The 100 million expulsions promise

• Demographic change in the US
• Identitarians in power
• Identitarian foreign policy
• More on these issues

“ … the white race, which is tragically shrinking into a minority on this planet … subject to a new, apocalyptic beast, an anonymous, omnipresent monster [mass migration] that sometime, long ago, vowed to destroy the West.“

Jean Raspail, Camp of the Saints (far-right novel), 1973

 

Dear friends of ESI,

On 28 December 2025, Elon Musk, since late 2022 owner of the social media company X, reposted a message on X to millions of people, adding just one word: “Wow”. The message shared offered statistics on race, followed by an accusation:

“The % of White populations in Western countries over last 50 years:

US:                   1975: 83%                   2025: 59%                   24% drop Canada:             1975: 95%                   2025: 70%                   25% drop UK:                   1975: 97%                   2025: 82%                   15% drop Western Europe: 1975: 96%                   2025: 80%                   16% drop

Insane. Replaced by the 3rd world. It is all by design.”

Elon Musk has long argued that the “whiteness” of the US, Canada and Western Europe should be a central political concern. He shares warnings on this issue all the time, messages pointing out that “while 36 percent of the world’s population was White in 1900, it might be only 2.5 percent in 2100.” He also propagates the theory that there is an ongoing “great replacement” of white majorities in Western countries happening “by design”. And he calls for urgent action to stop and reverse this process through “remigration.”

The dangerous notion that history is all about clashes between incompatible races has deep roots, also in Europe. Following the collapse of European empires in Africa in the early 1960s, and the mass flight of one million French citizens from today’s Algeria 1962, warnings about a looming invasion of Europe by African migrants became a prominent theme among those bitter about the independence of French Algeria. Such fears were politically weaponised by the late French far-right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had himself tortured civilians in Algiers in 1957 (when he did this, he was already an elected member of the French parliament).

On torture in Algeria and Le Pen – Raspail’s extremist novel

A far-right French novel, Camp of the Saints, published in 1973, told a story about migration from the “third world” as a deadly threat to white Europe. Author Jean Raspail describes the destruction of French society at the hands of an invading flotilla of one million impoverished Indians arriving by boat. In his story the leaders of France refuse to do react forcefully, unwilling to kill thousands upon arrival, and thus allow the invasion to proceed unopposed.

In 2011 the novel was republished in France, with a new introduction. In 2011, French author Renaud Camus wrote a book about what he called a Great Replacement, claiming that white Europeans were “being reverse colonized” by immigrants allegedly flooding the continent. Again, migration from the “third world” is presented as an existential threat. In 2012, a French far-right youth group that called itself Generation Identitaire, organised a protest against the construction of a mosque in Central France. It published a declaration of war that called for a “reconquest” of Europe. Identitarian groups have since propagated all these ideas – the great replacement, the need to repel a “third world invasion”, and reconquest and “remigration” – across Europe and the United States.

After Elon Musk bought X in 2022 it became a major platform for identitarian advocates. Musk himself regularly shares identitarian and racist content with hundreds of millions. Musk also shares messages by leading identitarians, and by those looking back wistfully at white rule in Rhodesia (today: Zimbabwe) and apartheid South Africa.

Messages – December 2025

  

    

 

Demographic change in the US

The US holds a census every ten years, where people are invited to self-identify as belonging to a ”race or ethnicity”. The five basic categories since 1997 have been: White; Black or African American; American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; or Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. White is defined by the US Census Bureau as: “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.” Also: “People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as “American Indian” and “White.” People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race.” (US Census Bureau)

What do these categories mean, and how are they used in the political debate? The statistic quoted by Elon Musk at the beginning of this newsletter stated that in 2025 the population of the US was “59 percent White”. According to the official Census website, in 2020 “White alone or in combination” were 71 percent. What Musk is referring to is the estimated “White alone non-Hispanic” population.

In 1970, the United States had about 204 million people. An estimated 83 percent considered themselves “white” (though the methodology and category were different from those in 2020)

By 2000, the United States had about 281 million people, 2010, it was 309 million. Now, an estimated 71 percent considered themselves “white alone.”

