The Trump administration has announced that, as part of its reorganization of the State Department (along with the now familiar gutting of important programs and firing of topic-area experts), it plans to create what it calls an “Office of Remigration.” Arguments over semantics—the “really real” meaning of a word—are infamously academic, smacking of jargon and insider pretensions. Yet, words are always more than words, and at times certain words reveal far more than intended.
Remigration is one of those.
Most closely associated with the European far-right, and linked to the venomous conspiracy narrative of the Great Replacement, remigration refers to proposals to expel immigrants and their descendants who do not meet the racial, religious, and cultural criteria of parties like the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. To be blunt, it refers to ethnic cleansing, and in the United States it’s an unabashedly white nationalist idea.
It flows from what I’ve called demographic dystopia, the modern white nationalist movement’s fixation on the idea that high rates of non-white immigration to the U.S. combined with low fertility rates among white people is a recipe for “white genocide.” And while the bulk of MAGA mass deportation-rhetoric is directed at the undocumented, the underlying ideas don’t rely on legal status, so much as they do on who is entitled to be here by virtue of race, religion, and ideology. Witness the jarring exception being made for white South African refugees.
The idea of remigration—although it’s connected to the decades-old attrition strategy championed by the U.S. anti-immigrant movement and adopted by the current administration—is unfamiliar in the United States. Though hardly its first appearance, it gained traction in September 2024 when then-candidate Trump posted the following on Truth Social:
As President I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America. We will stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals (CBP One App), revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement, and return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration). I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America. MAGA2024!
Glossing over the relative coherence of the post—which has Stephen Miller’s fingerprints all over it—the reference to remigration, dropped in a parenthetical note, did not go unnoticed at the time. But it almost seemed like a one-off until this recent proposal to reorganize the State Department “towards supporting the Administration’s efforts to return illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status.” Rather than support efforts to protect the life and dignity of refugees, the new office will focus on pushing people out—people considered inappropriate by the administration and its supporters who speak euphemistically of “American and Western values.”
The idea of expelling unwanted components of the population is of course embedded in the historical and ideological foundations of the country. Trump has been compared to President Andrew Jackson for his reliance on patronage and sycophants, but the comparison doesn’t end there. Jackson’s push for the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and his expulsion of tens of thousands of largely assimilated Native Americans not only led to the Trail of Tears and the death of some 4,000 human beings, but it also bears affinity to Trump’s mass deportation policies.
At the same time, the foundations of white supremacy in the United States were always intertwined with the practice of chattel slavery and the obligatory social and political exclusion of Black people from the U.S. body politic. Even for many abolitionists, the major barrier to ending slavery was the need to keep races separate—which is to say, a white nationalism grounded in both white supremacist ideas about “ability,” and gendered and sexual panic about “race-mixing.” The proposal was to “repatriate” formerly enslaved people to Africa.
The remigration idea being championed by the Trump administration is drawn from all of these currents: the expulsion of Indigenous people, fears of miscegenation, moral panic about groups who lack “Western values,” demographic hysteria about the end of “white” civilization, and conspiratorial hallucinations about replacement. The consequences are increasingly visible in the scale and indiscriminate character of ICE raids. At the same time, there does seem to be a growing resistance to these raids and perhaps the policies and white nationalist ideas that drive them.
