Remigration - new far right buzzword

This article is in The Economist. It describes the spreading concept of remigration, increasingly being embraced by the far right movement in Europe and now in the United States. Thoughts? Is this where we’re headed?

Tom Nuttall, Berlin bureau chief 

 Watching the founding event for the youth branch of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party last year, I was struck by a repeated refrain from the stage. “Only mass remigration will protect our women and children,” declared one newly elected board member. Another speaker called for “remigration on a massive scale”. Every use of this term earned thunderous applause… “Remigration” was a word once considered beyond the pale even for the populist nationalists of the AfD. Its journey to something closer to the mainstream is in large part the work of one man: Martin Sellner, a 37-year-old far-right Austrian activist and the author of “Remigration: A Proposal”, which briefly hit the bestseller charts in Germany in 2024. Mr Sellner divides immigrants into three groups he wants subject to remigration, by which he may mean anything from forced expulsion to encouraging immigrants to self-deport: illegal immigrants; the legal sort; and finally, naturalised but “unassimilated” citizens. Over decades, Mr Sellner suggests, remigration can arrest the “great replacement” of majorities and safeguard Europe’s ethnic identity. “Three steps forward, two steps back, until these terms have gone from unthinkably radical...to popular,” he once said. To judge by the increasing prominence of the term, Mr Sellner has reason to be satisfied with his progress. Last week a far-right group sparked uproar in Italy’s parliament with a petition calling for a remigration law. In 2024 Donald Trump thrilled Mr Sellner’s acolytes by pointedly using the word himself. But most importantly, Mr Sellner appears to have the ear of many inside the AfD, a radical party that leads some German opinion polls—and has a shot at taking power in two eastern states later this year.