Remigration. Just send them back!

The invention examined here is a departure made to sound like a correction. The prefix in “remigration” suggests a return to an earlier, proper arrangement. But who establishes that arrangement? If a person was born and raised in Denmark, removing them to a parent’s country would require explaining why ancestry overrides the life they have actually lived.

The word can cover different proposals. Voluntary repatriation, removal following a lawful individual decision and a programme aimed at changing a population’s cultural composition must be examined separately. Treating every use of the word as identical would reproduce the imprecision the article challenges.

The title is the slogan being interrogated, not an instruction to expel a population. Its shortest word does the largest job: “just”. It makes the missing decisions seem already settled. Who qualifies? Under what law? With what appeal? To which receiving state? With what consequences for children and families?

The Danish proposal makes culture an additional condition beyond lawful conduct. That creates a problem of proof. A criminal charge can specify an act and evidence. A demand for deeper cultural belonging needs someone to define the desired belief or practice and decide when a person has achieved it. If the standard remains invisible, passing it becomes difficult to demonstrate and failing it easy to allege.

The ethical concern is especially sharp when departure is called voluntary. Assistance can expand a person’s options. Pressure designed to make ordinary life untenable can narrow them. The appropriate question is what choices remain available, not merely which box was ticked on a departure form. This is an argument about meaningful consent, not a finding that every assisted return is coerced.

A credible policy must also explain its categories. An allegation about a group does not establish the conduct of an individual. A migration status does not establish religious belief. A religion does not establish criminality. Each leap needs evidence, and some proposed leaps replace evidence with ancestry or identity.

Return policy is not automatically unlawful. UNHCR recognizes return to the country of origin, alongside alternative legal migration options, for people found not to need international protection. It emphasizes safeguards against refoulement. [5] That position matters: criticism of indiscriminate removal should not erase the possibility of a lawful individual return.

The European Court’s factsheet explains that collective expulsion concerns removal without reasonable, objective examination of each person’s particular case. Similar outcomes for several people do not by themselves establish a prohibited collective expulsion when individuals have had a meaningful opportunity to present their arguments. [3] Counting passengers on a plane cannot substitute for examining the decisions that put them there.

The party’s document itself acknowledges that Danish citizens are Denmark’s responsibility, while proposing changes to citizenship and return rules. [1] That is the point where rhetoric needs its full legal specification. Which proposed power, which safeguards and which treaty obligations would change? A proposal to change the law is not evidence that the desired action is lawful today.

The documentary record establishes a Danish proposal that makes cultural belonging part of its return agenda. It also establishes a framework in which nationality, individual circumstances and danger on return matter. It does not establish that every person described as foreign lacks a right to remain, or that every political use of “remigration” describes the same policy.

The article’s conclusion is that a removal policy must be judged by its operative rules and its treatment of actual people. Public concern about crime can warrant investigation and prosecution. Concern about migration can warrant debate over admission rules. Neither concern establishes an individual’s guilt, erases their nationality or supplies a safe destination.

Read alongside the Danish values case, the question becomes uncomfortable: if equality and freedom are conditions of belonging, can they be withheld from people because their cultural expression is unwelcome? The strength of a principle appears when it restrains the authority invoking it.