Martin Sellner, Remigration: Ein Vorschlag (Antaios: Schnellroda, 2024). 184pp. ISBN: 978-3-949041-55-6. 17 Euros.
In his 2020 monograph, The State at Its Limits, Thilo Sarrazin devotes 140 pages to surveying the vast topic of “migration in world history.” At the end he arrives at some sobering conclusions:
To Move the World: JFK...
Best Price: $8.85
Buy New $35.75
(as of 12:03 UTC - Details)
Without exception, major immigration events or military conquests entailed serious disadvantages for the indigenous population in the destination land, in terms living conditions. It often cost them their lives, their property and their livelihoods. With such great regularity that it might almost be called a law, immigration to colonised areas meant a falling standard of living, increased mortality, violence, oppression and bloodshed – even genocide – for the indigenous population.
Throughout human history, it has regularly taken decades or even centuries for the immigrants and the indigenous population to intermingle on a mass scale, to assimilate culturally and linguistically, and for a new people to emerge … Often this did not happen at all, and the groups lived side by side, with the immigrant ethnic group often dominating the natives.1
In a normal world, these observations would be so banal that nobody would bother making them, but particularly since the mid-2000s, to speak like this is to violate a great tabu. This is because European elites have embarked upon a bold new experiment. Faced with declining birthrates and ageing populations, they have liberalised immigration law and opened their borders to ever greater numbers of foreigners from the developing world. In consequence, we find ourselves on the precipice of a new era, in which Europeans face the long-term prospect of becoming a minority in their own native lands.
We are told that this is no big deal, and that to worry about it is racist. The new arrivals will integrate into European society, and countries like Germany, France and Italy will continue on much as before, with various vaguely defined enhancements from diversity and better cuisine. This is an incredibly naive view, formulated for the compliant masses, and I doubt anybody in charge really believes it. Human populations are not interchangeable blank slates, and cultural traditions are not mere operating systems that can be installed just as easily on this human brain as the next. Rather, our cultures and societies express our innate, inherited proclivities. Germany would be a different place if its population were replaced with “assimilated” French and English, to say nothing of migrants from Africa and the Arab world. Mass migration is promoted for reasons of expediency, to keep pension programmes solvent and to make up for labour shortages, but in the long run it promises to change European society forever.
Allegedly, the people are sovereign in our liberal democracies, but ordinary Europeans have had very little say about replacement migration. Instead, millions of migrants have found their ways to our shores largely on the strength of judicial rulings and bureaucratic dictates emanating from the postwar international political system. Our minders have widened their understanding of human rights so far, that they find themselves incapable of fulfilling the basic state function of border defence. Like cells without membranes, states without functional borders will sooner or later die, and it is hard to overlook the many ways in which the influx resembles an invasion. Overwhelmingly, the new arrivals are young men, many of whom perpetrate substantial crimes upon the natives, including the classic violations of invading armies, like rape. They use the welfare state to loot their destination lands, transferring billions of entitlements to their home countries, and they bring their native politics with them – demonstrating on German streets to free Palestine and conducting campaign rallies in Berlin for elections in Turkey. It is not hard to see the near future, where Europeans will have access only to proposition nations that are open to everyone, while the new arrivals from the global south will retain their racial and cultural identities and combine control over their native lands with growing influence over European politics.
The political left welcomes these developments and they deploy a host of arguments to defend them. We hear that mass migration is an inevitable, unstoppable force and that it is our unique responsibility to ensure the welfare of all humans everywhere. The establishment centre-right parties, meanwhile, demand half-measures to increase popular “acceptance” of these epochal changes. If anything, that is even more ominous. Any realistic observer must wonder what Europe will look like in the next 50 years, whether it will be even minimally recognisable, what kind of world we have condemned our children to grow up in, and whether there is anything to be done about this.
Martin Sellner is an identitarian activist from Austria whose name has become a household word in Germany since the ridiculous Correctiv scandal from January. He believes that there is an answer to the problem our elites have sown for us, and that this answer is “Remigration” – an umbrella term that he uses for various policies to reverse the most catastrophic effects of mass migration and allow Europeans to retain political control over their own countries. Sellner has been smeared in the left-liberal press as a racist and a neo-Nazi who harbours genocidal fantasies, but these are lazy accusations that find no support in his actual statements. His recent work expresses more optimism about liberal democracy than I ever could, and the mild ethnic understandings that characterise his politics were shared by many opponents of the National Socialists, including the allied powers who defeated them. What is more, migrants to Europe as a rule exhibit much more pronounced ethnocentrism than anything Sellner has expressed, and nobody important seems to think that is a problem.
Sellner’s most recent book, Remigration: A Suggestion, follows a longer monograph he published last year on Regime Change from the Right; the two share many common themes, and it is hard to review one without reviewing the other. Because I don’t think 10,000-word blog posts will interest very many people, however, I’ve nevertheless decided to split my discussion into two separate posts. The second review of Regime Change will follow in a few days, I hope by Friday.
Remigration is fairly neatly divided into two parts. The first three chapters explain why mass migration is a problem and outline a suite of policies for reversing its most negative effects. The rest of the book addresses practical and moral considerations and represents a reply to potential critics.
Fat for Fuel: A Revolu...
Best Price: $7.40
Buy New $11.89
(as of 10:20 UTC - Details)
Sellner’s view of remigration, as I see it, rests on five pillars. The first is the establishment of an “Assimilation Monitor,” produced by a “demographic institute” that will provide yearly reports to “document the ethnic and cultural composition and changes in the population” of Germany (44). These are data that are currently collected only incompletely, if they are not outright withheld, in order to limit popular opposition to open-borders policies. Bureaucratic demographers would regularly survey everything from the language to the voting habits to the cultural and religious observances of the various ethnicities that find themselves within Germany. These data would then provide the basis for establishing migration quotas for specific regional and cultural groups, with a view towards keeping migration at socially, culturally and politically tolerable levels: “The immigration rate of a group must not exceed its integration and absorption rate in order to avoid the formation of parallel societies” (48).
The next three elements of “remigration” address those three categories of migrants who are already here. This first category, asylees and asylum seekers, are to face the “consistent application and reform of asylum and residency laws” (58). Closer scrutiny of existing asylees would doubtless generate grounds to deport a great many of them, but in the longer term the legal construct of asylum itself will have to be substantially reformed:
Asylum must once again become an exceptional remedy for individually persecuted people from neighbouring countries. As long as there are no dictatorships in our midsts that persecute dissidents, the number of asylum procedures per year should be in the low double-digits. Even here, protection would only be temporary. Applicants who have not been individually persecuted in a neighbouring country should be turned away at the border. Pushbacks must also be carried out in the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas. As long as European external border protection does not work and we have no remedies for transnational social abuse and crime, national border controls and protective measures must retain their legitimacy. (59f.)
Together with additional measures, like abolishing family reunification and incentivising voluntary departure, Sellner estimates that a maximum of 3.5 million asylees could leave Germany within 5 to 7 years.
