Just over two years ago, tens of thousands of Germans took to the streets in protest of a secret meeting in Potsdam, Germany, about “remigration,” a 30-year-long ethnic cleansing policy proposal targeting “illegals,” “non-citizens,” and “non-assimilated” peoples in Western countries. The meeting was attended by members of the far-right party Alternative Für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD), including party leader Alice Weidel’s personal aide, members of the white nationalist Identitarian movement, and other European neo-Nazis.
Two years ago, the idea of remigration was massively protested by Germans for its obvious racism and ethnic cleansing after news of this secret meeting was disclosed. But in the US with the new Trump administration, the racist idea of remigration has entered the White House, adopted by DHS and Trump in tweets fantasizing about “America After 100 Million Deportations” (the approximate number of non-white people in the country), State Department proposals like the Office of Remigration, and the mass deportations that are well-underway.
The Department of Homeland Security fantasizing about “America After 100 Million Deportations.” (Source: X).
Remigration is an ethnic cleansing policy proposal popularized by Austrian and former avowed neo-Nazi Martin Sellner, who, in Potsdam, delivered a lecture on the subject. Sellner has a long history of extremism. He was for years the de-facto leader of the European white nationalist Identitarian movement, was mentored by Gottfried Küssel (an Austrian Nazi imprisoned twice for “Nazi revivalism”), was part of a neo-Nazi group called “Stolz und Frei” (“Proud and Free”), and admitted to placing a swastika sticker on a synagogue in Baden bei Wien, Austria, in 2006. Sellner’s influence is shockingly clear throughout remigration’s journey into the Trump administration’s policies.
The concept of remigration is the policy solution to the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely purports that white people are being intentionally “replaced” by non-white migrants and refugees. Remigration would remove those non-white populations, thereby reversing the replacement and leaving countries with large white majorities.
The “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and remigration originated with the French author Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement, which depicted a world where Muslims from Africa and the Middle East overrun Europe. White supremacists who have adopted this conspiracy theory often scapegoat Jews as being responsible for orchestrating these demographic changes, and have committed several acts of targeted mass killings of Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and other marginalized populations in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Germany, among other countries.
Remigration Into The European Mainstream
Hateful activism based on the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was peddled by Identitarians (white ethnonationalists) for decades in Europe, with Identitarianism dating back to the 1960s and re-emerging in 2003 with the formation of the French group Bloc Identitaire. Its youth wing, the Generation Identity (GI) network, which emerged in 2012, was dissolved by the French government in 2021 due to their actions “inciting hate, violence or discrimination of individuals.” In German speaking countries, Identitare Bewegung (Identitarian Movement, IB), part of the transnational GI network, also emerged around 2012 and continues to campaign and fundraise on remigration today. Martin Sellner has played a pivotal role in both, including GI’s “Defend Europe” campaign in 2017, which involved disrupting NGOs working to save the lives of migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean with multiple actions by Identitarians interfering with migrant boats. The Identitarian movement is known for its slick videos and clean cut look designed to recruit young people.
Despite GI’s dissolution and the many acts of violent terrorism associated with the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, it, and later remigration, were allowed to proliferate across social media by Meta, YouTube, and X, culminating in continued hateful actions by the Identitarian movement and white nationalists globally. In May 2023, Martin Sellner advertised a “GI Campaign in Africa,” which involved placing billboards in Uganda, Ghana, Somalia, and other countries attempting to “discourage migrants from coming to Europe.”
Martin Sellner posts about Generation Identity’s “No Way — Do not come to Europe” campaign in African countries on his English-language Telegram Channel. (Source: Telegram).
Around the same time, AfD in Germany began to adopt remigration in their campaigning along with French politicians such as Reconquête member and GI co-founder Damien Rieu. By November 2023, AfD members were present at the aforementioned “secret meeting” in Potsdam, at which Sellner delivered a lecture about his remigration proposal. The media firestorm and massive protests following the meeting did little to deter AfD and Europe’s white nationalists from doubling down on their ethnic cleansing fantasies.
In April 2024, members of the neo-Nazi Swiss group Junge Tat (Youth Action) launched “Vision Remigration” in order to “[formulate] solutions for current migration policy and population exchange, which are grouped together under the term remigration.” Vision Remigration’s leadership, Manuel Corchia, Tobias Lingg, and Selina Dienemann, have ties to hate violence against migrants. In 2023, Corchia and Lingg were named as suspects in the detonation of smoke bombs in front of a refugee shelter in Gladenbach, Upper Bavaria. They were also both convicted of racial discrimination for disrupting an online lecture in Zurich by yelling “Heil Hitler” and “Sieg Heil” (“Hail Victory”). In December 2022, Dienemann “dressed up” with others as Muslims and, in an grotesquely racist stunt, pretended to “execute” Swiss people in Schaffhausen.
Neo-Nazis Tobias Lingg (left) and Manuel Corchia (right) from Junge Tat and Vision Remigration with Martin Sellner (center), who has been pivotal in popularizing remigration worldwide. (Source: watson.ch)
By 2025, remigration was entrenched as a staple in European far-right politics and became a beacon for American white nationalists. AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, publicly embraced the term in January 2025 at a party conference, saying “And I have to be honest with you: if it’s going to be called remigration, then that’s what it’s going to be: remigration.” The same month, Weidel was interviewed by Elon Musk on X, who endorsed AfD in the 2025 German elections. There was no mention of remigration, nor its ties to Europe’s neo-Nazis, during the interview. In fact, Weidel made the outrageous claim that Adolf Hitler was a “communist, socialist guy.”
