Remigration AKA Self-Deportation AKA…Going Home

I saw this on my news feed:

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security Embraces a Word With Ties to White Nationalism

by Connor Greene, Time Magazine, October 19, 2025

What’s the word? They couldn’t put in the headline, because they’re desperate for you to click, but when I clicked the word was familiar:

For months, the White House and federal agencies have drawn outrage from critics for social media posts promoting President Trump’s immigration agenda. Some of the posts deploy jokes or memes. Others use language or images seen as racist dog whistles. This week, the Department of Homeland Security drew pushback for a post that was just one word: remigrate.

That’s a very familiar word.

The DHS Tweet comes up on my page looking like this:

The “Community Notes” are linking to the Wikipedia article on remigration and to a “GZeroMedia” report titled “ What is “remigration” and why is the German far right calling for it? ” and a Politico.eu attack piece targeting German conservatives, Donald Trump, and remigration

The term “remigration” has traditionally been used in Europe to refer to the mass deportation of non-white immigrants. It has been used by right-winged politicians such as Austria’s Herbert Kickl and Germany’s Alice Weidel of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The term has also been popularized by the Austrian, millennial far-right influencer Martin Sellner.

“In Europe, it’s an established part of the linguistic toolbox of white supremacy,” Nicholas J. Cull, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California, tells TIME.

The use of the term in Germany and Austria has been a trademark of recent anti-immigration campaigns. Protests across Germany were sparked last year after it was alleged that AfD party members and far-right Austrians were plotting to deport thousands of migrants, causing mass pro-democracy demonstrations.

Germany’s far right seeks electoral legitimacy from Trump administration, by James Angelos, January 13, 2025

Do they seriously expect us to believe that these are pro-democracy demonstrations? The AfD can only start deporting “migrants” if they’re elected, and deportations have majority public support in Germany, and the current, elected government is also ramping up deportations.

Like the anti-Trump demonstrations from 2016 to last weekend, these are anti-democracy demonstrations.

“Remigration” isn’t a secret decoder ring for “far-right” ideology. It was used for the immigrants who returned to Europe from the US in the early twentieth century, There’s emigration (leaving your native country) immigration(coming to someone else’s country) and remigration, which is when you, having done the first two, go home.

The OED says this word goes back to 1601

The other name for remigration is “going home”. When he was running, somewhat wimpishly, for President in 2012, Mitt Romney used the phrase “self-deportation” as a kinder, gentler way dealing with illegal aliens without having to put ICE on the streets in large numbers. At the time, I pointed out that it just meant going home.

We use the term remigration (and repatriation) a lot here at Whitepapers. Our director, Cyan Quinn, gave a presentation at the first annual Remigration Summit in Milan, Italy, that you can read here:

In the end, not doing remigration has been, as they say on Twitter, “defeated at the ballot box”.

Our reply to the DHS on Twitter said this:

Nations implementing comprehensive remigration policies to reverse the Great Replacement is how we will know the long 20th Century has finally come to an end.

A healthy nationalism, a self-confident Western civilization, public displays of faith, and remigration!

Remigration isn’t some kind of a plot, and when the DHS says “Remigrate” all they’re saying is that they want the foreigners who have emigrated from foreign parts, and illegally immigrated to the US, to re-migrate, or as the drummer Animal says at the end of the 1979 Muppet Movie: “Go Home!”