Deportation, Remigration, Ethnic Cleansing, All The Same With Trump
No amount of sanewashing can mask that Trump is supporting a mass “remigration” or ethnic cleansing of immigrants with black and brown skins to their native countries of origin as an antidote for the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that claims the U.S. is being intentionally overwhelmed with immigrants in order to replace the white majority population.
The Great Replacement is a foundation of white nationalist rhetoric and is part of a far right, global conspiracy in various countries. Versions of the theory have become common in mainstream GOP discourse in the U.S. and have stimulated violent responses including mass murders.
Remigration, a sanitized word for ethnic cleansing, has previously been off limits, even for conservative Republicans in the U.S. But trump breached the line in a recent post on his Truth Social platform.
“[We will] return Kamala (Vice President Kamala Harris’s) illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” Trump wrote. “I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America.”
The threatening comments were reposted by former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, the hate-filled, far right architect of trump’s first term efforts to deport undocumented immigrants including separating children from their families.
“THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!” Miller posted.
Miller was trump’s senior advisor for policy and the White House director of speechwriting . An immigration hardliner, Miller was a chief architect of Trump’s travel ban, the administration’s reduction of refugees accepted to the United States and Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents. Miller also prevented the publication of internal administration studies that showed that refugees had a net positive effect on government revenues.
As a White House spokesman, Miller lied and made unsubstantiated claims regarding widespread electoral fraud. Emails leaked in November 2019 showed that Miller had promoted articles from white nationalist publications VDARE and American Renaissance, and had espoused conspiracy theories. Miller is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of extremists.
Miller prepared the remarks that trump delivered at the rally on Jan. 6, 2020, in Washington, D.C., to support his lies that the election had been stolen. After the speech, trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
In his post, trump also returned to his past promises to deport millions of immigrants, “stop all migrant flights,” end refugee resettlement and halt the Biden administration’s Customs and Border Protection mobile app.
The app is used by immigrants to schedule a hearing before an immigration judge to gain legal entry into America through official southern ports of entry. Immigrants located in Northern and Central Mexico can request and schedule appointments to present themselves at eight ports of entry along the southwest border. The CBP One mobile app is a free download for Android and Apple mobile devices.
“Remigration” has been a longstanding goal of the extreme right wing in Europe and more recently in the U.S. In Europe, the objective is the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship.
Trump did not elaborate on whether his version of “remigration” would extend to immigrants who are legally in the U.S. But historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said trump’s meaning is clear.
“He chooses his words carefully. He knows what he is doing,” said Ben-Ghiat, who is a professor of history and expert in fascism and authoritarianism.
Remigration has a long history in Europe. In France, one-time far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour proposed the creation of a “remigration ministry” to stop the “Islamization of the continent.”
In Germany, remigration is a bedrock of ethnic nationalists of the far right, Alternative for Germany or AfD party and the equally right wing, Identitarian Movement. One report said the term remigration is designed to conceal the true intentions: “the deportation of all people with supposedly the wrong skin color or origin, even if they are German citizens.”
Among those who took dark note of trump’s post was the Austrian identitarian activist, Martin Steller, the leader of the movement in Germany to relocate asylum seekers, foreigners with lawful status, and some Germans of foreign origin.
“#Remigration has had a massive conceptual career. Born in France, popularized in German-speaking countries and now the term of the hour from Sweden to the USA!” Steller posted.
Steller has been barred from entering Germany and the United Kingdom and his visa-free travel permit was canceled in the U.S. in 2019 over suspected links to Brenton Tarran, who was convicted of two bloody, 2019 rampages in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people.
The push in Europe for remigration began in November 2014, when 500 far-right activists gathered in Paris at an event organized by Generation Identity. The featured speaker was Renaud Camus, who coined the term “great replacement” in his 2012 book.
According to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the term “remigration” was “used more than 540,000 times between April 2012 and April 2019” on Twitter, particularly from accounts in France and Germany. Usage of the term skyrocketed after the Paris meeting.
In the U.S., the group “Identity Evropa,” modeled after Generation Identity in Europe, joined in the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in which one counter demonstrator was killed. The white supremacists chanted “you will not replace us.” After the rally, trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Trump has intensified his violent anti-immigrant rhetoric in the lead up to the 2019 presidential election. Earlier this year, trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the nation, an echo of the words of Adolf Hitler who wrote in his autobiography, “Mein Kampf,” that “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has been the ex-president’s lead attack dog, most recently spreading the false rumor about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, abducting and eating pets.
Trump said his mass deportations would begin in Springfield and Aurora, Colo., where he also made up a claim that a gang of Venezuelan immigrants have taken over housing in Aurora, Colo.
Trump has trumpeted the lies and his plans to deport Haitians even though most Haitian migrants in the U.S. have legal status under the Temporary Protected Status program or a Biden administration humanitarian parole initiative and are authorized to work.
Vance said at a campaign event in Raleigh, N.C., that even Haitians with Temporary Protected Status or other authorized immigration status are “illegal aliens” who should be deported because he claims, they were granted protections illegally.
Temporary Protected Status can be granted to people already in the U.S. whose native countries are in the midst of armed conflict, an environmental disaster, or any temporary or extraordinary conditions that would prevent the foreign national from returning safely. Temporary protected status can allow beneficiaries to live and work in the U.S. for a limited amount of time. As of March 2022, there are more than 400,000 foreign nationals in Temporary Protected Status.
The Biden administration has extended temporary legal protected status for unauthorized migrants from Haiti living in the U.S. through Feb. 3, 2026. Nationals from more than a dozen other countries including Venezuela, Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan can also be awarded Temporary Protected Status.
The outspoken proponents of the great replacement include billionaire trump backer, Elon Musk, who claimed that “Western Jewish populations” support “hordes of minorities…flooding their country.”
Former Fox host Tucker Carlson has relentlessly quoted the replacement theory as a central theme of his show. A 2016 N.Y. Times investigation showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show, Carlson claimed that Democratic politicians and other elites want to force demographic change through immigration.
Other proponents range from Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. and Rep. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Tunisian President Kais Saied and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Trump has been a strong ally of the authoritarian Orban, who has been associated with the great replacement theory for several years. In December 2018, Orban made claims very much like those made by trump. Orban claimed the “Christian identity of Europe” needed saving, and labelled refugees traveling to Europe as “Muslim invaders.”
“If in the future Europe is to be populated by people other than Europeans, and we accept this as a fact and see it as natural, then we will effectively be consenting to population replacement: to a process in which the European population is replaced,” said Orban. “In all of Europe there are fewer and fewer children, and the answer of the West is migration. We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children.”
The Great Replacement was noted in the violent manifestos of Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011; Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine Black parishioners in South Carolina in 2015; and Brenton Harrison Tarrant, who in 2019 live-streamed his murder of more than 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Tarrant’s manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” later inspired Patrick Crusius, who killed 22 people in El Paso, Texas, as well as a Norwegian gunman who was overpowered as he tried to shoot people at a mosque in Oslo.