The twice-impeached former president, Donald Trump, introduced a new word into political discourse last month: “remigration.”
As he does every day, Trump was ranting and raving about illegal immigration into the United States. In one of his missives, Trump vowed to “return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).”
That is a word that has been popularized by Europe’s extreme conservative parties – so extreme that one must squint very hard to discern any difference between them and their kissing cousins, fascist and Nazi parties.
Remigration started as the idea that illegal immigrants should be deported back to their native lands. It has broadened in scope to mean rounding up all Near East and African immigrants, their children and grandchildren born and raised in these countries, regardless of legal status, and deporting them to their countries of origin.
Now consider how remigration might be employed in the United States, if dictator-for-a-day Trump pushed the idea to the level of ethnic cleansing. Anyone whose skin color was brown to black in shade could be deported, regardless of legal status (including citizenship).
Think that’s too extreme, even for Trump? Then what would you call using the military and police to round up 15 million undocumented immigrants, house them in concentration camps, and then ship them to countries of origin? That’s in Project 2025 and in numerous Trump speeches. Trump admitted that such a task would be difficult and be “a bloody story.”
You think any loyalist in a Trump administration, backed by a Republican House and Senate and an extreme U.S. Supreme Court would be concerned where non-whites were deported at gunpoint – maybe to a generic Africa or Latin America? If this horror story should come to pass, anyone with a MAGA hat would need to trade it in for a MAWA hat: Make America White Again. Or white, male Trump fans could sport T-shirts labeled “Gideon, Love it or Leave It.” As for women who support Trump, watch “Handmaiden’s Tale” on TV, or read the book, to see what your future might hold in a Christian nationalist dystopia.
