You Can't Go Home Again
Remigration, ethnic cleansing, and the fallacy of racial or ethnic purity
We human beings are a territorial and tribal lot. We define and demarcate our territories and we defend them against intruders who would take our land and our homes and would dilute the essence of who we think we are. We paint our country’s flag on our faces when we attend a World Cup football match and we wear the baseball cap of our hometown team. Lifelong New York Yankees fan Jack Nicholson, playing the role of a Boston gangster in The Departed, refused to don a Red Sox cap.
The crazy thing about territory, however, is that no matter where we live or how long we have been there, our territory used to belong to someone else. The Texan or Arizonan who tells a Latina to speak English ignores the possibility that her family has been there since before the United States stole the land from Mexico.
It is now common to refer to American Indians and Inuit people as Indigenous, but their ancestors all came across the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska. In subsequent waves of immigration from Asia to the Americas, newcomers often pushed earlier settlers off their lands, who then may have gone on to displace other populations. Homo sapiens came out of Africa to Europe, where they mated with and then erased or absorbed the native Neanderthals.
Donald Trump has referred to remigration, a term often associated with the Holocaust, as the organizing principle of his policy for mass deportation. Last September, while he was running for President, Trump tweeted:
As President I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America. We will stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals… revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement, and return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).
For once he has kept his word, Stephen Miller as his faithful hatchet man putting deportations into overdrive.
The spectacle of ICE personnel wearing tactical gear, weapons at the ready, invading restaurants and Home Depot Parking lots, sweeping up citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants alike and sending them to detention centers bears an unsettling resemblance to the black and white images of Nazis rounding up Jews and other “undesirables.”
Last month the State Department announced plans to create an Office of Remigration, to be part of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which has until now acted as “the humanitarian bureau of the State Department.” Even now, the State Department website states:
PRM promotes U.S. interests by working to reduce illegal migration, to provide humanitarian assistance to those fleeing persecution, crisis, or violence, and to seek durable solutions for forcibly displaced people around the world. We do this by coordinating humanitarian policy and diplomacy, providing life-sustaining assistance, working with multilateral organizations to build global partnerships to reduce illegal migration and human smuggling, and promoting best practices in humanitarian responses.
My guess is that the pimply DOGE incels, who formerly roamed the halls of government agencies corrupting databases and striking fear into the hearts of civil servants, neglected to edit or erase it. By the time you read this it may already have been deleted.
Remigration in the MAGA imagination and the even uglier depths of white supremacist podcasts and militias is linked to “replacement theory”, the idea that dark forces are trying to replace white Christians - real Americans, they would say - with the world’s detritus that washes up on our shores or comes pouring over our southern border. People with darker skin, who worship other deities or none at all, who speak strange languages, take our jobs, and, allegedly, eat our pets.
Isn’t it only fair to make these people go back to where they came from? So say the remigration advocates. But if their advocacy, ignoring basic facts about the productive and law-abiding behavior of most immigrants, forces most of them to go back where they came from, where would it end?
Would the American Indians go back to Siberia, and would Russia take them back? The Jews would go back to Israel but from there back to Russia, Eastern Europe and Spain, and since many of those places don’t want them, back to Palestine and, eventually, back to the city of Ur in Mesopotamia, where - according to the Bible - God told a sheep herder named Abraham to go with his flocks and wives and children to Canaan, the Promised Land, in what is now the Eastern Levant, encompassing parts of current-day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Israel.
Of course, Abraham and his tribe were not the first people to settle there. There were already Canaanites and also Philistines, thought by many to be the progenitors of the Palestinians (in Arabic, the word for Palestine is Filistin). So where do the Palestinians go if they are kicked out of Gaza and the West Bank, which seems to be the preferred option for a growing portion of the Israeli population?
