Remigration
Remigration is a far-right and Identitarian political concept referring to the forced expulsion or promoted return of non-ethnically European immigrants, often including their descendants who were born in Europe, back to their place of racial origin, typically with no regard for their citizenship.
[7] 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".
[9] Presented by far-right extremists as a remedy to mass immigration and the perceived Islamisation of Europe, remigration has increasingly become an integral policy position of the Identitarian movement.
[13] 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 Church of England theologian.
[37][38] Since the 2010s, the idea of remigration has been used by thinkers and political leaders of the Identitarian movement, such as Guillaume Faye,[39] Renaud Camus,[40][41] Henry de Lesquen,[6] or Martin Sellner,[42] as a euphemism for the mass deportation of non-European immigrants and native residents with a migrant background, back to their country of origin, the criteria of exclusion being a vaguely defined degree of assimilation into European culture.
[45] In October 2017, Generation Identity announced policy plans to its members, for France to force former colonies to take back migrants by using its status as a nuclear power and making development subsidies and aid conditional on the repatriation of immigrants.
[46] In March 2018, an Al Jazeera investigative team released footage and audio revealing Marine Le Pen's close confidant and former accountant, Nicolas Crochet, saying that the National Rally party would introduce a remigration programme to force immigrants back to their country of origin, in the event that they came to power in France.
[48] In what Libération described as a "dangerous penetration of the ideas of the ultra-radical extreme right in the French political space", Gave announced that she was in favor of the party putting remigration "on the table".
[55] In March 2019, the German Identitarian movement began a "remigration campaign" which included governmental petitions, a "flashmob" outside a mosque and a demonstration in front of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community in Berlin, where the protesters demanded the repatriation of Islamic refugees back to the Middle East.
[65] The influential Norwegian counter-jihad blogger Fjordman himself stated in his writings in June 2011 that "Islam, and all those who practice it, must be totally and physically removed from the entire Western world".
[67] Slovenian Democratic Party MEP Branko Grims stated "we need remigration" in his first 2024 speech to the European Parliament, suggesting "sending all those who abuse the acquis communautaire and asylum law back to where they came from".
[72] Swedish Migration Minister Johan Forssell, a member of the Moderate Party, has stated that "remigration" is an important issue for Sweden, and that wider use of voluntary repatriation in line with the policy followed by Denmark would be one of the options considered by his government.
In April 2018, Hope Not Hate detailed how, while the group was relatively unknown by the mainstream media; its "core beliefs" of ethnopluralism, and remigration of non-whites from Europe, was more extreme than any policies of the English Defence League.
[82] In August 2018, Australian far-right extremist Blair Cottrell openly advocated for remigration,[83] calling for the deportation of "enemies of my country" and the execution of immigrants who refused to leave.
[84][85] Michael Weiss and Julia Ebner, of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, have identified the "identitarian concept of 'remigration'" as having accelerated since 2014, and associated it with increasing calls from the far-right for mass deportation of non-white Europeans, in what they described as "ethnic cleansing".
Arguing that France has had a mixed genetic heritage since Gallic times, he has questioned the practicality of expelling French people of immigrant origin and the number of generations that would require investigation in pursuit of "purity".
