As a writer, I deeply feel the idea that while words can evolve in their definitions, that they have meaning, and that such meaning should not be changed or corrupted consciously for no good reason.
Remigration is one of those words. On the basic face of it, re-migration (and I use the hyphen to differentiate from what “remigration” has become) is a simple word. It just means to migrate migrants again. This can be innocuous or even helpful. Perhaps a person or group of people migrated to a country but who actually want to—or would be better served—by re-migrating again to another country.
However, the term remigration has gained a much more sinister bent in recent history, as, in the words of the Wikipedia description, “a far-right European concept of ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation or promoted voluntary return of non-white immigrants and their descendants, usually including those born in Europe, to their place of racial ancestry … Some proponents of remigration suggest excluding some persons with non-European background from such a mass deportation, based on a varyingly-defined degree of assimilation into European culture.”
So, basically, a tool of white supremacy, white nationalism, and white bigotry to either force or cajole with incentives non-white people into abandoning their citizenship to migrate elsewhere. We’ll get back to that in a moment.
On July 5, the president of the United States made a social media post on his personal propaganda site Truth Social that read: “This July 4th weekend I want to give a big ‘THANK YOU!’ to the Heroic ICE Officers fighting every day to reclaim our Sovereignty and Freedom. One of the most exciting parts of the ‘ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL ACT’ is that it includes ALL of the Funding and Resources that ICE needs to carry out the Largest Mass Deportation Operation in History. Our Brave ICE Officers, who are under daily violent assault, will finally have the tools and support that they need. We will not let America become a Third World Country filled with Crime, failing Schools, collapsing Hospitals, and total Social Dysfunction. It’s called ‘REMIGRATION’ and, it will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
First, it’s a lie that ICE officers are under daily violent assault. They are terrorizing various cities right now. They are kidnapping undocumented immigrants who pay taxes (yes, lots of them pay taxes, which supports the government), from their jobs (clearly showing that such immigrants typically have jobs and are not living under some “government dole” or money from crimes), and from the courts (where they are often at because they are trying to go through the processes for asylum or becoming citizens).
They are also the ones harassing and arresting actual green-card holders/work visa-holders and naturalized citizens and even birthright citizens (including people who are multiple generations deep being born here), claiming that they’ve committed crimes or saying their Real ID “looks fake” and keeping them detained for extended periods even when they are fully legal, fully documented citizens of the United States.
And that’s the way 47 wants it. Regardless of pushback that ICE officers have recieved—or bounty hunters deputized to act for ICE—violence is almost never what they receive, and that pushback is justified as they continue to act as the personal gestapo for our Tangerine Tyrant. But he wants them empowered to do more, including more illegal and inappropriate arrests, to get people out of this country, among them citizens who publicly speak out against his policies.
47 isn’t interested in any gentle re-migration for people who need or want it. He wants remigration of the same type that far-right white supremacists have been pursuing in Europe for years.
Making America great again apparently means—and this is no surprise to most of us who have watched the resurgence of aggressive and violent white supremacy—making it as white as possible.
Add to this recent reports that Stephen Miller has said he wants the country down to a population of 100 million, ostensibly because he wants it all white. Which is interesting, since apparently there are 200 million or so white people in the country. Guess a lot of them have too many drops of non-white blood in them still. Add to that a social media post by Laura Loomer talking about how alligators can have 65 million meals soon, in reference to the “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp build hastily in Florida that seems designed not only to hold detained immigrants indefinitely but probably kill them since that is hurricane country, the concentration camp is in a swamp, and as we saw with Hurricane Katrina and other disasters, prisoners don’t get moved out of the way of deadly weather patterns. Oh, and that 65 million number? That’s about how many Latino/Hispanic people there are in the country. Not undocumented people, but Latino people in general.
This all adds up to nothing more or less than an ethnic cleansing and potential genocide, deliberately orchestrated by the regime in D.C.
Even beyond Loomer’s nasty and evil comment about Latinos, the right wing is very much against seeing any non-white people as equal citizens deserving of equal rights and protections. They see them as a taint and a corruption of America. And as Miller’s alleged comment indicates, not all white people are white enough. The earliest history of this country tells us that once upon a time, Irish and Italian people, for example, weren’t considered white—until it was useful to identify them as such to help bolster white power and white supremacy.
Citizenship, naturalized or birthright, won’t be enough to protect anyone. Being half-white or even three-quarters white isn’t enough. They want this country white-white. And they are willing to terrorize, kidnap, illegally deport, and kill to get it that way.
And the irony of all this is that remigration in the United States is ridiculous. Many call for Indigenous Americans/Native Americans (or “Indians” to use the old-fashioned term) to be sent back where they came from, and they are already where they came from, because we took their land from them and put them under our thumb (by the way, Ann Coulter recently posted online that “we didn’t kill enough Indians” in response to a leftist Indigenous professor’s comment that decolonization would help the country). People call for Mexican-descended people to be “sent back” even though the legacy of why many of them are here is because we stole land from Mexico through warfare. Hell, police and others in this country ask people from New Mexico to show their passports even though New Mexico is a U.S. state. They call for people from Puerto Rico to be deported even though that island is a U.S. territory and they are U.S. citizens by definition.
At least in Europe, as evil as the concept of remigration is, it has some tiny sliver of “sense” to it. Not real sense, because until the slave trade started in Europe, race based on skin color wasn’t a thing. You were defined by nationality, not color. The mixing of races, culturally and through procreation, has existed for millennia and it was the loyalties you swore to a country currently that mattered more than skin color or where you were born.
So even in Europe it makes no sense, because as white as Europe may have been originally, it’s been forever since it was truly all-white. And the United States was built by immigrants who landed here and gradually took over land that wasn’t theirs. This whole country is based on migration, initially violent white migration (colonization)—not to mention the multitudes of non-white immigrants who helped build it and helped it prosper, plus the enslaved Africans whose descendents make up most of the Black population today. But here we are.
Remigration is policy now, and the powers that be want this country white. And at least a third of the U.S. population isn’t safe anymore from this vile concept. Frankly, neither are a lot of you “white” people either, especially if you’re not willing to bend the knee to our increasingly fascist, Nazi-inspired country.
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Image by Maayan Nemanov via Unsplash
