White nationalists in multiple countries, including Canada, are pushing for mass deportations of non-Europeans to be part of the political platforms of their right-wing parties.
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
Illustration: Hazel Woodrow
Against the backdrop of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department snatching people off American streets and shipping them off to South American and African prisons, a new word has begun to enter the lexicon of Americans and Canadians alike: remigration.
“Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States,” Trump posted to his social media platform Truth Social in June.
According to reports, Trump wants to create an official “Office of Remigration” to carry out his policy of mass deportation. Data shows that most people arrested in ICE raids don’t have criminal records, despite Trump saying they are simply removing criminals from the country. Some of the people they are deporting are American-born children who are US citizens.
In Canada, masked groups of white nationalists have held public demonstrations with “mass deportations now” and "remigration saves our nation" banners. Daniel Tyrie, the former People’s Party of Canada executive director, and “founder and chairman” of the registered non-profit Dominion Society of Canada, is trying a more professionalized and political approach.
In a livestream with DSC co-founder Greg Wycliffe, Tyrie says it’s their “main mission to normalize” the concept of remigration. His goal is to make Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre say the word “remigration” by the end of the year.
According to multiple experts, remigration is a form of ethnic cleansing targeting people of non-European descent.
In an email to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network Tyrie wrote, “The Dominion Society of Canada does not advocate for remigration based on ethnicity. Our remigration plan prioritizes the return of illegal immigrants, criminals, individuals on expiring visas, temporary foreign workers, and permanent residents without full citizenship.” He adds, “we explicitly reject any association with ethnic cleansing.”
According to Wycliffe, “you don't have to be ethnically pure and part of the club, but you have to respect the people who found and developed this nation. That's what's important.”
However, the more vocal members of DSC admit that the project is racist. “Remigration means all of the foreigners,” Diagolon influencer Alex Vriend said on X, “including the ones who were ‘born here’ and ‘assimilated.’”
Vriend hosted a Spaces on X (a public conference call) on August 22. In it, Tyrie told the audience, “we wanna attack every level of government to spread our message and start pushing back against the people that are transforming our society, whether it be tearing down statues or replacing us with foreigners.”
“I like to reference areas like Brampton and, and Surrey and so on, as sort of canaries in the coal mine,” says Tyrie. “This is what it looks like when an area changes from majority white heritage Canadian to majority East Indian within 30 years.”
Other speakers in the Spaces included neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Vriend’s co-host greeted the room with a loud anti-Black slur, saying “What’s up, n*****s?”
The Dominion Society of Canada isn’t afraid of being labeled racist; they welcome it. In the livestream with Wycliffe and Tyrie, both agreed with a commenter that it’s a good thing to be called racist. On August 4, Wycliffe wrote on X that “racism works,” including a video in which he calls himself “the spokesperson for racism in Canada.”
Tyrie has been successful in getting an op-ed promoting his new organization in Juno News, and a story about them and their mission in the Western Standard, both right-wing media outlets.
“Remigration” is a softening up and repackaging of the language of forced, racially-motivated deportation to appear reasonable to the average person, and to appeal to people who may otherwise bristle at the inherent racism and discrimination embedded within it.
Remigration: the call for forced deportation of migrant communities, with the intent of creating an ethnically or culturally homogenous society, essentially a non-violent form of ethnic cleansing.” - Institute for Strategic Dialogue
In the late 1930s, Adolf Eichmann, an officer of the SS who significantly contributed to the plans and execution of the Holocaust, created the Reichzentrale für jüdische Auswanderung, or the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, and later throughout the Reich. First by creating hostile conditions, and then compelling them to leave, the office forced European Jews out to fill emigration quotas.
“The term is a call for state policy to deport en masse people of non-European or non-Christian descent "back" to their "home countries." It is a key concept of European Identitarian groups who fear a "Great Replacement," and using a more politically correct euphemism, is a proposal for an ethnic cleansing of people of non-European descent from the continent.” - Global Project Against Hate and Extremism
The term “remigration” was coined by French writer Renaud Camus, who is credited with developing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory which paints demographic change in Western countries as a plot to strip white people of political power. Proponents of the theory frequently claim that the West, including Canada, is being “invaded.” The theory has motivated multiple mass murders, leading to the deaths of over 170 people.
Austrian white nationalist and identitarian Martin Sellner is a long-time proponent of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory – and “remigration” is his solution.
“[The Great Replacement theory is] a worldview that has inspired calls for extreme action, ranging from nonviolent ethnic cleansing through "remigration" to genocide. The crisis narratives central to the theory often inspire a sense of apocalyptic urgency in its adherents.” - Age of Insurrection, David Neiwert, page 27
Sellner, who previously was a member of a German neo-Nazi group, is well known for a 2017 stunt in which he, Canadian Lauren Southern, and members of Sellner’s group Generation Identity, attempted to use a raft to block a ship run by the NGO Doctors Without Borders after disembarking from a port in Italy.
In 2019, The Guardian reported that Sellner had been in contact with the Christchurch mass murderer before his attack on the Muslim community killed 51 people. Sellner had invited the shooter, who was inspired by the Great Replacement theory, to meet him if he was ever in Austria.
When Sellner promoted the Dominion Society of Canada on X, Tyrie responded, “Thank you for sharing, Martin! You are a big inspiration for us.”
In July, Daniel Tyrie wrote in Juno News, “[Remigration] includes the deportation of illegal migrants and fraudulent asylum seekers, restrictions on temporary migrants, the withdrawal of public benefits from non-citizens, and the creation of incentives for recent migrants to voluntarily return to their countries of origin.”