By 2020, the United States had about 331 million people. Of these, an estimated 62 percent considered themselves “white alone.”

In short: from 2000 to 2020, the US population increased by some 50 million people. The non-white (alone) population accounted for all population growth in the US in these years.

In 2018, Trump-supporter Laura Ingraham complained that: “In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people.” In a book from 2020, US-journalist Ezra Klein wrote that “the most common age for white Americans is fifty-eight … for African Americans it’s twenty-seven, and for Hispanics it’s eleven … To put it even more starkly, about seven out of every ten seniors are white and Christian, compared with fewer than three in ten young adults.”

Texas has had a non-white majority population since 2004. The same is true, since 2000, for California. It is true for Hawaii, Maryland, Nevada and New Mexico.

Texas has elected Republican governors since 1995. It is proudly advertising itself today as “a global economic force and … one of the strongest and most diverse economies in the nation.” It has the second largest GDP among the 50 states of the US after California. There is also the dynamism of New York, in third place, and in particular of New York City, which just elected its first Muslim mayor. The economically most successful US states – California, Texas, New York – have long been the most ethnically diverse.

”Non-white Texas” (July 2022)

The demographic future of California (2021)

Texas and California would, on their own, be among the biggest economies in the world. By any standards, this is no decline. Unless, of course, the standard is white (demographic) supremacy.

 

Identitarians in power

US warnings to Europeans about “ethnic diversity creating unreliable allies” thus appear hysterical, and bizarre. The US is more diverse than European democracies, and the most diverse parts of the US are the most dynamic and successful. But these warnings are also sinister. It is one thing to complain about the fact that demography and society is changing. It is another to promise to reverse such changes, in the US … and in Europe.

There has long been a debate on how best to control the US Southern border to reduce irregular migration. Various US governments have deported migrants without regular status. This was done under presidents Clinton and Bush, under presidents Obama (who deported 3 million migrants) and the first Trump administration (which deported 1.5 million). But none of these measures halted the bigger demographic transformation. This would have required deportations in the tens of millions, including US citizens, which simply seemed inconceivable. Until recently, the dominant view in the US among leaders of both big parties, Democrats and Republicans, was that reversing demographic change is neither possible nor desirable.

In 2023, Trump advisor Stephen Miller spoke to the late MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk. Kirk asked him how it might be possible to remove 30 million people from the US. Miller explained that, yes, this could be organised:

“In order to carry out a deportation operation of that scale, you would need to involve the U.S. military … the U.S. military, state, federal, and local law enforcement to then carry out large-scale deportations across the whole country. And then you would need to build very large staging facilities to carry out the removals … it would be an undertaking that would be greater than any national infrastructure project we've done to date, but that's what we have to do.”

Politico wrote in late 2024 about US deportations in the late 1930s: 

“Informal raids and sweeps were conducted in major cities … It’s estimated that by the mid-1930s, over a million Mexicans were returned to Mexico … Ultimately, only about 80,000 Mexicans were formally deported … U.S. immigration officers stoked fear through raids in major cities to pressure Mexicans to “repatriate.” … Newspapers ran inaccurate and inflated numbers of deportations in the program. The result: large-scale self-deportation. Many Mexicans, including U.S.-born people of Mexican descent, elected to leave the country. In Los Angeles, by 1935, one-third of its Chicano population had disappeared. Nationwide, it’s estimated that up to 60 percent of those who left were actually American citizens.”

The essential ingredient of previous such efforts: to strike terror into the hearts of the target population. Deport large numbers. Inflate the numbers of deportations. Create huge insecurity and thereby put pressure on minorities, even those with US citizenship, to flee. Create a Kafkaesque detention and deportation bureaucracy. Accuse critics of treason.

This policy mix was identified before Trump returned to the White House. In late 2024, the New York Times described detailed plans by the Trump team to carry out mass deportations. His open promise was to carry out the largest deportations in US history.

