DHS Brings an Ugly Past Back to the Surface

WHEN THE U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a single word—remigrate—on X in October 2025, it wasn't a vague message. A once neutral term dating back to the 17th century, meaning “to migrate back” or “to return,” remigration has evolved into a euphemism for forced deportation under the guise of policy. A government agency invoking it naturally sparked debate about this historically fraught concept.

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Google Books Ngram, an online tool that tracks the historical frequency of word usage in print, shows remigration peaking in 1797 amid a surge of nativist sentiment that would soon produce the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798—a series of restrictive laws that increased residency requirements and empowered the federal government to deport “dangerous aliens.”

The next peak occurred nearly 150 years later, in 1945. This marked the resettlement of the Jewish diaspora following World War II as hundreds of thousands of Jewish expatriates, facing rampant antisemitism, struggled to return to their war-torn homes.

Harking back to this dark historical epoch, modern usage of