Everybody’s Talking About Remigration

“Remigration is the only way.” With one post, Elon Musk put a brick through Britain’s Overton Window. Until now, the phrase has been used by fringe figures with chequered pasts. Those who agreed with the goal have refrained from using it, fearing the smear of associating with people and positions they find objectionable. But now the world’s richest man has swept the mines. As the leftist press fear, we have irrevocably entered the “age of deportations”.

Debates about immigration policy have been contained to the orderly manner by which demographic replacement can proceed with the proper documents and through “safe and legal routes”. Reductions in legal migration were pitched exclusively in economic and logistical terms. As Eric Kaufmann observed in Whiteshift, concerns about cultural change were couched in polite proxies, such as strain on public services. Mass deportation policies only concern the millions of illegal migrants and foreign criminals presently in our countries. Hostile legal migrants and their unassimilable descendants were considered a millstone which Western nations will be lumped with for generations. Distinguishing between the minority of friends of foreign heritage who have ingratiated themselves into our families, and the millions of welfare scroungers, sexual predators, and total strangers who were never invited here, has been unthinkable for our politicians — even on the right.

But the vibe has shifted. Nigel Farage has finally, commendably called for mass deportations, after a year of denouncing them as “a political impossibility” and “a very grave, dark and dangerous use of language”. Reform UK have promised to expel 600,000 immigrants per year — which sounds like a good start to me. Farage had planned to address NatCon DC with a speech entitled “Getting Mass Deportations Done”, but Britain’s world-class airport infrastructure saw fit to delay his flight. On Monday, Farage announced his plan to “reverse the Boris wave”, ensuring the over four million third-world immigrants imported since Boris Johnson liberalised immigration laws after Brexit return home. 95% of these migrants will never be net-tax contributors across their lifetime — costing taxpayers £465,000 each by age 81. Rescinding indefinite leave-to-remain for these unwanted burdens will save us over £234 billion. “Many of those who will lose their leave to remain are entirely dependent on the welfare state and will leave voluntarily upon losing access to benefits”, Zia Yusuf, Reform’s Head of Policy said. “Those that don’t will be subject to immigration enforcement as part of our mass deportation programme.”

It is encouraging to see that Reform are listening to their base. Farage is fixing bayonets to his rhetorical rifles because he finally recognises that votes, and victory, lies on the right. Hence why he refused to denounce the Unite the Kingdom rally, and his critics Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson, when journalists demanded it at a press conference last week. Reform’s locus of moral concern is not the Westminster media, but the patriotic public.

Farage’s counterpart in this right-wing arms-race is Conservative leader-in-waiting, Robert Jenrick — who Farage once claimed would present as more radical than himself on immigration by the next election. Jenrick has outbid Reform’s promise of net-negative immigration by pledging a decade of net-emigration, and mass deportations for all illegal immigrants — not just the single male asylum seekers targeted by Farage. “The country now needs breathing space after this period of mass migration”, Jenrick said. “Reversing recent low-skilled migration will likely mean a sustained period of net emigration. I would support that.” The sincerity of Jenrick’s Damascene conversion is immaterial: it demonstrates a preference cascade toward proving who is most credible to conduct mass deportations. Political plate tectonics have shifted so significantly that policies once considered reputation suicide to support are now prerequisites to victory.

Across the Atlantic, President Trump has already deported and hastened the departure of up to 1.5 million migrants from the United States. Another >60,000 await deportation in ICE detention facilities and the new “Alligator Alcatraz” deterrent centre in the Florida Everglades. Southern border crossings have fallen to the lowest on record. For the fourth month in a row, no illegal immigrants made it into the United States.

Legal migration matters just as much to MAGA. Last Christmas, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy declared war on Trump’s base, demanding the mass importation of cheap Indian labour via the H-1B visa continue. 71% of H-1B visa grants went to Indian applicants in 2023 – 2024. Senator Eric Schmitt noticing this at NatCon prompted a panic-call from the Indian embassy. Fears that the flow of remittances might stop were no doubt exacerbated when Jack Posobiec called to cancel all visas from India going forward.

The base cheered when President Trump announced an annual $100,000 penalty for each H1B visa, discourage corporations from replacing American labour. They chimped when Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified that this would not apply to existing H-1Bs, or to recipients who leave and re-enter the United States to renew their visa. Given Trump listens to his base, Americans can only hope that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s original restrictions are what are enforced. If more Indians were the solution to America’s problems, then India itself wouldn’t have any problems.

