Australian Remigration

What it would look like, and how it could be achieved tomorrow

By Gladio

The Rise of Remigration

Remigration as a term in nationalist circles started to gain currency in the 2010s when European identitarians including Austrian activist Martin Sellner and French writer Renaud Camus starting using the word to describe a deliberate, policy-driven reversal of demographic change in Western nations, a different connotation to the more traditional ‘repatriation’. The idea was simple: if decades of mass immigration had fundamentally altered the ethnic composition of European societies, then a concerted political programme could begin to reverse that process.

For years, the concept remained confined to identitarian circles and the fringes of European nationalist politics. Then, beginning around 2024, it broke through. Austria’s Freedom Party campaigned openly on “remigration of uninvited strangers.” Germany’s AfD made it a centrepiece of its 2025 federal election campaign after concerted effort at regional level by identitarian activists. Parties in the Netherlands, Finland, and Belgium adopted the term or its close equivalents. Most strikingly, by late 2025 the Trump administration in America had embraced the language outright: The Department of Homeland Security posted “Remigration now” on social media, and the State Department’s proposed reorganisation included an Office of Remigration. While the American substance has not yet matched the style, for the first time since the 1930s, net migration to the United States has turned negative.

The question for Australian nationalists is what, if anything, ‘remigration’ means for us.

Australia Compared to Europe: The Metapolitical vs The Legal-Bureaucratic

Here we encounter a paradox that anyone serious about immigration policy in Australia needs to understand.

In Western Europe, there is a large and growing public appetite for radical immigration reversal. The integration failures are, because of the Musk-led opening up of social media, more visible than ever: parallel societies in French banlieues, Pakistani rape gang scandals in England, clan-based crime networks in Germany and Sweden, all alongside welfare dependency rates among third world migrant cohorts that dwarf those of native populations. These realities generate potent political energy. European voters are increasingly willing to support parties that promise not just to slow immigration, but to reverse it.

But Europe’s legal-bureaucratic environment is a thicket of impediments. The European Convention on Human Rights, EU asylum directives, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, deeply entrenched judicial review norms, and a vast ecosystem of NGOs with standing to litigate… all of these create procedural friction that makes large-scale removal extraordinarily slow and difficult. Even Austria, which achieved a record 14,156 deportations in 2025 and cut asylum applications by 36 percent, is operating well within these constraints rather than overcoming them.

Australia’s situation is almost exactly the inverse. Our legal-bureaucratic environment is, comparatively, far more permissive. We are not signatories to the ECHR. Our constitution contains few explicit individual rights protections applicable to non-citizens. The Migration Act grants the Minister extraordinary executive power, power that was expanded dramatically in 2024 when Parliament passed laws enabling third-country deportation arrangements, criminal penalties for non-cooperation with removal, and ministerial authority to reverse protection findings. A Senate inquiry estimated that 80,000 non-citizens could be susceptible to deportation under these provisions. Both major parties compete to appear tougher on border control. The institutional infrastructure is there and to a large extent we have the bipartisan consensus against boat people forged by the Howard and Abbott Governments to thank for it.

But metapolitically, things are tougher. Building a broad public constituency for demographic reversal is harder in Australia than in Europe, precisely because our immigration system has historically been more selective. We’ve filtered more strongly for English proficiency and employability. The result is that Australia’s immigrant population, on aggregate, is more economically productive and better integrated than Europe’s asylum-heavy intake. This makes the political argument for reversal less viscerally obvious to ordinary voters, even as the long-term demographic trajectory raises the same fundamental questions about national identity and social cohesion. It’s a lot easier to deport Mohamed the rapist drug dealer than it is the law-abiding Chinese-Malaysian doctor who’s been here for forty years and has many Australian friends. Compared to Europe, our migrant intake has proportionately had a lot more of the latter migrant. The more recent deluge of ‘skilled’ immigrants, particularly from the Indian subcontinent, only changes this problem at the margins. Any programme of ‘remigration’ that is based on wholesale deportation of fundamentally productive migrant groups will inherently face tougher political challenges as Australians confront how badly they really want to deport ‘the good ones’. Even the average One Nation voter (or leader!) seems to mostly want mere multi-ethnic assimilationism, a return to the Howard era.

Australian nationalists need to reckon honestly with both sides of this equation: the tools are better than we often realise, but the political case requires more sophistication than a European-style appeal to immediate crisis if we want to reverse our demographic direction while there’s still time to do so with a democratic majority.

Why Australian Nationalists Need Policy Detail

It’s not enough for Australian nationalists to simply declare “we need remigration” and leave it at that. The political landscape is shifting, and we need to be ready with actionable policy when the moment arrives, policy crafted to our specifically Australian conditions.

The next Federal Election will likely see the Liberal Party, already a hollowed-out and ideologically exhausted husk, obliterated. One Nation has definitively demonstrated that there is a substantial constituency for nationalist politics in Australia, and while they will have their best-ever election result in 2028, it seems likely they will not have the political talent or policy depth to provide a true alternative government on solid ideological grounding. The tumult of 2028 will create the conditions for reinvigorated right-wing political formation to contest what will be an era-defining set of elections in the 2030s. Whatever party takes the lead will need a policy programme to address the remigration question that is legally defensible, fiscally rational, administratively achievable, and politically palatable to the broader electorate.

