1,677 words

Martin Sellner
Remigration: Ein Vorschlag [Repatriation: A Proposal]
Steigra: Antaios Verlag, 2024

Vienna native Martin Sellner founded the Identitarian Movement of Austria in 2012, maintained a highly successful YouTube channel before it fell to censorship in 2019, and is the author or co-author of four previous books. His newest offering, only available in German (although an English version is planned), is a proposal for the gradual reconquest of Germany and Austria as homelands for the German people. It is sometimes reminiscent of the chapter “Restoring White Homelands” from Greg Johnson’s White Nationalist Manifesto.

Sellner begins by pointing out that the governments of Germany and Austria already sponsor official repatriation programs offering assistance to immigrants and asylum-seekers who, for whatever reasons, have chosen not to remain. Such assistance includes training in skills currently in demand in their countries of origin, and even payment of travel and start-up expenses. The logo of the Austrian program, as Sellner remarks, looks as if it might have come from an identitarian repatriation campaign:

Much of the problem of replacement-level migration could be solved merely by shifting incentives and expanding these currently existing programs. The goal of a repatriation policy is to ensure that the German-speaking lands gradually see their national character determined once again by a secure, livable, and stable ethnic majority. Sellner emphasizes that his program can be implemented within about a generation to the economic and cultural benefit of all concerned.

For decades, Western European countries have been carrying out what even supporters have acknowledged is a demographic “experiment unique in history,” one which the United Nations has openly termed “replacement migration.” Since the 1970s, population growth in Western Europe has come almost exclusively from immigrants and their children, while the native population has aged and diminished. Without immigration, Germany would today have a population of 70 million rather than 83, while Austria would have six million instead of nine. Immigration is indisputably a primary cause of rising criminality; the overloading of the education, health, and welfare systems; rising rents; the paving over of green spaces; and the emergence of Islamic terrorism in Europe.

Perhaps more serious still is ethnic bloc voting, always for parties which favor further immigration and public subsidies for parallel societies. This is a self-reinforcing tendency which can no longer be peacefully counteracted once the foreign population reaches a certain level, which the author estimates at about one-third of the electorate. The natives of Europe are losing control of their own future. This fate cannot be averted with verbiage about assimilation, law and order, or the other placebos of the “respectable” Right, but only by a fundamental reversal in the direction of migration.

To hide the failure of their own policies, today’s German and Austrian regimes try to keep the public in the dark about the realities of migrant demography, especially in the context of crime. Since an accurate understanding of the demographic landscape is an essential precondition for any rational policy, Sellner advocates the establishment of a demographic institute. This body would be tasked with the objective study and documentation of the population’s ethnic composition, including the economic integration and cultural assimilation of its various component groups. It would be required to publish annual reports with copious statistical information. Specific areas for study would include electoral behavior, knowledge and use of the German language, and religious convictions. From such reports it will become clear which groups are contributing to German society and which represent a burden upon it, which are assimilating and which building their own parallel societies. Eventually it will be possible to establish empirically how many immigrants of a particular origin can be admitted to German citizenship without threatening the German majority culture. For the long term, Sellner recommends adoption of an immigration policy based on maximal quotas for groups of different origin. He explicitly cites the American immigration system that was in place from 1924 until 1965 as a model.

Immigrants who constitute an economic, criminal, and cultural burden on Germany tend strongly to come from non-Western, Afro-Arabic, and Muslim backgrounds. Obviously, not all members of these groups burden German society equally, and Sellner’s proposal places the highest priority on repatriating criminals, the long-term unemployed, and jihadists. Even those who merely represent a cultural burden, however, should eventually be subject to repatriation.

Sellner distinguishes three legal categories: asylum-seekers, foreign residents, and unassimilated citizens. Since asylum is supposed to be sought in the first safe country a refugee reaches according to international law, very few asylum-seekers in the German-speaking lands are legitimate. Most are economic migrants from distant lands who should be subject to quick deportation even under existing law. Political asylum was not designed as a path to permanent resettlement.