The Economist is terrified that Trump’s policies will empty the tank of this hypothetical GDP-rocket-fuel and bankrupt “America Inc”. “In time,” the editorial reads, “the costs of Mr Trump’s immigrant bashing will become clearer.” Their belief that millions of people from impoverished backwaters become economic dynamite once they cross the border is based on the delusion of the blank slate. Liberals act as if a latent egalitarian nature lies beneath arbitrary cultural differences and economic disparities, and that people can fit fungibly into the market like so many cogs. This sort of thinking persists on the right, who insist they oppose only illegal and low-skill legal migration.

But nations are not economic zones. As Roger Scruton wrote in How to Be a Conservative, “The market is held in place by other forms of spontaneous order, [which] create the kind of solidarity that markets, left to themselves, will erode.” Nations are homes, with a culture and character that flows from the families who own it. The word economy derives from the Greek oikos, meaning home. If houseguests outnumber the homeowners, then it ceases to be a home, no matter how much that may expediently profit the landlords. “America is not a revolving door”, Posobiec reminds us. “When it comes to gender fluidity, the right seems to understand it; but when it comes to the nation, they believe in national fluidity.” You cannot substitute one people for another and have the same country.

Immigration policy should not be about human-quantitative-easing GDP out of the third world, or treating your citizens like tradeable players on a sports team. The economy is sustained by a culture, and the culture is the property of the people who invented and inherited it. Anglo-Protestant culture has been the wellspring of American prosperity. Immigration policy must conserve that culture, and serve the interests of the people from whom it flows. Any immigrant who is superfluous to that goal must leave.

The Trump administration is also reviewing criteria for revoking citizenship grants from recipients who violate their naturalisation oath. Many have. As Posobiec pointed out at NatCon, most people retain their loyalties to foreign princes and potentates when they migrate. When America is treated as “dirt that you can just stand on” which magically makes them indistinguishable from the pilgrims on the Mayflower, they have no obligation to assimilate. “These people do not want to assimilate”, Posobiec reiterated. “If you want to wave another flag, you are free to do so on the flight back home.”

Any immigrant who celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk will also have their visa revoked. A prime candidate is Minnesota congresswoman, Ilhan Omar. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Omar joined Medhi Hasan to list Kirk’s sins against progressivism like a posthumous fatwa against him. At a lectern in a local Lutheran church, she declared “those of you interested in rewriting this hateful man’s history are full of shit.” She said on CNN that Kirk “should be in the dustbin of history, and we should hopefully move on and forget the hate that he spewed every single day”. Omar also shared a video on social media which said “Kirk was a reprehensible human being… a stochastic terrorist… With his last dying words, he was spewing racist dog whistles.”

When I and others on X demanded Omar be deported, Rep. Nancy Mace filed a motion to censure and strip her of congressional committee assignments. Four Republican congressmen voted against the motion, defeating it. They are why Trump was elected: Republicans’ unwillingness to use power, affording their enemies grace that is never reciprocated, was why the left captured every institution.

But Florida congressman Cory Mills may have other motives. Mills married his third wife, an Iraqi national, in an Islamic ceremony at the Virginia mosque where al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar Al Awaki was an imam. Two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, also attended the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in early 2001. The wedding was officiated by mufti Mohammed Al Hanooti, a co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Mills co-founded arms company Pacem with his wife, and closed a $228 million deal with Iraq in their first year. He is also evading censure by Democrats for his own allegations of impropriety. Let Mills be a lesson to Republicans that electing virtuous legislators is as important as supporting competent policy.

Rather than demote her in Congress, the Department of Justice and State Department should be investigating Omar for violating her naturalisation oath and potentially breaking the law. Both Mace and President Trump referenced the allegation that Omar committed immigration fraud by marrying her brother, Ahmed Elmi, in a Christian ceremony to provide him residency in the United States. Omar was still in an unregistered Muslim marriage to her first husband, Ahmed Hirsi, at the time. Surely, this would be grounds for deporting Omar back to Somalia?

Omar has shown nothing but contempt, disloyalty, and ingratitude toward her hosts. At a Council on American Islamic Relations event, she euphemised 9/11 as when “some people did something” and Muslims began “to lose access to our civil liberties”. She has repeatedly called Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud “our president” and promised to use her position in congress to protect Somalian territory. She told an audience that, “I am a Somali girl taken from my country. I miss my country, and I dream of living in Somalia again.” The Trump administration should grant her wish. Ilhan Omar should be denaturalised and deported, alongside all the Somali clans turning Minnesota into “Little Mogadishu”.

