On the weekend Donald Trump detailed on Truth Social how he would “end the immigrant invasion of America.” The presidential candidate, who has repeatedly vowed to launch the largest mass deportation campaign in American history, dug into his usual laundry list: He would “stop all immigrant flights,” eliminate the Biden administration’s Customs and Border Protection mobile app, and stop refugee resettlement. These proposals are neither new nor surprising coming from the Trump campaign.
But one part of the Republican candidate’s weekend post stood out. “(We will) send Kamala’s illegal immigrants back to their country of origin (aka re-immigrants),” Trump wrote. Former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller reposted it, saying, “Trump’s plan to end the small-town invasion of America: re-immigrants!”
What did Trump and Miller mean by “re-immigrant”? Even seasoned immigration policy analysts had to look up the term.
“Re-Immigrants,” an article about the rise of extreme anti-immigrant sentiment in 2019 The European language, as described by the Associated Press, is “a chilling concept of sending immigrants back to their home countries, equivalent to a soft-style ethnic cleansing.” The term refers to the policy of forcibly returning or deporting non-European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. Trump, without much fanfare (to Miller’s all-caps cheers), seems to be hinting that he will introduce far more radical ideas into his immigration proposals, beyond the mass deportation of illegal immigrants.
“He knows what he’s doing,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor who studies fascism and authoritarianism, of Trump’s statements. “He chooses his words carefully.”
that The value-neutral term “remigration” has been used in a dry way, for example, in the context of the return of Jews to Germany after World War II. But the word has been adopted mainly by far-right groups in European countries, and has now become synonymous with these movements.
In France, Eric Zemur, a former far-right presidential candidate, has proposed the creation of a “Ministry of Re-Immigration.” In a speech to the National Conservative Conference in Brussels in April this year, Zemur denounced the “Islamization of the continent” as an existential threat to European civilisation.
In particular, “relocation” has gained a strong foothold in Germany. In 2023, a jury of German linguists selected “relocation” as the “non-word” of the year, a “deliberately ideological” euphemism for the forced expulsion of people “in order to achieve cultural hegemony and ethnic homogeneity.”
“The seemingly innocuous term ‘re-immigrant’ is used by the nationalists and identity movements of the (Alternative for Germany) AfD to mask their real intention: to expel anyone with the wrong skin colour or origins, even if they are German citizens,” said one guest judge.
Last November, far-right AfD, neo-Nazis and businessmen reportedly met in Potsdam to discuss a plan for mass deportations, including of “non-assimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The mastermind behind the plan to relocate asylum seekers, foreigners with legal status, and some Germans of foreign origin to so-called “model countries” in North Africa was Austrian identity activist Martin Sellner. (Even France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen has objected to the secret meeting, saying she is “totally opposed” to the idea of re-immigrants.)
According to recent local reports, the AfD candidate in Stuttgart campaigned on the slogan “Rapid re-immigration creates living space.” Habitat The Nazis used it to justify their expansion of genocide into Eastern Europe.
Trump’s comments on re-immigrants couldn’t go unnoticed. Sellner, who has been banned from Germany and the UK and whose visa-free travel permit was revoked by US authorities in 2019 over alleged links to the Christchurch shooter, appeared to celebrate the former US president’s “re-immigrant call” as a triumph on X.
According to Cécile Alduy, a French expert on the political use of language at Stanford University who studies questions of national identity and myths of national and ethnic identity, remigration is “a key word in the vocabulary of the far right.” In an email, she explained that the French equivalent, remigration, is a neologism. “The far right loves to create new words like ‘immigrantism’ or ‘remigration’ or ‘Francocide’ or ‘mass replacement’ because they claim that they alone can see the new reality, and that this new reality requires a new vocabulary to shake people’s minds and raise awareness of the dangers.”
As I’ve written here, anti-immigrant sentiment has been at the heart of the right’s resurgence around the world, including in the United States. At the National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., this summer, speakers reiterated some of the beliefs that have fueled the idea of re-immigrants, from the emphasis on assimilation to characterizing multiculturalism as “anti-Western” to calls to “decolonize America.” One anti-immigrant hardliner even floated the idea of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda.
This kind of language comes amid a growing body of dangerous rhetoric about immigrants in the United States. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, recently played a key role in spreading false rumors that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were kidnapping and eating pets, a lie that Trump repeated on the debate stage. The lies led to bomb threats and stoked fear in the community. (And it seems intentional: When CNN’s Dana Bassey asked why he continues to spread debunked claims, Vance said, “If I have to create a story that actually gets the American media to pay attention to the suffering of the American people, that’s what I’m going to do.”)
If given the chance, Trump and his followers could turn their hate speech into a deportation policy targeting all immigrants. Last week, the former president said he would begin mass deportations in Springfield and Aurora, Colorado, two cities caught up in a right-wing anti-immigrant conspiracy theory. Most Haitian immigrants in the United States have legal status under the Temporary Protected Status program or the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole initiative, and are allowed to work.
But that probably means little to Miller, who has touted the possibility of stripping people of their citizenship during Trump’s second term. “We are launching a new de-citizenship program under Trump,” he wrote on X in October. “It’s expected to be turbocharged by 2025.”
Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University who studies international migration, said on social media platforms that “this is not a question of who should be granted citizenship, but rather a question of some American citizens making other American citizens illegal.”
