Remigration has become the latest call to action among far-right actors in Europe and North America, heralded as a solution to the alleged degenerating effects of the Great Replacement. The concept refers to the mass deportation of non-white immigrants in Western countries, regardless of their citizenship status. 

The Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) tracked the emergence of the remigration narrative when it first appeared online in 2010 and rose in prominence over the last fifteen years before gaining mainstream visibility in 2025. A once obscure concept, today, remigration appears in far-right political party manifestos across Europe and has gained trans-Atlantic resonance within the current Trump administration to justify ongoing ICE deportation efforts by the Department of Homeland Security. The transnational architecture of social media has significantly made the exchange of ideas around remigration highly visible and rapidly scalable.

Join CSOH for a panel discussion examining the rise in popularity of the remigration concept, from its origins as a fringe intellectual talking point towards its legitimation by public officials. Panelists will explore the various interpretations and adaptations of a remigration agenda to fit local political and social contexts in Europe, the UK, and the US, offering regional perspectives on this growing transnational narrative and its implications for democratic governance, civil rights, and the future of immigration policy.

Panelists

Shada Islam

Shada Islam is an award-winning Brussels-based journalist and think tanker who now works independently as an advisor/analyst/strategist/ writer on Europe Africa Asia Geopolitics Trade and Race, Diversity and Inclusion. Her columns are published in the EU Observer, and the Guardian and on her own Substack.

Shada worked for nine years as Director of Europe and Geopolitics at Friends of Europe, an influential independent think tank based in Brussels. She now runs her own Brussels-based global media, strategy and advisory company, New Horizons Project.  Shada is Senior Advisor at the European Policy Centre and also at Bursons, a renowned international communication firm. She is also a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Natolin).

In 2017, Politico identified her as one of Brussels’ 20 most influential women. In 2023, 2024 and 2025, she was on the ZN Consulting list of 50 top influencers. Shada has won European of the Year Media awards from the European Movement International and from the Association of European Journalists of Catalonia. 

Shabna Begum

Shabna is CEO of the Runnymede Trust and was Director of Research there before her current post. Her leadership has been at the heart of all the Runnymede Trust’s recent projects, including research on education, including art education, police in schools, and more broadly around the cost-of-living crisis, the experiences of women of colour in the workplace, racism in migration debates and most recently on Islamophobia.

Before Runnymede, Shabna worked as a teacher and Head of Social Science in London schools for over 20 years.

In 2021, she completed a PhD at Queen Mary University London based on her family’s experience of migration and racism in 1970s east London as an entry point to a wider community history around a Bengal squatters’ movement. She went on to translate that into a book ‘From Sylhet to Spitalfields: Bengali Squatters in 1970s east London’ published with Lawrence and Wishart, 2022.

Heidi Beirich

Heidi Beirich, Ph.D., is an expert on the American and European far right, including white supremacist, anti-immigrant, antigovernment, and other extremist movements. In 2020, Beirich co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) to monitor and counter increasingly transnational hate movements, particularly in areas of the world where capacity is limited to combat far-right movements that threaten human rights and democracy.

Beirich has testified in Congress on issues related to extremism in the military and among veterans and on the dangers of accelerationist and neo-Nazi movements. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol sought her testimony on the threat posed by the extremist Proud Boys and on the history of the rise of white supremacy in the U.S. Government agencies and tech companies have sought her advice on policies to combat hate speech, hate crimes, and domestic terrorism. 

Before co-founding GPAHE, Beirich led the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, the premier organization tracking hate and antigovernment movements in the United States.

Moderators

Eviane Leidig

Dr. Eviane Leidig is Director of Research and Outreach at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH). She leads CSOH’s research projects and coalition building efforts to combat hate, extremism, and digital harms. Eviane is an expert on online radicalization, extremism, threats to democracy, and platform governance and regulation.