AILSA CHANG, HOST:
After an Afghan national was charged in the ambush of two national guardsmen last month in Washington, D.C., the U.S. has further restricted immigration from 19 countries. President Trump has also revived a call for, quote, "reverse migration," a once fringe idea that has become a mantra for this administration. NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef joins us now to talk about all of this. Hi, Odette.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, so where exactly within this administration are you seeing these calls for reverse migration or remigration, as it's sometimes referred to, right?
YOUSEF: Right. So President Trump on Thanksgiving Day posted to social media about how immigration policies have hurt, quote, "gains and living conditions for many." And he said only reverse migration can fully cure this situation. But also, the State Department's proposed reorganization plan included a new office of remigration, and the Department of Homeland Security has called for remigration on social media posts. One of them, for example, Ailsa, with simply the word remigrate.
CHANG: OK. So what does remigrate exactly mean?
YOUSEF: Well, here's how Heidi Beirich explained it to me. She's with the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
HEIDI BEIRICH: Basically, what it means is ethnically cleansing or forcibly deporting from traditionally white countries everybody who's not white. That's the idea.
YOUSEF: The idea is often attributed to a French novelist who became known as the originator of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which is this baseless claim that white Christian Europeans are being systematically replaced by immigrants in an attempt to dilute European or Western cultures. And remigration was the solution he proposed. And the idea was that it would be a kind of organized removal of immigrants and even the children of immigrants. And Ailsa, these were fringe ideas earlier this century, but they are now associated with a movement that cuts across Europe known as the identitarian movement and which has increasingly informed party politics there and here.
CHANG: Right now. OK, so talk more about that. Like, how have these ideas become mainstream today?
YOUSEF: So the change is largely attributed to an extreme right Austrian political activist named Martin Sellner. He's a former neo-Nazi, and now he heads up an international network called Generation Identity, and he has worked to bring terms like remigration into popular discourse. I spoke to Julia Ebner about this. She heads the Violent Extremism Lab at the University of Oxford, and she has sat in on strategy sessions for identitarian groups. She says they staged events to create uncertainty and fear because then they found that people were more open to their extreme ideas.
JULIA EBNER: The strategy was all about controlled provocation and strategic polarization. So they were launching media stunts in the streets of - from Vienna to Berlin to Paris, where they tried to generate as much media attention as they could possibly get from, for example, simulating a terrorist attack in the heart of Vienna or putting a burqa on top of an old statue. So their idea was to really to provoke strategically and step by step to move the Overton window.
YOUSEF: The Overton window, Ailsa, refers to the range of policy ideas that the public considers acceptable. Remigration for a long time fell outside that window, but that's no longer true.
CHANG: No longer true. I mean, it is interesting that these ideas are so strongly associated with Europe. Like, how did they take root here in the U.S. then?
YOUSEF: So a personal story. Years ago, I was interviewing someone who was in charge of recruitment in the Midwest for a group called Identity Evropa, which at the time was the U.S.-based identitarian group. And I remember asking him how did he think the U.S. would become a white nation if not with violence. And he said he thought people would just remigrate. I think that was the first time I heard the term. And it sounded ridiculous to me. You know, why would millions of people who had put down stakes just willingly uproot?
CHANG: Yeah.
YOUSEF: Well, years later, remigration has been operationalized. We are seeing it with immigration operations in LA, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans and so on. I did some reporting from Chicago about, you know, the disorder, the tear gas, the pepper guns, military-style raids and beatings that occurred in that operation in places that didn't normally see those things. And so it has been clear that the removal of people is violent.
CHANG: But what are you hearing, Odette, from White House officials when they are being asked why they are using terms that are adopted by white nationalists?
YOUSEF: The White House, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department all rejected or didn't acknowledge the European extremist roots of this policy idea when I asked them about it. But I think it's important also to add the context of other terms that this administration has been using, you know, talking about Western values, Western civilization, chiding European allies for making themselves vulnerable to civilizational suicide or civilizational erasure. Beirich says this is language that sits firmly within the rhetoric of the identitarian and broader white nationalist movement.
CHANG: That is NPR's Odette Yousef. Thank you so much, Odette.
YOUSEF: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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