Remigration: A Review of Martin Sellner's Proposal to Reverse the Flow of Refugees and Save Europe

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:

Without exception, major immigration events or military conquests entailed serious disadvantages for the indigenous population in the destination land, in terms of 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.