Late on Thanksgiving Day, a holiday whose central fable is about the American value of welcoming strangers in need, President Donald Trump announced an intent to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover.”
It is not clear exactly how exactly this sweeping policy is supposed to work in practice — or if, as is often the case, the president’s posts bear little resemblance to policy reality. But it does have a clear precedent: a speech given by Richard Spencer, the leader of the once-prominent “alt-right” movement, given just after Trump’s victory in 2016.
“One fundamental policy we’re going to put forward is a break on all immigration, particularly non-European immigration, for a 50-year period,” Spencer said at a November 2016 conference.
At the time, Spencer acknowledged his proposal was “certainly out in front of anything Donald Trump said.” Now, however, the president has adopted a version of Spencer’s policy as his own.
This is hardly the only example of the White House adopting language from the 2010s-vintage white nationalist movement.
At a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Trump railed against Somali immigrants — saying “I don’t want them in our country” because America could “go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage.” Top White House adviser Stephen Miller referenced a prominent alt-right critique of immigration in a tweet last week. A call for “remigration,” a vision of mass deportations developed by Europe’s alt-right equivalent, has been embraced by Trump’s Homeland Security and State departments. And the concept of a “great replacement” of Americans by migrants, once the province of tiki-torch marchers at Charlottesville, is now widely proclaimed by the Republican Party’s leading figures — from Trump on down.
This isn’t entirely new: Miller, a college friend of Richard Spencer’s, sent emails privately citing white nationalist websites and advocating for a full immigration ban all the way back in 2015.
But in Trump’s first term, this kind of thing was not for public consumption — and when exposed, it caused a scandal. In 2018, for example, Trump fired speechwriter Darren Beattie after he got caught giving a speech at an alt-right event.
In the second term, the Trump administration appointed Beattie to a high-level position at the State Department. He never repudiated his extremism; what changed is that the alt-right influence on the White House is now open rather than hidden.
The mask is well and truly off.
The alt-right to White House pipeline
Since its origins in the late 2000s, the alt-right (short for “alternative right”) aimed to build out a parallel vision for conservative politics rooted in an explicit white nationalism. Its leading ideologues — writers like Spencer, Peter Brimelow, and John Derbyshire — believed that the existing conservative movement was unwilling to take seriously their belief that the US should be a country governed for and by its white majority. Non-white immigration, in their view, threatened everything that made the United States great.
In this respect, they went further than even the right’s mainstream immigration hawks of their time. Typically, right-wing immigration hawks focused on the downstream effects of immigration: claiming that current policy was suppressing working-class wages or causing an increase in crime. Such concerns could, in theory, be addressed by reforms to existing immigration policy; by spending more on assimilation programs or prioritizing high-skilled immigrants, for example.
Within this context, the alt-right’s defining move was to argue purely on the basis of ethnic or national origin. In their view, there are entire classes of people — those hailing from poor or “Third World” countries — who cannot under any circumstances adapt to America. Whether for reasons of culture or biology, or perhaps both, bringing such people to the United States would inherently make the country poorer, weaker, and dirtier. It is an argument for collective responsibility: for holding all migrants from a particular country responsible for problems with its government or society.
The alt-right mocked the idea that individual immigrants could adapt to America as “magic dirt” theory.
“Sure, Mexico and Central America are messed-up places, and presumably their inhabitants played some role in messing them up. If we just move thirty or forty million of those people to the USA, though, our Magic Dirt will transform them into civic-minded Jeffersonian yeomen!” Derbyshire wrote in a 2015 column for the alt-right site VDARE.
At the time, these ideas were too toxic even for the Trump wing of the GOP. At the inaugural 2019 National Conservatism conference, an effort to build a more intellectual Trumpist nationalism, the organizers made a show out of refusing admission to prominent alt-right figures like Brimelow. When I reported on a conference presenter advancing “magic dirt” arguments against non-white immigration during one of the panels, it turned into a PR disaster for the event.
Yet today, this sort of thing is proclaimed openly at the highest levels — in actual policy concepts like Trump’s “Third World” ban and the State Department’s proposed “Office of Remigration,” but also in its rhetoric and argumentation.
Last week, for example, a Wall Street Journal opinion piece argued that the US government should not punish all Afghan immigrants for the actions of the asylum seeker who shot two National Guard members in Washington, DC. In response, Stephen Miller explicitly invoked the magic dirt theory against what he called “the great lie” that America can integrate large numbers of migrants from poor countries.
“No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders,” Miller writes. “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
Similarly, leading conservative activist Chris Rufo — a figure closely aligned with the White House — has been on a tear against Somali immigrants, using a recent fraud case in Minnesota involving Somali perpetrators as evidence that the entire community was hurting America. When confronted with the argument that it’s wrong to blame all Somali immigrants for the actions of fraudsters, Rufo implied that it’s actually quite reasonable to see Somalis collectively as the problem.
“The national culture of Somalia is different from the national culture of Norway. Somalis and Norwegians therefore tend to think differently, behave differently, and organize themselves differently,” he wrote. “Norwegians in Minnesota behave similarly to Norwegians in Norway; Somalis in Minnesota behave similarly to Somalis in Somalia.”
That’s why, he argued, the US should begin explicitly redesigning its immigration policy around ethnicity. (On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced a new initiative to crack down on Somali migrants in Minnesota.)
“In the United Kingdom, mass immigration from incompatible cultures is creating a civilizational crisis. Rather than replicate the policies of our sister country, we should accept reality and adopt a more thoughtful policy, which recognizes cultural norms as a reasonable measure of capacity to assimilate and to contribute,” he writes.
Rufo is not, by the wild standards of the second Trump term, an extremist. He has repeatedly called on the right to reject Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi streamer popular with young conservatives.
Yet this merely shows how much the contours of the debate have shifted. Ideas about immigration that were once scandalous, even in the first Trump term, are now openly proclaimed without anyone being especially scandalized or surprised.
The alt-right as failed movement — and ideological success
You’d think, given the alt-right’s evident influence on the current White House, its leaders would be taking a public victory lap. Yet the movement has all but dissolved as an independent entity — battered by lawsuits emanating from the 2017 Charlottesville rally violence and outflanked on the edgelord right by even more radical figures. There is no better example of the alt-right’s formal dissolution than Richard Spencer’s recent effort to reinvent himself as a Trump-critical quasi-lib.
The fact that no one really calls themselves “alt-right” anymore reflects not only this organizational failure but, ironically, also its ideological success. While individuals like Spencer are now non-factors, others (like Acting Assistant Secretary of State Darren Beattie) are now quite literally in the halls of power. The alt-right label doesn’t make sense anymore because there is no longer any need to describe these views as an “alternative” to the mainstream right. Many are now the Republican Party’s stated positions.
This alt-right triumph reflects deliberate efforts by key actors — like Tucker Carlson — to seed these ideas in the mainstream right. It also reflects Trump’s repeated efforts to drive more moderate voices out of the party, to sideline the “adults in the room” who reined in him and Miller during the first term. And it also reflects the hubristic sense of total cultural victory on the right after the 2024 election: a belief that there had been a “vibe shift” in which normal Americans had suddenly become receptive to a whole range of extreme right political views, most notably on immigration.
For all these reasons, we are living in a world where ideas that were toxically controversial less than a decade ago are now officially proclaimed from the highest offices in the country.
