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Remigration

Forced or promoted return of non-European immigrants

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Advocates of remigration promote the concept in pursuit of ethno-cultural homogeneity. According to Deutsche Welle, ethnopluralism, the Nouvelle Droite concept that different ethnicities require their own segregated living spaces, creates a need for remigration of people with "foreign roots". The Mexican scholar José Ángel Maldonado has described the idea as a "soft type of ethnic cleansing under the guise of deportation and segregation".

Presented by its proponents as a remedy to mass immigration and the perceived Islamisation of Europe, remigration has increasingly become an integral policy position of the Identitarian movement and other far-right political movements and parties. Research from the British Institute for Strategic Dialogue, conducted in April 2019, showed a distinct rise in conversations about remigration on the social media website Twitter between 2012 and 2019. Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk, and Telegram have been at the forefront of spreading the term into the mainstream.

Etymology and development

The term remigration stems from Classical Latin remigrāre, "to return home", and was first used in English in the writings of Andrew Willet, an early-17th-century theologian within the Church of England. It had originally meant simply "returning", later was applied to the voluntary return of an immigrant to their place of origin, and is still used as such in social science.

Examples of the historic usage of the term remigration include the return of European Jews after the Second World War, as well as migration of people who had fled socialism and then returned postsocialism. According to journalist Ana P. Santos, up until the 2020s, "The term 'remigration' was primarily used in migration studies to describe the voluntary return of migrants and foreigners to their home countries." But during those years, there was also some discussion of involuntary migration, for example the economist Wolfgang Franz used the term remigration in 1987 for the involuntary return of foreign workers to their home countries.

Early evocations of the modern far-right concept of remigration can be found in French 1960s movements such as Europe-Action, considered the "embryonic form" of the Nouvelle Droite. Jean-Pierre Stirbois, then General Secretary of the National Front (FN), coined the expression "we will send them back" ('on les renverra') in an interview. He was the architect of the first electoral breakthrough of the FN in 1983, earning nearly 17% of the vote in the city of Dreux with the promise of "inverting the migratory flows". The idea is also expressed in the German slogan "Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus" ('Germany to Germans, foreigners out'), and in the motto of L'Œuvre Française "La France aux Français" ('France to the French').

Adoption by Identitarians

A core tenet of the Identitarian movement is the "Great Replacement", a conspiracy theory which states that white people are being replaced through migration, violence, and high birth rates by people from Africa, Muslims in particular. Reducing or halting immigration and removing migrant populations are presented as a solution to social issues caused by the Great Replacement.

In the 2010s the Identitarian movements were trying to avoid the use of historically tainted vocabulary while expressing their ideas, trying to create a "new language", for example, by replacing "race" with "culture". In the process, a successful strategy of reusing old terms with a new meaning had been discovered. In particular, while their meaning of "remigration" was a neologism intended to replace the tainted "deportation", the word itself had a reputable history. This was especially true in German-speaking countries, where remigration denoted the post-Second World war return of German refugees who fled from Nazism, thus creating positive associations. Similarly, the term "infiltration" was replaced with the Great Replacement, a myth which states that the white Christian European population is being progressively replaced with non-European populations, specifically from North Africa and the Middle East, through mass migration, demographic growth, and a drop in the European birth rate.

The French movement Generation Identity adopted remigration as part of its platform in 2015, though the term remained obscure until January 2024, with mass interest generated by the widely publicised 2023 Potsdam far-right meeting. The situation in Germany was similar; between 2018 and 2023, Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland and Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) occasionally used the term, and the AfD adopted it as part of its platform in 2021, but widespread use only began in 2023.

As of 2024, AfD had deemphasized making radical proposals on remigration, allowing the party to appeal to a broad electorate. At the same time, the concept was becoming increasingly normalised, with a wider audience now familiar with what was once an obscure Identitarian term.

Proponents of remigration often use the historical example of the expulsion of Pieds-Noirs from Algeria in 1962 as a successful past instance of organised forced remigration, though the exodus is described by some historians as ethnic cleansing stimulated by violence and threats from the National Liberation Front (FLN) and part of the native Muslim population, as evidenced by the slogan "the suitcase or the coffin" promoted by the FLN, the kidnappings of Pieds-Noirs, or the Oran massacre of 1962.

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