Trump's 'Reverse Migration' is an Idea Without a Future

After an Afghan national was charged in the shooting of two National Guardsmen in Washington just before Thanksgiving, President Trump’s administration revived his earlier calls for something that to many Americans sounded, at best, puzzling: “reverse migration.”

Or, in shortened form, “remigration.”

For many Black Americans, “reverse migration” describes the widespread movement back to the South after civil rights reforms undid the Jim Crow segregation laws that spurred many, including my ancestors, to move north.

In this sense, reverse migration carries a connotation of social healing.

Yet, as gratified as I am by how smoothly Americans of all races have become accustomed to getting along, in ways that would have been scarcely imaginable even in my youth, I am dismayed by giant steps backward being advocated for by the new Trump generation of right-wingers.

Trump's embrace of “reverse migration” is central to the ascendancy of populist white nationalists in the Republican Party — the folks who 10 years ago we knew as the "alt right" but who now practically comprise the American right in its entirety.

The concept of "remigration" is well known in Europe as a “lite” version of ethnic cleansing, the systematic and forceful removal of an ethnic, cultural, racial, or religious group from a given territory, with the goal of making that area ethnically homogeneous.

In the worst circumstances, when violent and terror-inspiring means are used, ethnic cleansing is a war crime, and Europe saw plenty of this in the long, bloody 20th century.

However, in the euphemistic usage of European far right, the concept of remigration implies choice on the part of the subject, but make no mistake: This is forced repatriation of immigrants.

The “identitarian” movement, an umbrella term for European populist anti-immigrant and white nationalist parties, has helped to popularize the concept of remigration, and any other effort that moves in the opposite direction from diversity, in the United States.

Trump began using the terms remigration and reverse migration frequently in the 2024 election campaign, and he explicitly promised to remove millions of immigrants from the U.S., including some who are in the country illegally and potentially some others who have legal status.

Who can forget his slander against Haitian refugees living in Ohio?

Trump has shown himself willing to subordinate all governing values to the desire to rid our nation of immigrants who don't look like us or pray like us.

His attitude toward the program that brought Afghani refugees to the U.S., including those who served alongside our troops, all risking their lives in Afghanistan, is perhaps the clearest example.

Unfortunately, the recent attack against the National Guard soldiers, in which one died and the other was hospitalized, only gave Trump an opportunity to frame all of the Afghans who have risked their lives and limbs for our military mission as security risks and poorly vetted. So he froze their asylum claims and ended protections like Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Afghans.

Most Americans understand and appreciate that bringing Afghani allies to the U.S. after the war was a clear and simple humanitarian duty. And most of us understand that collective punishment is unjust.

But to Trump, identitarian values trump American values.

To me, today’s identitarian movement seems like a depressing revival of the neo-Klan or neo-Nazi “white power” groups I covered in Chicago in past decades dating back to the 1970s.

That was the era of the infamous Skokie march, a deliberately provocative parade by uniformed neo-Nazis in a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago after they won a landmark free-speech case.

But there's a key difference. These racist groups now have the president of the United States adopting their racist code words and empowering them to join federal agencies to run amok among immigrant communities.

Trump vowed that his administration will "permanently pause" migration from all "Third World countries" following the National Guard attacks, even as he has opened the door wide to white South Africans to emigrate.

As we have seen in the immigration raids staged by agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the process of forcibly removing immigrants from our country will be slow, inefficient, violent and in many cases unjust. And, coincidentally, largely unpopular among Americans.

And that is why it's not going to work. Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are here for overwhelmingly economic reasons. The United States remains the land of opportunity for those who want to work and thrive. The benefits of our current immigration arrangement flow not only to immigrants but also to all of us. Immigration, hate it or love it, is a key component of our economy. Take immigrants out of the picture — at huge expense, as Trump is attempting — and you will have a different economy, one you may not prefer.

Economic studies continue to show that making life tough for immigrants does not necessarily translate into more jobs for the rest of us. Yet one really gets the sense that Trump's and the right wing's animus against immigrants has little to do with economics and much to do with racism.

For decades, U.S. immigration policy has been far from perfect. For one thing, a status quo that involves ignoring the letter of the law undermines the norms of the nation.

Experience should have taught Trump and the rest of us that populist grandstanding about immigration does nothing but make the legal issues around it more intractable. But some people seem to insist on learning the same lessons over and over again.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)