Trump meant it. Returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, set out to create a huge army of enforcers, vastly increasing the resources available to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) administration. ICE’s mission is to hunt those to be detained and deported, everywhere and at all times, by men with masks and no accountability: in schools and in courts, in hospitals and at work. Cruelty, “mistakes” (such as arresting US citizens), long and harsh detention of people prepared to leave the US voluntarily, and violence in the streets during operations reinforce fears.

The federal government created an archipelago of new detention places across the US, with flagship projects such as the deportation camp in the middle of the alligator-infested Everglades in southern Florida. Terror was struck into migrant communities with the deportation of Venezuelans to a high-security prison in El Salvador. As US think tanks and media reported, the vast majority of the around 240 Venezuelans deported there and mistreated had no criminal conviction at all. Only 4 percent had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offence.

In May 2025, Stephen Miller urged ICE to aim for 3,000 arrests per day of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. This would equate to more than a million arrests in a year.

Just how far is the Trump White House prepared to go? Masks dropped when on 31 December 2025 the department of Homeland Security published a message on X. It picks up the theme of Raspail’s novel: a “siege by the third world.” It refers to a peaceful America “after 100 million deportations.” But who are the 100 million people targeted to be deported? Credible estimates (here the Pew Research Centre) speak of at most 14 million “unauthorised immigrants” in the US. The 100 million-promise must include more than 80 million citizens.

    
A “second American revolution“ – 100 million deportations

Donald Trump has long mentioned that deportations might also target US citizens, stripped of their citizenship.

So what is the intent? How else to explain such official communication, if not through a vision guiding this White House of restoring a solidly white US majority population, reversing a decades-long transformation? In 2020 there were an estimated 205 million non-Hispanic White people and 126 million others. To deport 100 million of these, or to get them to flee, would restore the demographic realities of half a century ago. It would do so at a devastating price: the collapse of human rights and the rule of law in the US and untold human suffering.

Reversing demographic change would require millions taking fright and fleeing or “self-deporting”. The institutional changes and shifts in political power would amount to a political and cultural revolution.

Trump and Miller have often warned that the mass deportations that they had promised would likely require emergency rule: “American law allows the president to call National Guard troops from any state into service if the US is ‘invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation’, or if ‘there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion’ against the US government.” Trump used this to bring 2,000 National Guard troops under his control in summer 2025. Trump also repeatedly warned that he

“is open to invoking the Insurrection Act, a law from 1807 that allows the president to deploy the military in the United States. Earlier this month [October 2025], Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he is “allowed” to use it if courts deny his efforts to send the National Guard to U.S. cities. “Everybody agrees you’re allowed to use that and there is no more court cases, there is no more anything,” Trump said. “We’re trying to do it in a nicer manner, but we can always use the Insurrection Act if we want.”

 

Identitarian foreign policy

“ … Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”                                US National Security Strategy, 2025

Far-right theories about the necessity of racial (in German: völkisch) cohesion are central to this White House. They also reshape US relations with European allies. Replacement theory features prominently in the new US National Security Strategy, which claims that European nations might soon have “non-European majorities” and thus face the

“… stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife … and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”

Trump’s MAGA movement seeks to export its demographic agenda to Europe. It advocates for parties that also promise mass expulsions to change their societies. Trump’s government is proactively promoting far-right parties in Europe, such as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). European ethnic diversity is presented as a growing security issue for the US. It is not only that European countries with majority “non-European” populations are unreliable. They are likely to pose a threat to the US! As vice president J.D. Vance put it, ominously, in December 2025, the US has to worry that it might see

“Islamist-adjacent views rise to power in a European nuclear power, like Paris or London, in 15 years … If they [France and UK] allow themselves to be overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas, then you allow nuclear weapons to fall in the hands of people who can actually cause very, very serious harm to the US.”

Swiss writer Max Frisch in Biedermann and the arsonists

It was long tempting for European leaders to simply ignore such claims. Today, however, anyone concerned about security and the transatlantic relationship, and rejecting the toxic dangerous philosophy that the White House seeks to export, faces a new reality: The Trump White House no longer shares core values that have come to define “the West” in recent decades.

This poses a threat to US citizens and their democracy. And it threatens liberal democracies in Europe. 

Yours sincerely,