The same goes for Senator Fatima Payman in Australia. She was suspended from Labour for supporting a Green Party resolution to reward Hamas for the October 7th massacre with a Palestinian state (something Australia’s Labour government, alongside Britain and Canada, have now done anyway). She spread Iranian state propaganda about how well they treat women. Payman gloated about Charlie Kirk’s murder on a TikTok livestream: calling Kirk “a pretty awful person” and insinuating that RIP meant “Rest in piss”. She may still have dual-citizenship with Afghanistan, in violation of Australian law. Given she is so insistent on turning Australia into Afghanistan, she should be denaturalised and deported there.

This precedent exists in Britain too. Former UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell has proposed “Shamima’s Law”: using the precedent set by revoking ISIS bride Shamima Begum’s citizenship, because her return would “not be conducive to the public good”, to denaturalise eligible immigrants and their offspring. The jus sanguinis citizenship laws of Begum’s heritage nation, Bangladesh, meant depriving her of British citizenship, did not render her stateless. Therefore, laws in, and bespoke deals with, other nations can be leveraged to deport immigrants and their descendants who detract from our nation’s social fabric.

These policies fall beneath the banner of remigration: the reversal of mass immigration, to restore sovereignty over each nation to their eponymous peoples. “Remigration has become the essential political question”, academic Nathan Pinkoski observed at NatCon. He proposed “voluntary inducements to depart forever from the United States” as the solution to the “crisis of solidarity” created by imposing unilateral multiculturalism on white Christian countries. I think withdrawing welfare and subsidies would suffice.

National conservatism is avowedly non-liberal. It finds its model in the nation states of antiquity and the Bible: that states are preceded by peoples, families, and their faith. In 2024, Vice President Vance premiered his Republican National Convention nomination speech at NatCon DC, announcing that “America is not just an idea… It is, in short, a nation.” His motif of the Kentucky burial plot, where his ancestors were laid to rest and where one day he will join them, was an exemplar of that sentiment. Nations are collections of families, with a shared story, and investments and obligations that span generations. They are not strangers who occupy the same landmass out of pure moneyed interest.

This year, Senator Eric Schmitt received a standing ovation for saying that America is not a “universal proposition” but “a homeland” that Americans “fought, bled, and died for” to bestow upon their descendants. It belongs to the American people: a coherent ethnic group of “the most adventurous, the most courageous, the most curious and innovative” of the English, Scotch-Irish, and continental Europeans, who came as settlers and to whom the United States belongs. In short, America is a people, exceptional and irreplaceable. “If America is everything and everyone,” Schmitt said, “then it is nothing and no one at all.”

The alternative, as Pinkoski said, is muscular liberalism: a euphemism for “postliberal administrative governance, which stretches from the ever-more powerful tools of the national security state to the strategies of surveillance capitalism”. State power increases in proportion to ethnic heterogeneity. Our civilisation becomes a panopticon: the concentric circles of relationships and natural loyalties dissolved, national borders abolished, and replaced with a state which intervenes in private affairs to ensure equality between peers, and imposes internal boundaries to prevent the war of all-against-all. The total state replaces the families, communities, congregations, and civic associations out of which the nation emerged: “It’s the way to make multiculturalism work.”

Pinkoski’s remarks were delivered during a panel on the rising threat of Islam in America. “What Bush and Blair never understood,” Pinkoski explained, “is that Islamism is first and foremost a strategy of cultural replacement. Whether one flies planes into buildings or not is a tactical question.” Islamic terror is the predictable effect of Islamic migration. It is not an aberration of the violent faith, or a problem to be solved with employment opportunities and civics programmes. If we shut our borders to the Muslim world, and encouraged the departure of Islam’s practitioners, it would not be our problem.

Restoring our high-trust, homogenous, inherited culture will require some form of remigration. This doesn’t mean exiling everyone of foreign heritage. Breaking up mixed families, or banishing patriotic half-English people to nations they’ve never visited, is a political non-starter. It would be unjust to treat those with whom we have formed good relationships no different from criminals because of their skin colour. But they are a minority. Most must leave.

It isn’t just Islam, of course. Input any foreign faith or culture into a civilisation, and you don’t get the same civilisation at the end of the experiment. National conservatism recognises that faiths and cultures are the distinct properties of peoples. Exercising national sovereignty means being able to discern which faiths, cultures, and peoples do not belong in your country.

It is not extreme to say that we do not have to share our home with people who hate us. We do not have to live like this. They are going back.