Over the weekend, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to elaborate on how he would “end the migrant invasion of America.” The candidate for president—who has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest mass deportation campaign in US history—exhumed the usual laundry list: he would “stop all migrant flights”; do away with the Biden administration’s Customs and Border Protection mobile app; halt refugee resettlement. None of these proposals are new or surprising coming from the Trump campaign.
But one part of the GOP presidential nominee’s weekend post stood out. “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” Trump wrote. Former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller reposted it, saying “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”
What did Trump and Miller mean by “remigration”? Even seasoned immigration policy analysts had to look the term up:
“Remigration,” as a 2019 article about the rise of extreme anti-immigrant language in Europe from the Associated Press explains, is the “chilling notion of returning immigrants to their native lands in what amounts to a soft-style ethnic cleansing.” The word stands in for a policy that entails the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. With little fanfare, Trump seems to be hinting at bringing an even more radical idea into his immigration proposals (to Miller’s all-capped cheers) that goes further than the mass deportation of the undocumented population.
“He knows what he is doing,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history who studies fascism and authoritarianism, said of Trump’s statement. “He chooses his words carefully.”
The value-neutral term “remigration” has been employed in anodyne ways—for instance, in the context of Jews returning to Germany after World War II. But the word has been co-opted by far-right groups, mainly in European nations, and is synonymous with these movements now.
In France, one-time far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour proposed the creation of a “remigration ministry.” Speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels this April, Zemmour denounced the “islamization of the continent” as an existential threat to the European civilization.
Most notably, “remigration” has gained a stronghold in Germany. In 2023, a jury of linguists in the country elected remigration the “non-word” of the year for its “deliberately ideologically” appropriation as an euphemism for the forced expulsion of people to “achieve cultural hegemony and ethnic homogeneity.”
“The seemingly harmless term remigration is used by the ethnic nationalists of the [Alternative for Germany] AfD [party] and the Identitarian Movement to conceal their true intentions: the deportation of all people with supposedly the wrong skin color or origin, even if they are German citizens,” one guest juror said.
Last November, members of the far-right AfD, neo-Nazis, and businesspeople reportedly gathered in Potsdam to discuss plans for mass deportation, including of “unassimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The man behind a master plan to relocate asylum seekers, foreigners with lawful status, and some Germans of foreign origin to a so-called “model state” in North Africa was the Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner. (Even French far-right leader Marine Le Pen took issue with the secret meeting, expressing “total disagreement” with the remigration discussions.)
More recently, according to local reports, 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.
Trump’s mention of remigration didn’t go unnoticed. Sellner, who has been barred from entering Germany and the United Kingdom and had his visa-free travel permit canceled by US authorities in 2019 over suspected links to the Christchurch shooter, appeared to celebrate on X the former US president’s “calls for remigration” as a victory.
According to Cécile Alduy, a French expert on the political uses of language at Stanford University whose works touches on issues of nationhood and the mythology of national and ethnic identities, remigration is “flagship far-right lexicon.” The word, which is the same in French, is a neologism, she explained in an email. “The far right is fond of creating new words, such as ‘immigrationism’ or ‘remigration’ or ‘francocide’ or the concept of ‘big replacement’ because they argue that only them can see the new reality, and that this new reality needs a new vocabulary to shake people’s mind into more awareness of the dangers at play.”
As I’ve written about here, anti-immigrant sentiment has been at the center of the revival of the right globally, including in the United States. At the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC this summer, speakers repeated some of the very beliefs animating the notion of remigration, from an emphasis on assimilation to the characterization of multiculturalism as “anti-Western,” and calls to “decolonize America.” One anti-immigration hardliner floated the idea to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
The use of this kind of language fits in the context of an escalation in dangerous rhetoric about immigrants in the United States. Lately, Trump’s running mate JD Vance has played a key role in disseminating false rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, abducting and eating pets, which Trump repeated on the debate stage. The lies have resulted in bomb threats and unleashed fear in the community. (They are also seemingly deliberate. When pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash on why he continues to perpetuate the debunked claims, Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”)
If given the opportunity, Trump and his acolytes could turn hateful discourse into expulsion policies targeting all immigrants. Last week, the former president said he would start the mass deportation operations in Springfield and Colorado’s Aurora, two cities caught in the vortex of right-wing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Most Haitian migrants in the United States have received legal status under the Temporary Protected Status program or a Biden administration humanitarian parole initiative and are authorized to work.
But that would mean little to Miller, who has boasted of a potential second Trump presidency’s move to take away people’s citizenship. “We started a new denaturalization program under Trump,” he posted on X in October of last year. “In 2025, expect it to be turbocharged.”
Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University who studies international migration noted on the social media platform, “It is not about who should get US citizenship—it is about some US citizens illegitimizing other US citizens.”