Australia’s legal framework gives us more room to manoeuvre than European nationalists have but we need to be precise about what we’re proposing and how it will work.

Using the Tools at Our Disposal

A possible Australian remigration approach would centre on two tiers: Scaling up an existing government programme to become a proper voluntary remigration programme and increasing the flow of current immigrants out of the path to citizenship for eventual return to their homelands.

1. Incentivised Voluntary Departure for Citizens and Permanent Residents:

Australia already operates the Return and Reintegration Assistance Program, which provides support to non-citizens who choose to leave voluntarily. This programme could be substantially restructured and expanded. The key change would be offering significant financial packages to Australian citizens who hold dual citizenship or are eligible for citizenship in another country, in exchange for voluntary renunciation of their Australian citizenship and relocation.

The amount offered would be determined by an individual fiscal assessment prepared by Treasury but utilising data from Federal and State governments: a net present value calculation of the projected lifetime cost or benefit of that individual to the Australian taxpayer, incorporating variables such as welfare receipt history, criminal record, employment and tax history, qualifications, age, health indicators, and broader demographic data including country-of-origin fiscal profiles. The logic is straightforward: if an individual is projected to be a net fiscal cost over their lifetime, the government saves money by offering them a departure payment up to that amount. The receiving country’s cooperation could be secured through parallel government-to-government payments (as already allowed in the Migration Act 2024), sweetening the deal for nations that might otherwise be reluctant to accept returnees.

This approach is formally race-neutral as it targets fiscal cost, not ethnicity, but because fiscal outcomes correlate with the integration patterns of different migrant cohorts, the practical effect would be to disproportionately incentivise departure among those groups that are least economically integrated. The programme would be entirely voluntary: no one is compelled to accept. Those who are net contributors would receive negligible or no offers, regardless of background.

2. Accelerated Removal of Non-Citizens:

The 2024 Migration Act amendments already provide the framework for deporting non-citizens who have committed crimes, breached visa conditions, or otherwise failed their obligations as residents. Crucially, this can include deportation to third countries willing to accept them, with Australian government funding. Scaling this up is primarily a matter of appropriating funding, diplomatic effort, and political will. The 80,000-person pool identified by the Senate inquiry represents a good starting point for deportation but we can go further.

A key goal would be to enact supporting measures that are individually mainstream and politically palatable, but which collectively have the effect of reducing the flow of temp migrants into permanent residency and permanent residents into citizens. It’s a classic “self-deportation” approach (thanks Mitt).

A comprehensive programme would include drastically tightening student visa pathways to permanent residency, which have become one of the primary engines of demographic change; extending the qualifying period for citizenship from the current timeframe to ten or twelve years, with no access to welfare or other government benefits during the qualifying period; and imposing a substantial tax on outbound remittances, which currently represent a significant capital drain and whose taxation would both raise revenue and reduce the financial incentive for low-wage migrants to stick around.

None of these individual measures is radical or unpopular. All can be implemented as part of a general effort to ‘right the ship’. Student visa tightening is already government policy. Extended citizenship pathways exist in many comparable countries. Remittance taxation has been implemented or proposed in numerous jurisdictions. But taken together, and combined with the two-tier departure programme, they would begin to shift the demographic trajectory meaningfully, reducing inflows, accelerating outflows among the least integrated, and creating a migration system that once again selects overwhelmingly for people who will strengthen, rather than dilute, the national community.

Conclusion

The remigration conversation has arrived in Australia, whether the political establishment likes it or not. The question is not whether it will be discussed but whether Australian nationalists will be ready with serious, defensible proposals when the political window opens.

The tools are already largely in our hands. The Migration Act is one of the most powerful pieces of executive immigration legislation in the Western world. The 2024 amendments expanded it further. The legal environment, while not unconstrained, is far more favourable than what European nationalists face. What we lack is not legal capacity but political organisation and policy specificity.

The programme outlined above (a fiscally-indexed voluntary remigration policy, accelerated non-citizen removal, and a suite of supporting intake-reduction measures) is not fantasy. Every component either already exists in some form or could be implemented through uncontroversial, ordinary legislative and budgetary processes. It would not reverse fifty years of demographic change overnight, but it would, for the first time, begin moving the needle in the right direction, and do so in a way that can be explained and defended to the broader Australian public in the language of fiscal responsibility and national interest.

You don’t need to agree with my policy proposals, and I imagine many will read this article and be thinking “this bloke is cucking” because of the lack of explicit focus on ethnicity. So be it. I’m not asking anyone to agree with every point raised here. What I’m asking is that we start thinking about Australia’s specific circumstances, and how we can start building towards a policy suite that actually has a chance of getting implemented in the next five to ten years. If you want something more radical, how are you going to do it?

The political moment is coming. Our policy needs to be ready.

Gladio is an oldhead frequently confused by zoomer memes. He is still waiting for Elon Musk to reinstate his Twitter account.