What is remigration, the far-right fringe idea going mainstream?

What is remigration, the far-right fringe idea going mainstream? From the US to Europe, the idea of forcibly expelling non-white immigrants is gaining steam. Where does it come from? Last week, Republican Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy challenged other Republicans over their idea that ancestry or heritage is what makes someone truly American. “The idea that a ‘heritage American’ is more American than another American is un-American at its core,” Ramaswamy, who was born to Indian immigrant parents, said during Turning Point USA’s annual conference . Remigration - once a fringe far-right notion advocating the deportation of ethnic minorities - is now gaining traction in United States Republican circles as President Donald Trump’s second term enters the final weeks of its first year. Earlier this year, reports said that the US State Department was considering creating a department of remigration. A few months later, the Department of Homeland Security posted in favour of remigration online. But it is not just American far-right figures evoking the idea of remigration; European far-right leaders are also joining in. Here is a closer look at what remigration means and what its origins are. What is remigration? Broadly, remigration refers to when an immigrant voluntarily returns to their country of origin. However, in the context of far-right movements, remigration is a method of ethnic cleansing. For white ethnonationalists, remigration is a process through which all non-white people are forcibly removed from traditionally white countries. W hat are the origins of remigration? Ideas of remigration trace back to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. The Nazis attempted to “remigrate” the Jews in Germany to Madagascar. But the concept got wind through the work of Renaud Camus, a French novelist who devised the Great Replacement conspiracy theory in his 2011 book, Le Grand Remplacement. His widely debunked white nationalist theory suggests that elites are replacing white Christians in the West with non-white, primarily Muslim, people through mass migration and demographic changes. Camus calls this “genocide by substitution”. Far-right nationalists in Europe and beyond have borrowed ideas from this theory. Heidi Beirich, an expert on the American and European far-right movements, told Al Jazeera that the term remigration is “relatively new” in far-right circles. Beirich said that the concept was popularised by Martin Sellner . Sellner, 36, is the leader of Austria’s ultranationalist Identitarian Movement , a far‐right group known for anti-immigration activism and promoting ethnonationalist ideology. Ethnonationalists define the nation primarily by shared ethnicity, ancestry, culture and heritage. “Remigration advocates the forced removal of non-white people from what Sellner and others with his beliefs view as historically white countries, basically Europe, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand,” Beirich explained. Beirich said remigration in essence, is a “policy solution to the white supremacist ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory”. Do different groups have different ideas? There are strands of nationalists beyond ethnonationalism. Civic nationalists, who also called liberal nationalists or constitutional nationalists, define the nation by shared political values, laws and institutions, regardless of ethnicity. They believe that a...

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