In President Donald Trump’s first term, we got used to hearing “dog whistles.” Trump’s populist nationalism was riven through by messaging that implicitly demonized minorities and migrants. Undocumented arrivals were “rapists,” inner city youths were “rabid” animals, neo-Nazi marches included “very fine people,” and some countries were simply, in Trump’s derogatory parlance, places teeming with excrement. The president brought into the mainstream a style of rhetoric brimming with contempt that had previously been kept at bay on the fringes of U.S. political life.
In Trump’s second term, the margins are now the center and the dog whistle has been replaced by a blowhorn. As his administration steps up a sweeping campaign of mass detention and deportations, Trump and his allies routinely cast certain populations of migrants as belonging to cultures incompatible with the United States. Amid a world of asylum seekers, his administration explicitly prioritizes resettling White Afrikaner refugees from South Africa while blocking other refugees. And it has been more overt in its desire not just to expel those illegally living in the U.S. but curtail legal paths into the country.
The latest indication of Trump’s hard-line views and approach came in the wake of the shooting of two National Guard members near the White House on Wednesday. The ambush, which has lead to the death of at least one of the victims, was allegedly carried out by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who had worked alongside U.S. forces in his country and came to the United States in the aftermath of the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.
My colleagues’ reporting found that Lakanwal was a member of CIA-backed “Zero Units” that conducted counterterror raids in various parts of Afghanistan, sometimes amid allegations of abuse and violence toward Afghan civilians. The long tail of American wars abroad, marked by trauma and tragedy, brought the suspect to the U.S., but Trump seized on the incident as proof of the “social dysfunction” caused by immigrants writ large and the need to “permanently pause migration” from poorer nations. (U.S. authorities have stopped processing all asylum applications and paused visas for Afghan nationals for the time being.)
Then, Trump deployed a conspicuous term: “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation,” he wrote in his Thanksgiving greeting post on social media. The phrasing surfaced elsewhere. “The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now,” declared the X account of the Department of Homeland Security.
DHS has issued earlier calls for remigration. The White House floated creating an office of “remigration” at the State Department while it dismantled existing programs to aid refugees. The implication is not simply that undocumented migrants must be deported, but that, more broadly, American society can be saved only by the departure of certain migrants, illegal or not. “Remigration” has been invoked by Trump and his allies since the launching of his successful bid to return to office in 2024.
The term is not a neutral one. It probably entered Trump’s orbit via the politics of ascendant far-right parties in Germany and Austria, where politicians and activists campaigned aggressively on a platform to deport asylum seekers and encourage the emigration of non-European or Christian communities. In some instances, the far-right AfD party, which is Germany’s second largest party in parliament, distributed mock one-way airplane tickets, touting its ambitions for mass deportations.
The “remigration” debate in Germany is a charged one, not least because of the legacy of the Holocaust and the mass deportations that prefigured the genocidal slaughter of Jews. The concept has its roots among French “identitarians” and sits adjacent to the “great replacement” theory — a conspiratorial fantasy-turned-commonplace talking point that suggests White populations in Western societies are being “replaced” by non-White migration championed by establishment liberals.
Across the West, right-wing political parties in the ascendance have made “remigration” a plank of their platform. Britain’s Reform UK party has vowed the deportation of hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers. Spain’s far-right Vox announced its own program of removing both recent arrivals and nationalized Spanish citizens who do not conform to some standard of assimilation. “We have the right to survive as a people,” a Vox spokesperson told reporters this year.
In many instances, that sense of existential peril is not borne out by demographic data, crime reports or little other empirical evidence. In the aftermath of the attack Wednesday on National Guard members, advocates urged the U.S. government not to scapegoat an entire population because of the actions of one troubled man. “We urge the American public not to judge thousands of innocent Afghans based on the actions of a single person,” the Alliance of Afghan Communities in the United States said in a statement.
But that’s precisely what the discourse around “remigration” does. The far right believes that in “any particular state that has a White majority population that wants to retain it — or restore it — you would have to get rid of people of color,” Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a sociologist and scholar of extremist movements at American University, told CNN last month. “And you either do that violently … or by remigrating them.”
The figure credited with popularizing “remigration” in recent years is Martin Sellner, an Austrian national and far-right influencer. He’s banned from entering certain European countries for his anti-migrant writings and ethnonationalist agenda, which were celebrated, among other extremists, by Brenton Tarrant, the right-wing terrorist who killed 51 worshipers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
In an interview with my colleagues last year, Sellner proudly showed off a screenshot of a Trump social media post, using the word “remigration.” He said that Trump’s borrowing of the term was a “vindication” of his own political project.
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