Last weekend, former President Donald Trump posted another anti-immigrant screed to Truth Social. It would have been unremarkable ― at least, graded on the Trumpian curve of extreme xenophobia ― except for one word.
“[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” he wrote. “I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America.”
Many people might have glossed over his use of “remigration.” White nationalists did not.
“#Remigration has had a massive conceptual career,” Martin Sellner — leader of the Austrian chapter of Generation Identity, a pan-European white supremacist network — tweeted in his native German. “Born in France, popularised in German-speaking countries and now the term of the hour from Sweden to the USA!”
It was a succinct and accurate history from Sellner, a 35-year-old who typically traffics in vicious lies and conspiracy theories, particularly about Black and brown people. He has been at the vanguard of pushing “remigration” — a euphemism for ethnically cleansing non-white people from Western countries — into the popular political lexicon in Europe.
Now Sellner was seeing his favourite little word all grown up, moving overseas in service of the 45th president of the United States, who has promised to implement the largest mass deportation of immigrants in US history if elected back to the White House in six weeks’ time.
Trump’s use of “remigration” is the latest instance of the Republican’s intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric in the run-up to November’s election, underscoring the degree to which one of America’s two major political parties is sourcing many of its talking points and policy ideas directly from neo-fascists.
“Trump’s rhetoric about ‘remigration’ has its origins in the international far-right,” Jakob Guhl, a senior manager of policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, explained to HuffPost in an email. “The term remigration was popularised by groups adhering to Identitarianism, a pan-European ethno-nationalist movement, as their policy to reverse the so-called ‘great replacement.’”
“The great replacement theory is a conspiracy theory which claims that ‘native’ Europeans are being deliberately replaced through non-European migration while suppressing European birth-rates,” he continued. “This theory has inspired numerous terrorist attacks, including the Christchurch massacre, where 51 people were killed, as well as attacks in Poway, El Paso, Halle, Buffalo, and Bratislava.”
Pat Buchanan, the onetime presidential hopeful and former aide to President Richard Nixon, used the term “remigration” to whitewash his own call for ethnic cleansing as early as 2006, in his racist tract “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.” But the term’s journey into the Trump campaign’s vernacular more likely got its start in November 2014, when 500 far-right activists gathered in Paris.
The inaugural Assises de la Remigration, or Annual Meeting on Remigration, was organised by Generation Identity. Its featured speaker was Renaud Camus, the travel writer-turned-philosopher who coined the term “great replacement” in his 2012 book by the same name. Camus’ book built off the work of another French author, Jean Raspail, who wrote “The Camp of the Saints,” an extraordinarily racist French novel that depicts a flotilla of faeces-eating brown people invading Europe.
“The Great Replacement is the most serious crisis that France has witnessed in 15 centuries,” Camus told the crowd, eliding many bloody episodes in the country’s history, including a pair of world wars that killed nearly 2 million French people. For Camus, “remigration” was the best solution to the imagined crisis of the “great replacement,” the two terms essentially joined at the hip.
Camus and his fellow subscribers to identitarianism “have always been quite clear that the objective of ‘remigration’ is to create greater ‘ethnocultural’ homogeneity,” Ruhl told HuffPost. “For them, culture and ethnicity are inseparable, and they view (white) European identity as being fundamentally threatened by the presence of migrants ― necessitating drastic, far-reaching responses.”
According to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the term “remigration” was “used over 540,000 times between April 2012 and April 2019” on Twitter, particularly from accounts in France and Germany. Usage of the term skyrocketed after the Annual Meeting on Remigration in Paris. Camus himself was one of the main promoters of the word online.
As “remigration” became an increasingly discussed term, militant far-right groups adapted it as their own. In 2017, police in France arrested 10 far-right activists over a suspected plot to kill politicians and migrants and to attack mosques. Officers found a shotgun and two revolvers in the home of the group’s ringleader, who’d sought to create a militia, according to a post on Facebook, to kill “arabs, blacks dealers, migrants, [and] jihadist scum.” Per French investigators, the group, known as OAS, was formed to “spark remigration.”
