed to attend.

Those Africans in attendance were presumably those who just so happened to already be in the US or countries the world’s superpower felt it didn’t mind them travelling from.

Flowers said the outright rejection of African participants this year happened after they had already registered for the conference and paid their initial visa fees. They were rejected after short interviews in spite of their also providing additional personal documents, such as bank statements and property records.

Nothing they did was apparently good enough.

The rejected participants came from Nigeria, Cameroon, Angola, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ghana, South Africa and other African countries.

Flowers has been organising the event since 2013 and, in previous years, about 40% of interested African participants were also denied entry.

The US State Department, according to the report, refused to comment on the rejection claims but said in a statement that US authorities were not barring the participants because they were African. However, they didn’t exactly explain on what other basis they were being denied travel to the US either.

“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 US law,” the department was quoted as saying.

Flowers said the refusal to grant African participants to the summit visas would, in the long term, result in a lack of new trade links and business partnerships between US entrepreneurs and African nations.

“This summit is designed to bring Africa to America’s doorstep for investments and trade … We can’t have the government telling us to go do business with Africa and then you slam the doors in their face … We can’t survive as an internal country. We have to operate globally or we won’t be powerful,” she said.

The US is a major export country for South Africa, especially because of the African Growth and Opportunity Act that allows goods to be sent to the country tariff-free.

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