Remigration: a growing far-right movement

A “dark money lobbying network” bankrolled by a major donor to Reform UK has been associated with “open advocates of far-right remigration”, said Byline Times.

Aerospace tycoon Richard Smith “owns 55 Tufton Street, the Westminster townhouse that houses a cluster of opaquely funded right-wing lobby groups”. One of these, the New Culture Forum, has platformed speakers who call for “mass deportations of ethnic minority British citizens”.

“A lot of the people who have come here legally, especially over the last 30 years, and those who have been born here, they don’t belong here,” Restore Britain campaign director Charlie Downes told the forum’s podcast, “Deprogrammed”, in August 2025.

As seen in the Makerfield by-election, Reform UK is being challenged on its right by Restore, which has advocated for “reverse mass migration”. Once a fringe, far-right concept, remigration is gaining traction not only in Britain but across the world.

What is remigration?

In general terms, it describes the process of an immigrant voluntarily returning to their country of origin, said Al Jazeera. However, in a far-right context, remigration has been appropriated as a “method of ethnic cleansing”, where “all non-white people are forcibly removed from traditionally white countries”.

The idea can be traced back to Nazi Germany of the 1930s, but it was revived by French novelist Renaud Camus’ “widely debunked” 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement”, which advocated the Great Replacement theory.

Fifteen years later, the meaning of remigration can be “elusive”, said The Economist. The term is now “less a set of policies and more a catch-all term for a vision of Europe with its ethnic and cultural identity rid of what they call ‘Afro-Arab replacement migration’”. Proponents hope to capitalise on voters who feel “uneasy at the rapid scale of demographic change they witness around them”.

Is it becoming mainstream?

Social media is both driving and reflecting the rise in messaging around remigration policies. The idea gained “mainstream visibility” last year, said the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate. During 2025, there were 952,000 mentions of the term by 303,000 unique authors on social media – more than double the year before.

Support is also becoming more visible beyond online forums. In May, more than 500 activists and influencers congregated in Portugal for Remigration Summit 2026. “VIP guests” included former US Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and Jared Taylor, editor of white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, said Politico.

“Several thousand” anti-immigration protesters took to the streets of Rome in mid-June in support of a citizens’ initiative bill named “Remigration and Reconquest”, said Deutsche Welle. The bill, which gathered the 50,000 signatures required for discussion in parliament, includes proposals to offer foreigners financial incentives to agree to what it calls voluntary repatriation, while incentivising Italian families to have more children.

Who is pushing for it?

Many European parties have outlined their support for remigration in their election manifestos, said the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate. These include the Austrian Freedom Party, Alternative for Germany, and Dutch parties Forum for Democracy and Conservative Liberals.

Others who have expressed interest in remigration include Flemish Interest in Belgium, Lega in Italy, Vox in Spain, Alternative for Sweden, the Finns Party in Finland, and Reconquête (Reconquest) in France.

But it has also found favour in the Trump administration. In November, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security posted that “the stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now”.

Does it have support in the UK?

“Millions will have to go,” said Rupert Lowe at the official launch of Restore Britain in February. The party’s manifesto promises that a legally resident foreign national in the UK who is “unable to speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, refuses to work, fails to integrate, commits crime or actively hates our way of life” would be deported under a Restore government.

But whether the concept has widespread appeal with the electorate is more doubtful. A YouGov poll in August last year found that 45% of Britons approved of “an immigration scenario whereby no more new migrants were admitted, and large numbers of recent migrants were required to leave”.

However, questioned on the specifics, respondents varied wildly; while 90% of those in favour supported the deportation of asylum seekers coming via small boat crossings, only 26% supported the removal of skilled migrant workers and even fewer supported expelling healthcare workers or foreign nationals who had taken British citizenship.