The point is that since Homo sapiens emerged from Africa about 60,000 years ago they have spread to all corners of the world, establishing their own cultures and nations and languages and gods. Some of them, living in northern climes, developed light complexions, blue and green eyes, and fair hair as little as 7 or 8 thousand years ago, while the vast majority of the species kept their dark eyes and more pigmented skin tones. The history of our species is one of movement, migration, conquest, and intermingling.
Some countries, like Japan and South Korea, devoted to an ideal of ethnic and cultural purity, have exceptionally low levels of immigration. In South Korea, with its big American military presence, children born to a Korean mother and American father have suffered discrimination because they are not “true Koreans”.
Most other countries have a more relaxed attitude, at least some of the time, though this is in flux
. Many European countries experience tension between their idealized racial and cultural heritage and the reality of their imperialist past. In France, they used to teach schoolchildren “Our ancestors, the Gaulois, had blue eyes and blond hair”. That hardly chimes with the reality of a colonial past stretching from the West Indies to North and sub-Sharan Africa, the Levant, and Indochina, with cross-pollination of cultures, religions, cuisines, and racial composition and the pull of the colonized peoples to the center of empire for education and employment. The same is true of other former conquerors, including Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal.
Racial purity is a myth, as is race itself to a large extent, pace Winston Churchill, who often referred in his writings to the English and German races.
Katherine J. Wu, writing in Smithsonian Magazine, notes:
By the time Homo sapiens emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, Neanderthal ancestors had already been living in Europe and Asia for some 100,000 years.
Groups of Homo sapiens didn’t leave the African continent in large numbers until about 60,000 years ago, although smaller migration events to Eurasia took place long before. Scientists suspect populations of Homo sapiens could have traveled back-and-forth to the African continent several times, but evidence of such returns are scarce.
Thousands of physical artifacts and fossils—from tools to near complete skeletons—now tell us that early humans eventually lived near their Neanderthal cousins in Europe and Asia for at least a few thousand years… a growing body of genomic evidence shows that the species interbred—even as recently as 37,000 years ago—before Neanderthals went extinct.
Because Neanderthals evolved outside of Africa, scientists assumed their DNA would not show up in the genomes of modern African populations. Previous studies have found only about 0.02 percent of Neanderthal DNA in modern African genomes.
However, new research published… in Cell turns that assumption on its head with a groundbreaking new finding: People with African ancestry actually have close to 0.5 percent Neanderthal DNA in their genome. The study also found that Neanderthal DNA makes up roughly 1.7 and 1.8 percent of the European and Asian genomes, respectively.
This surprising discovery of heritage, however, does not show that Neanderthals and ancient Africans directly interbred… Rather, it may provide evidence that populations of early humans went to Europe, mated with Neanderthals and then returned to Africa, mating with African populations that had never left.
So if you have lived in a certain place for a while you come to belong to that place, regardless of how many people would like to be rid of you. As Henry Louis Gates writes, “Freetown [in what is now the West African country Sierra Leone] was founded as a settlement for freed slaves in 1792, the year when the black Loyalists (including George Washington’s former slave, Harry Washington), arrived from Nova Scotia. In 1808, Sierra Leone became a [British] colony.”
In 1822 the first shipload of freed slaves from the United States arrived in what is now Liberia, also on the West Coast of Africa. The new arrivals did not assimilate well, instead dressing like their former plantation overlords, living in antebellum style mansions, adopting a constitution that barred the native African population from participating in elections, reserving that privilege for property owners (i.e., “Americo-Liberians”), and carrying on a lucrative slave trade with the Spanish West African colonies of Fernando Po and Rio Muni, now Equatorial Guinea.
For the United States, sending people back to where they came from - or to a hellish prison in El Salvador - is a solution to a largely imaginary problem. Countries certainly have the right to control their borders and to determine whom they will allow in.
But brutal mass deportation of people who have at least tacitly been allowed to enter and stay, have raised native-born children and established stable, productive lives, and who love and cherish the United States and its values more than most native-born citizens, is both heinous and contrary to the best interests of the nation.