"Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time," Hansson writes, cheerfully, as if reporting a stock he'd bought early.

And he is totally right about that, so it's worth being precise about which fringe. The concept in its current usage was developed and popularized by the Identitarian movement, most prominently by the Austrian activist Martin Sellner, who presented his program (the removal from Germany of asylum seekers, of foreigners with residence permits, and even of "non-assimilated citizens") to a private gathering of far-right figures and AfD politicians at a villa outside Potsdam on November 25, 2023. When the investigative outlet Correctiv reported the meeting in January 2024, the response was one of the largest protest waves in the Federal Republic's history, with around 576,000 people in the streets in a weekend. That same month, an independent jury of German linguists selected "Remigration" as the Unwort des Jahres (the non-word of the year) on the grounds that it functions as "a right-wing fighting word" and a "euphemistic cover term" for programs of forced deportation, up to and including mass deportation¹1. A Berlin court would later find some of Correctiv's specific characterizations of the Potsdam meeting unproven; the finding matters for Correctiv's editorial reputation and not at all for the meaning of the word, since Sellner has published his program himself, as a book, under the title Remigration: Ein Vorschlag (Sellner 2024)..

He is right that it traveled from the fringe to the mainstream "in record time"; the interesting question (what his article is a small part of the answer to) is what carried it. We need note how the word "remigration" permits the speaker to propose the forced removal of millions of human beings without once producing, in the mind of a comfortable reader, the image of what that removal would look like at the door of an apartment in Malmö; i.e. it performs the work euphemisms exist to perform. It's also the work he did in this article.

In fact, in the version his sources wrote down, "remigration" includes citizens judged insufficiently assimilated. If he knows that, the word choice is damning. If he doesn't, that's the ignorance half of the title doing its work.

I don't want this to read as a piece on euphemisms or philosophy either (although philosophy does matter a lot in these discussions of ethics); I would rather talk about the claims Hansson actually made.

Before his September 2025 essay "As I Remember London" (what some might call an elegy for the city), I didn't know anything about Hansson other than him being an important contributor to open source. In a nutshell, that piece leans on grooming-gang scandals and arrests, and this summer's manifesto does not make my impression differ much from the one it left. The relevant literature is larger than most people think, and it's also quite consistent; let me give a couple of examples. Bell, Fasani, and Machin, studying Britain's two great migration waves in the Review of Economics and Statistics, found the asylum wave associated with a small rise in property crime, no effect on violent crime, and the (much larger) A8 labor wave associated with no rise at all (Bell 2013). Nunziata, using victimization data across Western Europe, found that rising immigration produced no increase in actual crime victimization, but a measurable increase in natives' fear of crime (Nunziata 2015).

That last finding is quite interesting. Much more interesting, though, is Abramitzky, Boustan, and colleagues in American Economic Review: Insights: across 150 years of American data, immigrants have been incarcerated at lower rates than the native-born in every era, today by 60 percent (Abramitzky 2024). Numbers of this kind rarely appear in the genre Hansson is writing in.

Now let's get back to the London post, specifically its load-bearing sentence. London, Hansson writes, is no longer full of "native Brits": "In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third."

Interestingly enough, there is exactly one demographic category whose London figures match the numbers Hansson puts up, which is White British: 36.8 percent at the 2021 census. A Black Londoner born in Lambeth to British-born parents is not a native Brit by the arithmetic Hansson chose, and neither is Tekin Süleyman, the Ruby developer born and raised in London whose response to the post should be read in full. He anticipated the objection: "There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese." In fact, this phrasing is quite common in racists' speeches around the world; even in my country, a lot of xenophobes repeat that "Egypt is for Egyptians." All of these are totally innocent statements under one condition: that we mean citizenship; i.e., in his example, if "the Danes" means Danish citizens, no one should dispute it. But that reading is unavailable to him, because his numbers exclude millions of citizens from the category.

The statistics he cites tell you more. In "Danes a minority in their own country by 2096," the word "Dane" is the word of interest: under Statistics Denmark's definitions, a child born in Copenhagen to two naturalized Danish citizens is counted a "descendant," not a person "of Danish origin," in perpetuity of the relevant projections. So a Danish passport and a Danish upbringing still don't make you a Dane, in the numbers. I wonder, then, what the other possible reading of "who is a Dane" could be. There has always been the other reading: nationality defined by descent. Fortunately, history has a name for that reading, and its adherents have usually resented the name, which is why the disclaimer ("I'm not racist, but…") that you can find in Hansson's phrasing is necessary. It's old, too: Powell insisted on it, in the same speech in which he described the native Briton made "a stranger in his own country."

Hansson described the crowd at the September 13, 2025 "Unite the Kingdom" rally as "perfectly normal, peaceful Brits" protesting a "demographic nightmare." The rally was organized by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known as Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League, a man whose convictions include mortgage fraud, assault, and contempt of court. The Metropolitan Police recorded 110,000–150,000 attendees, with at least 25 arrests and 26 injured officers, four of them with serious injuries like broken teeth and concussion. The crowd was addressed by video by Elon Musk, the world's richest man, who told it: "violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die."

Hansson writes, correctly, that "tens of thousands of people die needlessly in Europe every year from something as simple as summer," and cites the Nature Medicine literature. The study he's pointing at counted 61,672 heat deaths in summer 2022 (Ballester 2023), on what Copernicus and the WMO document as the fastest-warming continent (Service 2024). In other words, he is citing climate deaths as an argument for abandoning climate policy, if I understand correctly. (Note that the accompanying claim that "climate catastrophizers" hold "air conditioning in itself is a sin" identifies no law or institution, which is smart again, because no serious one exists; in fact, the public-health literature he cites treats expanded cooling as adaptation and documents that adaptation is already reducing mortality per degree (Gallo 2024).)