“Today, a majority of Canadians want immigration levels reduced — and many now support mass deportations.” Although he doesn’t include a supporting citation, it’s a claim he makes often.
On an August 5 livestream he stated that, “According to opinion polls, the large majority want less to no immigration and almost a majority are calling for things like mass deportations.” On an August 6 livestream he said, “Public opinion polls show time after time that a large majority of Canadians want little to no immigration and even a significant portion want mass deportations.”
Presumably Tyrie is referring to a National Post article from December 2024 which claims that "nearly half of all Canadians believe that mass deportations are necessary to stop illegal migration." The article, however, misrepresents the polling data which actually shows support for the statement that "mass deportations of undocumented immigrants are necessary to curb illegal / irregular migration (emphasis ours)." This awkwardly framed question and its circular logic isn't properly quoted anywhere in the National Post piece, and the data doesn't show support for the kind of mass deportations favoured by the Dominion Society of Canada.
In the Juno article Tyrie also favourably mentions the Remigration Summit—a conference held in Milan, Italy in May of this year.
“This conference drew nationalist and conservative leaders from across Europe to discuss what was once a taboo subject,” writes Tyrie, “how to reverse decades of demographic transformation driven by mass migration. The summit was hosted by prominent figures in European politics and focused not just on halting new immigration, but actively restoring national identity through a variety of policies intended to reverse migration flows.”
Tyrie chooses not to name these “prominent figures in European politics.” According to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), one of the organizers and a headlining speaker at the conference was Martin Sellner.
Another organizer and speaker at the Milan conference was Dries Van Langenhove of Belgium. He was convicted last year of racism and Holocaust denial. Portugal’s Afonso Gonçalves, another organizer and speaker at the conference, has, according to GPAHE, referred to women as “cockroaches” and argued that people who have abortions should face the death penalty.
Despite Sellner’s neo-Nazi and white nationalist activism, electoral successes in Europe have allowed him and others to further push the idea of remigration into the mainstream. Having pitched the idea of remigration to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right political party in Germany, AfD began campaigning on the concept, putting up posters reading “Summer, sun, remigration.” The far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) urged the European Union to install a “remigration commissioner.”
Both parties experienced a surge in support in recent elections.
“Mainstreaming helps expose new people to hate and recruit them to extremist ideologies, but it also softens extremist beliefs through coded terms that obscure their violent underpinnings. In this way, mainstreaming and normalization help further radicalize individuals who are drawn to far-right-extremist ideas. Thus, relabeling concepts like the forced deportation and ethnic cleansing of immigrants as "re-migration" can make hateful expressions seem more acceptable to a broader range of ordinary individuals. Racist expressions may appear more acceptable when they come from elected officials in mainstream political parties, helping legitimize and spread ideas that used to be considered fringe. For example, a sitting president tells four congresswomen of color - three of whom were born in the United States— to go back to the countries they came from, and crowds of people start chanting ‘send them back’ at his political rallies.” - Hate in the Homeland, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, page 47
In January 2024, German investigative journalism outlet Correctiv published an exposé of Sellner’s secret meeting in Germany with members of AfD and others, including neo-Nazis. The meeting, held 10 months before regional German elections in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg where AfD saw a surge in support, was meant to discuss Sellner’s “masterplan” of remigration policy in Germany, and how to make it happen.
According to Correctiv, this plan even included German citizens who were born with “the wrong skin colour, the wrong parents, or aren’t sufficiently ‘assimilated.’” Their reporting also details how attendees discussed moving up to two million people, including citizens who advocate for refugees, to North Africa.
Jeremy MacKenzie and other influencers within Diagolon—whose affiliates and fans share a crossover with those who have claimed membership in Tyrie’s organization—have been talking about forcibly, and in some cases violently, deporting all South Asian people from Canada, particularly people originating from India. Refrains of “they have to go back” and “Auslander Raus” (“foreigners out”) are a fixture within their, and others’, online spaces.
“Give me some guys and some weapons and we'll fucking get rid of them,” MacKenzie said during a June 2024 live stream. “We'll take them up. Get in the truck, you're going to the airport. ‘Make me.’ Okay, bang. Anybody else? Anybody else not want to go to the airport? Who wants to go to the airport? Show of hands, who wants to go to the airport?”
He added, “I only had to shoot one, see? Easy. And you wanted to keep them here and have thousands of people die over the next ten years. Jeez, what a terrible mathematician you are.”
In the August 22 Spaces on X DSC founding board member Cleveland Jones—he also goes by Ken—said, “I think that obviously stuff like, or organizations like the Dominion Society and Second Sons and you know, like the community of Diagolon are all complementary of another.”
In the same call, both Tyrie and Jones told a participant that they would not “counter-signal” (meaning they would not denounce) neo-Nazis who want to sieg heil in public.
“Anyone with two IQ to rub together understands that there's a approach to things that doesn't require you to, you know, like you're not gonna go out there in a bunch of masks with your fucking, you know, arm up and get anything done in this country,” Jones said.
“Radicals have an important role in the political spectrum. They might have a message that's unpalatable for the large majority, but they do push the boundaries of the Overton window,” Tyrie said.
The Overton window refers to the range of topics and opinions that is considered acceptable speech in mainstream politics.
Continuing, Tyrie said, “And that's how we really push things. That's how we change the conversation. That's how we push the Overton window in a very specific way. So yeah, counter-signalling the radicals is generally unproductive in my view.”
Whether you measure it by number of supporters, fundraising ability, or by the size of its militant groups, the white nationalist movement in Canada has never been larger or more of a threat.
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