The term made an appearance in Canada, too, where a far-right fight club called Falange — named for the fascist group that served under the Spanish general Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War — put signs with the word “Remigration” across Quebec City.
And that same year in the US, the group Identity Evropa — modelled after Generation Identity in Europe — burst into the public consciousness for its participation in the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Identity Evropa’s proposed policies included “remigration,” and when its members marched in Charlottesville, they invoked the “great replacement” concept, chanting “You will not replace us.”
Back in Europe, in March 2019, Sellner started a channel on the chat app Telegram called the “European Compact for Remigration,” the beginning of a campaign, he announced, to influence far-right parties across Europe to support “de-Islamisation” and “remigration.”
That same month, a white supremacist in Christchurch, New Zealand, live-streamed himself walking into two mosques and opening fire, killing 51 Muslim worshipers. He’d posted a genocidal screed online before the shooting. Its title was “The Great Replacement.” Nevertheless, one week after the shooting, Sellner’s Generation Identity group in Austria staged a protest against the “great replacement,” again calling for “de-Islamisation” and “remigration.”
A couple of months later, it emerged that the shooter in New Zealand had communicated with Sellner only a year prior, donating over $2,300 to Sellner’s white supremacist group. “Thank you that really gives me energy and motivation,” Sellner wrote to the shooter in an email.
“If you ever come to Vienna,” Sellner added, “we need to go for a café or a beer.”
Despite these revelations, Sellner’s efforts to get far-right political parties to support remigration started to see results in the following years. In 2019, Alternative for Deutschland — which recently became the first far-right party since the Nazis to win a state election in Germany — inserted “remigration” into its list of official policy proposals.
Four years later, an investigation from Correctiv found that AfD members held a secret meeting with neo-Nazis and wealthy businesspeople to discuss the “remigration” of asylum seekers, immigrants with legal status, and “unassimilated citizens” to a “model state” in North Africa. The plan — which bore an unnerving resemblance to the Nazis’ initial idea to mass-deport Jews to Madagascar, before they settled on a wholesale extermination campaign — was Sellner’s brainchild.
That same year, as noted recently by Mother Jones, a jury of linguists in Germany selected “remigration” as the “non-word” of the year. “The seemingly harmless term remigration is used by the ethnic nationalists of the AfD and the Identitarian Movement to conceal their true intentions: the deportation of all people with supposedly the wrong skin colour or origin, even if they are German citizens,” one guest juror wrote.
Mother Jones also noted that earlier this year, “an AfD candidate in Stuttgart campaigned with the slogan ‘Rapid remigration creates living space,’ a nod to the concept of Lebensraum used by the Nazis to justify the genocidal expansion into Eastern Europe.”
And finally, this year in Austria, the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), founded after World War II by former Nazis, and which recently enjoyed success in national elections, called for the creation of a “remigration commissioner” in the country.
Still, very few, if any, U.S. politicians have uttered the word “remigration” in recent years. Trump’s use of the term stateside has coincided with his renewed embrace of dehumanising language when talking about immigrants.
The former president’s promotion of a false story about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio was classic fascist fare, depicting an entire category of people as savages. And earlier this year, the Republican nominee said immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the nation. Historians quickly noted that Trump’s language echoed the words of Adolf Hitler. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.
But who in Trump’s orbit might have introduced him to the term “remigration”? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment. One possible culprit, though, might be Stephen Miller, who served in the Trump White House as an adviser and speechwriter. Miller’s ties to white supremacists are legion, and while working as an editor at Breitbart in 2015, according to leaked emails obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, he suggested the website publish articles about The Camp of the Saints, the racist French novel that inspired Renaud Camus.
Miller, like Sellner, was thrilled with Trump’s use of “remigration” last weekend.
“THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!” he tweeted.