Listening to colleagues involved in university discussions about what’s happening in the U.S., in my view, confuse what is happened now with the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the past in America which is very similar to that which one hears outside America as well, particularly in Europe, but now increasingly outside of “the West,” in India, for example. What is happening now focuses its vocabulary on migration, but the policies emerging in the US suggest something deeper that is happening there. More than migration, we should begin thinking about characterising what’s happening as ethnic cleansing, or skirting very dangerously close to it.
Ethnic cleansing is a convenient term, undefined by treaty, that states can mobilise to describe a genocide in another state when they do not want to get involved. If the killing or destruction of people, a culture, a group occurs in the process of removal from a geographic area were called genocide, most countries in the world (153 have signed to date) would be obligated to intervene, as a result of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) (effective from 1951) that criminalises genocide. Call it ethnic cleansing, and no one is obligated to anything, although these two conceptual circles, genocide and ethnic cleansing largely, though not completely, overlap.
A good example of how close these can be is what has happened to the Rohingya. One argument is that Myanmar’s NLD Government and its army, tried to force the Rohingya (whom they wrongly accused of being illegal migrants or “illegals”) out of the country and into Bangladesh, where about a million remain today in refugee camps. But a more convincing argument is that the high rate of killings, mass rape, and other violence which attended the attacks from August 17, 2017, following years of control designed to limit Rohingya births, preservation of their language and culture, and attacks on their religion, constituted genocide. After all, there was no guarantee, when the attacks began, that the Rohingya would have been allowed refuge in Bangladesh and would have fallen under the full weight of the heavily armed juggernaut of the NLD state.
2018: Rohingya Camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Photo VOA, Wikipedia Commons
Another good example is Gaza, which is officially just a counter-terror campaign, but has been undertaken with such wanton and indiscriminate violence against one population group, that states feel they could name it if not genocide, then ethnic cleansing. This included, for example, Trump’s much publicised, but ill-fated proposals to move the Palestinian population out of Gaza elsewhere with no right of return, while America would control Gaza and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
IDF forces during ground operations in the Gaza Strip. 1 November 2023. Wikipedia Commons
But thus far foreign states have been reticent to accuse America, a very rapidly (surprisingly so) disintegrating superpower and its current administration, of ethnic cleansing, in North America, within the borders of the country. The administration has entered a period in which the demographics of the younger generation demonstrate that left alone, the white population of the country will be the minority. Perhaps, in a racial politicised version of Thucydides Trap, the rising political strength, in a Democracy, of people of colour, has frightened those who have banked on the security of a white majority to defend the wealth disparities in the country. Historically, race has been used in America to obscure class differences and divide them against each other. Without a racial wall to hide behind, the white oligarchs might be just as exposed as wealthy white farmers were in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
How else could one explain the sudden flipping of the American political egg, sunny side down. DEI programmes designed to promote equality and inclusion banned as an evil ideology and wokeism (with all of its admitted limitations) treated on par with Nazi-ism (and as a challenge to free speech). In March, Trump signed his “Restoring Truth and Sanity in America” which seeks to reverse anti-American ideology that turns races against each other. Yet, the underlying meaning of this order is working it differently than might be supposed in a different era. The current order includes provisions which appear to be directed at restoring those Confederate statues taken down after the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests. Confederate statues of course are very racially divisive, yet a cherished memory of part of the white community historically least in favour of integration and inclusion. A range of other policies are being proposed or already being implemented, sometimes by Republican, pro-Trump states. There is a now a ban, for example, on teamsters who do not speak or read in English (historically, America has had no official language).
Then there are the calls by the President no less to have mostly-white Canada join the US as a state, but not to Mexico or Cuba, which arguably would have far greater historical affinities with the country. But of course, they speak Spanish, not English. Their populations are Latino, not Northern European. Their populations are those that share the same profile as those people the US is actively deporting right now. “Illegal” Latin Americans migrants are being “sent back.” Others, and negotiations are now underway for this, will be sent to Rwanda. Still others, wait in detention for their destinations to be decided. “Illegals” are going to be offered money to “go back” as well. Some of those Latin Americans as US citizens, “sent back” by accident.
And as people of colour are “sent back,” the administration has made offers to give their places in America to white Afrikaners from South Africa. Almost as soon as Trump had taken office he signed an executive order on 20 January 2025 indefinitely suspending the refugee program, effective from 22 January. But on 27 February 2025, on the grounds of a South African law misrepresented by the administration, Trump signed an Executive Order that prioritised “admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” While people of colour remain unwelcomed in America as refugees, white Afrikaners deemed eligible will be welcome. Domestically, Trump has also turned to pro-natalist policies, including proposed $5000 “baby bonus” (Hitler gave medals) citing declining birth rates, but particularly for white women. More white children, perhaps, will help keep the current majority, the majority in the years ahead.
We are now only four months into the new administration, but in this short time, it has become clear that Trump’s America is not just a cultural war, but a demographic one as well. As deportations (Trump has referred to millions) pick up pace, will they continue to represent just one slice of the American population pie, and hence figure more clearly as ethnic cleansing? Will Trump’s America be a “golden age” for white, northern European, Christians? In either case, we see the beginnings of an ethnic cleansing of America. But even more worrying, when things go sour, will this ambition lead to something even worse, as they did in Nazi Germany? With the US being the site of these developments, this time around, who will be in a position in the world to stop it?
Mike Charney
SOAS, University of London
Banner: Large groups of illegal aliens were apprehended by Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents near Yuma, AZ on June 4, 2019. The Yuma Sector continues to see a large number of Central Americans per day crossing illegally and surrendering to agents. CBP photo by Jerry Glaser. Wikipedia Commons
Watch above: Mike Charney speaks at “Trump USA and Its Dark Consequences”. Twenty-two distinguished scholars, analysts and activists from eleven countries on four continents will share their analyses on how the new Fascist-like policies and reactionary changes which Trump-Vance-Musk oligarchy is pursuing are resulting in the devastating consequences for the world’s peoples and communities, as well as international law, norms and institutions. https://forsea.co/trump-usa-its-dark-consequences/