Foreign residents are those legally in Germany due to marriage, study, or work visas, or as a result of bilateral agreements. Their residence permits are either permanent or temporary. All such permission should be revoked in cases of conviction for serious crimes. Welfare assistance for foreign residents should be carried out by a distinct government body in order to clarify its costs to the German taxpayers (which the present regime does its best to disguise). Such welfare benefits should, where possible, be in kind rather than in cash, should enjoy lower priority than assistance to citizens, and should be indexed on the standard of living in the foreigners’ country of origin. Existing laws against political activity contrary to the interests of the German people should be enforced. Freedom to demonstrate or assemble should apply only to German citizens, and the display of foreign flags or colors should be forbidden.

Finally, there are several million persons of foreign origin who were overhastily granted citizenship by the current anti-German regime despite an inability or unwillingness to assimilate. These people do not identify with Germany and its natives, and often continue to be a burden upon them. Such persons must eventually be stripped of their citizenship and deported to their countries of origin. Sellner does not, however, advocate the revocation of anyone’s citizenship for purely ethnic or religious reasons: only for an absence of loyalty or willingness to contribute to German society.

Homecoming centers can be established in immigrant neighborhoods to offer attractive voluntary repatriation programs involving language refresher courses, job training, and even living and work arrangements in the destination countries. Sellner considers payments as high as 30,000-50,000 euros possible, arguing they would still represent a long-term savings for the state. A few success stories should be publicized in the interest of advertising.

A certain pressure for migrants to decide between assimilation and repatriation can be provided by the restoration of German cultural hegemony (Deutsche Leitkultur) as a replacement for multiculturalism. This means that the cultural and religious traditions of the majority ethnicity will once again be publicly celebrated, as is done in Hungary and Israel. All migrants, with or without citizenship, will be expected to accept the favored position of German culture within Germany. Foreign parallel societies will no longer enjoy state subsidies, and funding from abroad will be forbidden. There will be no public recognition of foreign holidays, religious food prescriptions, or times of prayer.

It is sometimes maintained that many migrants cannot be deported because their countries of origin are either unsafe or unwilling to take them back. Sellner proposes to overcome such objections through the establishment of anchor centers abroad. The first steps toward establishing such centers have already been taken by the existing European Union regime in its Common European Asylum System proposal that was made public in December of last year. This plan, however, foresees the accommodation of just 30,000 persons per year at a time when over one million persons per year are claiming asylum in Europe!

As Sellner comments, a serious repatriation program must think big. He proposes the establishment of anchor centers on the North African coast that are built and financed by the West on the basis of long-term leases similar to the British lease on Hong Kong in the last century. Such centers would include schools, hospitals, sport and leisure centers, well-equipped police departments, and offer possibilities for employment, long-term residence, and even the establishment of small businesses. They would gradually be built up into model cities and special economic zones able to accommodate two or three million persons with considerable latitude to manage their own affairs.

Besides previous “undeportables,” migrants picked up in the Mediterranean could also be sent to such locations. All migrants will be free to leave at any time they like, so long as they do not head for Europe. Sellner amusingly suggests Europe might ship its liberal do-gooders there to serve as social workers without thereby endangering their homelands. All of this will cost less than what is currently being wasted trying to make Germans out of Africans and Middle Easterners: prices for nearly everything in North Africa are a fraction of those in Europe.

Foreign aid must be made conditional on the willingness of foreign nations to cooperate with European repatriation efforts, while those who cooperate most quickly and fully can be rewarded through partial cancellation of debt or trade advantages.

Much of the resistance to repatriation comes from a lack of political imagination. Even many who understand the irreversible damage that is being done by extra-European migrants think it would be utopian simply to start shipping them home. Summoning the will to begin is indeed the most difficult obstacle: Once the momentum has been reversed, these critics will become supporters. There really is no alternative: Mass immigration was a utopian experiment whose failure was foreordained. The only rational response is to summon the humility to begin the long process of reversing the policies of the last half-century. The sooner we begin, the more manageable the task will be. It is therefore comforting to note that most of Sellner’s support comes from his younger compatriots. They are not as invested in the failed ideas of the past as their elders.

A change is going to come.