"Europe is irrelevant to the equation either way. Just 6% of global emissions originate there." Except the atmosphere responds to accumulation, the EU is the third-largest cumulative emitter in history, at roughly 13 percent since 1850, with a per-person historical footprint three times China's. And beyond that, this logic is extremely idiotic, every country out there is under 15 percent of current emissions, and if "too small to matter" excuses you, it excuses everyone.

On energy costs, "Europe can't be a competitive part of the global economy if its energy costs are several times those of its commercial counterparts", is close to a problem, yet with a funny analysis. A more reputable analysis might be the Draghi report which attributes the price gap principally to dependence on imported fossil gas and to fragmented, badly integrated energy markets, and recommends, again the opposite of Hansson's proposal, accelerating technology-neutral decarbonization, because a decarbonized system "radically decreases import dependency" and lowers marginal costs (Draghi 2024). So the authoritative case for the second cow recommends quite the opposite of slaughtering it, just as it recommends the opposite of the first, and it locates the third, Europe's failure to build and scale. Nowhere in that list of causes will you find Ahmed's Pakistani grandfather, who made the mistake of coming to Denmark.

I couldn't care less about one more racist post floating around; as an Arabic-speaking Muslim I get many of these every day, some written directly in emails from burner addresses. However, DHH is a very important person in open source (he arguably changed a lot in the software history and industry), and I think more people need to be aware of, and careful about, his attitude, which I read as a malicious one.

During the previous DHH controversy, I learned from the discussions about a much older incident, at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference in San Francisco, April 2009 (among roughly two hundred attendees were six women). A presenter delivered a technical talk on CouchDB structured as an extended pornography joke, illustrated with images of scantily clad women. Sarah Allen (later a Presidential Innovation Fellow) explained why this is not okay, and furthermore: "What most pisses me off is that I had to write this blog post, instead of one about Ruby & CouchDB, which is a far more interesting topic." She is totally right about that, too.

Hansson's contribution, as the contemporaneous documentation records, was to declare on Twitter that pornography in a conference presentation was "absolutely" appropriate. Mike Gunderloy, who ran Rails's community outreach, resigned from the role with a statement worth preserving: "a significant number of Rails core contributors — with leadership (if that's the right word) from DHH — apparently feel that being unwelcoming and 'edgy' is not just acceptable, but laudable. The difference between their opinions and mine is so severe that I cannot in good conscience remain a public spokesman for Rails."

Tom Stuart's 2014 conference talk "The DHH Problem" has a quite funny personality analysis, so he describes the community's leader as "noisy… reactionary… anti-intellectual.. very sure that he is right," a man who "enjoys being rude," and compares his method to Fox News', i.e., perform common sense, perform fair-and-balanced. What's funny about that is that the Fox News comparison came mostly before Hansson's political takes, it was about his methods alone, and it predates all of what follows.

In April 2021, it emerged that employees at Basecamp (his company) had for years maintained a list of customer names they found funny, many of them Asian and African names. When employees tried to reckon with this, the reckoning was terminated as Hansson and Jason Fried banned "societal and political discussions" on company forums as "a major distraction" and dissolved the internal DEI initiative. A third of the company's ~60 employees (including the heads of design, marketing, and customer support) quit as a response.

And from 2022 till this day, his racism posts are just accelerating; "We must say no to these people" (2022), adopting the frame that anti-racism is a fanatical religion to be resisted; the DEI victory laps (2024); "As I Remember London" (September 2025); an ad featuring a plus-sized Black woman described as "grotesque" while a competing ad is praised for its "blond babies"; anti-trans essays; ADHD mockery. After Charlie Kirk's assassination, a post about "the last loonies on tech's woke island" calling people Nazis. Through most of it the author is, Fox News style, the voice of common sense, and the objectors are hysterics, women were humorless, and people who quit were distracted. "radical, violence-condoning nut jobs." he describes other critics.

But why does all this matter anyway? Again, if Hansson were a random poster, none of it would. But Hansson personally holds the Rails trademarks and chairs the Rails Foundation. He also sits on the board of Shopify. Someone with that kind of influence sets what counts as normal for a huge community of engineers, and every euphemism he launders travels downstream with his authority attached.

In racism and in far-right movements, people like Hansson serve the important function I mentioned above: the euphemism. That's why I think his proposals and his reasons must be stated clearly. "Mandatory remigration of millions" means, in a way or another, agents of European states, with the force of law and ultimately of arms, removing millions of people from their homes (including refugees and even citizens judged insufficiently assimilated) and transporting them to countries many have never lived in.

Europe has a good history of running this experiment. Recall that the European Convention on Human Rights and the 1951 Refugee Convention were written by the survivors, on purpose, as obstacles to running it again. That is why every remigration movement, everywhere, sooner or later announces that those conventions are the real sacred cows that must die for everyone to be happy again.

Ronacher gives the good example of Stefan Zweig, who boarded a ship to New York in 1919 without a passport and lived to watch the borders close over his generation. Hansson himself is a migrant twice over, by some terms, he was once a young Dane who moved to Chicago in 2005, was welcomed, got rich, and went home when it suited him, although I'm unsure the analogy works for him, as the melanin variable differs again here. Nobody uses the audit he proposes for the Somali nurse's daughter in Copenhagen who was Danish-born and Danish-schooled, who is counted, in the statistics her expulsion would be justified by, as no Dane at all.

#Politics