Throughout 2025, Musk made several posts on X advocating for remigration, including one post saying “Europe will not be Europe much longer, unless the domestic birth rate increases and there is large-scale remigration.” In February 2025, American Vice President JD Vance met with AfD leader Alice Weidel before accusing European nations of being authoritarian regimes fueled by “old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” at the Munich Security Conference. In May 2025, AfD was designated as “right-wing extremist” by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Elon Musk made several posts in 2025 advocating for remigration, all within the context of Europe, as the ethnic cleansing proposal became popular among far-right movements overseas. (Source: X).
In May 2025, an estimated 300 to 400 far-right activists from across the globe attended the first “Remigration Summit” in northern Italy. The conference was organized by Martin Sellner, Belgian Dries van Langenhove, Portugual’s Afonso Gonçalves, and Italian Andrea Ballarati. American participants included prominent white supremacists such as Jared Taylor (founder of the white supremacist organization American Renaissance), and Jacky Eubanks, a former Trump-endorsed GOP candidate for the Michigan House of Representatives and Michigan’s state senate. She was also a field representative for Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Another conference called the “Road to Remigration,” hosted by Ballarati, was held in October 2025, featuring speakers such as Member of European Parliament (MEP) Roberto Vannacci (Lega), MEP Petr Bystron (AfD), Romanian Member of the Chamber of Deputies Mihail Neamtu (AUR), Hungarian Director of Foreign Affairs at the Nezopont Institute Mihaly Rosonczy, and others from across the continent.
Remigration Completes Its Journey To The White House
The US is no stranger to racial extremists who believe in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and transatlantic white nationalist partnerships have long been growing. The “Great Replacement” made an appearance during the August 2017 “Unite the Right” riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the unnerving chants of “Jews will not replace us” and “you will not replace us” could be heard as an ominous warning. That weekend left an anti-racist protester dead and several others injured at the hands of white supremacists. The idea of white people being “replaced” was, by that time, proliferating on both sides of the Atlantic. American white supremacists who were in Charlottesville, such as Richard Spencer, had become steeped in Identitarianism, and European Identitarians — specifically Christoffer Dulny and Daniel Friberg — traveled to Charlottesville to be on hand with their American counterparts.
The promotion of “Great Replacement” rhetoric by American elected officials and political figures such as Elon Musk (whose own AI, Grok, has decried Musk for his “Great Replacement” rhetoric), was taken up by Donald Trump, who also campaigned on remigration leading up to the 2024 presidential election. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the United States celebrated Trump’s use of the term in a September 2024 post on X, along with Sellner himself, who credited Trump with making remigration “the slogan of our generation and the dream of all European and western people worldwide.” Only a month later, Sellner virtually attended and spoke about remigration at the white supremacist American Renaissance conference alongside eugenicists and other white nationalists.
Donald Trump invokes “remigration,” a call for ethnic cleansing, in a September 2024 tweet about “end[ing] the migrant invasion of America” (Source: Twitter).
Martin Sellner shares a post claiming that remigration is the “dream of all European and western people worldwide,” and that it is “unstoppable.” (Source: Telegram).
Leading up to Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, American white nationalists, including the neo-Nazi Active Club movement, called on him to follow through on his promises of mass deportations. Only five months later, Trump’s mass deportation strategy closely mirrored Sellner’s remigration proposal, aligning with parts of his three “phase” plan which involves deporting “illegals,” “non-citizens,” and “non-assimilated” peoples (read GPAHE’s full analysis on the similarities between Trump’s policy and Sellner’s proposal here).
In April 2025, the State Department proposed shifting the responsibilities of several offices dedicated to refugee support in a move that would create an “Office of Remigration.” While this officially remains a proposal, it’s clear by the Department of Homeland Security’s activity on X that the administration has fully embraced remigration as policy. DHS posted in November 2025 on X, “the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now.” The State Department has also frozen visa issuance fully or partially to nationals of 39 countries, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has halted all asylum decisions, and DHS has stopped processing immigration for Afghan nationals indefinitely. Meanwhile, the United States is accepting white (Afrikaner) South Africans into the country based on Trump’s thoroughly-debunked claims that there is an ongoing “white genocide,” which itself shares an ideological similarity to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
The Department of Homeland Security claims its “goal has never been more clear: Remigration now,” signaling an intent to ethnically cleanse America. (Source: X).
On December 31, 2025, the White House made a series of posts on X, captioned “words to carry into the new year.” One of these posts was a picture of Trump with the word “remigration” beside him. Several members of the AfD followed suit by copying the format. Sellner, like with every step taken beforehand to normalize remigration in the American political milieu, was jubilant, crediting Trump for creating the “trend” and celebrating the AfD members following it.
Remigration has come full-circle. A concept for ethnic cleansing devised by white supremacists and neo-Nazis and so hateful that it could only be discussed in a secret meeting, sparking massive protests, is now the official policy of the United States of America.
The White House account on X makes a post with Donald Trump and the word “remigration” next to him. December 31, 2025. (Source: X).
Remigration Is Violence
Make no mistake, the adoption of remigration as a policy is another cog in the Trump administration’s authoritarian machine. Trump’s deployment of ICE in his mass deportation operation, fueled by a goal to ethnically cleanse America of immigrants, has led to the deaths of 32 people in ICE custody during 2025. Trump has labeled dissent against ICE’s immigration raids, such as the June 2025 protest in Los Angeles, as “violent, insurrectionist mobs,” and law enforcement has been documented hitting and pushing protesters when making arrests, firing rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, and even shooting one Australian reporter with a rubber bullet. The administration’s authoritarian violence has dramatically escalated into 2026, with ICE killing a motorist during their immigration crackdown in Minneapolis on January 7. Remigration begets violence, and as it continues to be adopted by politicians globally, dissenters against authoritarianism will continue to be targeted — and killed.
