The Pencil Test Returns
How a South African pencil, a set of Nuremberg registries and a Bavarian expulsion order explain the far right’s newest export on both sides of the Atlantic
By Mika Horelli, Brussels
In apartheid South Africa, officials had a method for deciding who belonged to which race. A pencil was pushed into a person’s hair. If it fell out, you could be classified as white; if it stayed, you could not. Families were split by these rulings. Siblings ended up in different racial categories, which meant different schools, different neighbourhoods, different futures. Every year, reclassification boards moved hundreds of people from one race to another, as if humanity were a filing system and skin a form to be stamped.
I thought about the pencil test in May, when more than 500 delegates from the European and American far right gathered in the Portuguese coastal town of Figueira da Foz for the second Remigration Summit. Their stated goal is a twenty-to thirty-year project of “demographic renewal”; in plain language, a generational plan to push non-white people out of Europe, including citizens whose families have lived here for generations.
The endgame, in the movement’s own words, is to reverse decades of migration and multiculturalism. The pencil is back in the room; only the language has been laundered.
From a secret dinner to the State Department
The idea has a traceable genealogy. In November 2023, a small group met in Potsdam, near Berlin, to listen to the Austrian identitarian Martin Sellner. Present were members of Alternative for Germany, as well as figures from the mainstream centre-right. Sellner’s thesis was that, since deporting citizens is unconstitutional, pressure should be applied to encourage undesirable populations to leave on their own. The distinction between citizens of white and non-white descent would be drawn anyway; the law would simply be circumvented rather than broken.
When the investigative outlet Correctiv revealed the meeting in January 2024, hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets. Two years later, the same ideas are discussed at open conferences with American VIP guests, and the United States has moved to establish an Office of Remigration. What was a scandal has become a programme.
The intellectual foundation is the Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory claiming that hidden elites are deliberately replacing Europe’s white Christian population with Muslims and Africans. It is a theory that requires no evidence because it explains everything in advance; every mosque, every mixed marriage, every foreign street sign becomes proof. Europeans have seen this logic before. In the 1930s, it was called Judeo-Bolshevism, and it ended in places whose names we still cannot say without lowering our voices.
The question no one can answer
Here is the problem the remigration movement never answers, because it cannot: who, exactly, is to be removed, and by what criterion?
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 tried to answer the same question and collapsed into absurdity. Jewishness was defined not by faith or identity but by the religion of one’s grandparents; the regime invented categories of “half-Jews” and “quarter-Jews”, and an entire bureaucracy laboured over cases the ideology could not resolve. South Africa’s Population Registration Act of 1950 attempted the same, resulting in the “pencil test”. Race, it turns out, is not a fact waiting to be measured; it is a line drawn by whoever holds the pen, and the line is always arbitrary.
The arbitrariness was visible at the very top. Germans in the Third Reich whispered a joke about the ideal Aryan: blond like Hitler, tall like Goebbels, slim like Göring.
Not one of the men demanding racial purity embodied the ideal they preached. The doctrine was never really about biology; it was about power, and about deciding who could be excluded from the community of the protected.
America invents “the real American”
Which brings us to the United States. President Trump, on a visit to Europe, urged leaders to stop what he called an invasion that is killing the continent; his defence secretary used the same word in a commemoration speech in France. At home, the administration is engaged in something more ambitious than border enforcement. It is attempting to redefine what an American is; to establish that some citizens are more authentically American than others, and that authenticity correlates, in practice, with whiteness and with how long ago one’s ancestors arrived.
In a country where everyone except the Indigenous population descends from somewhere else, this is a definition that can only ever be invented, never discovered. Roughly forty million Americans are descendants of people who were brought to the continent in chains.
They have no other homeland; there is no port of return. A Black family in Georgia may trace its American roots to the 1730s, deeper than the vast majority of white families now demanding their removal or marginalisation. To where, precisely, would such people “remigrate”? The question has no answer, and that is the point; a policy that cannot be completed can be enforced forever.
The president's own family history makes the project stranger still. His grandfather left the Bavarian village of Kallstadt for New York in 1885; the US immigration record of that year lists him not as Trump but as Trumpf, one of several spellings the German family name passed through before it settled into its American form. When he later tried to resettle in Bavaria, the authorities expelled him in 1905 for having emigrated to avoid military service. The Trump dynasty exists in America because Germany once, in effect, remigrated one of its own. His grandson now presides over a government building, an office to do to others what was done to Friedrich Trumpf.
In the final third: how the Nordic countries, which like to imagine themselves immune, are already rehearsing the same idea. Sweden has made paid “return migration” official policy; in Finland, nationalists demand that a minority which has lived on the same coasts for a thousand years “go back” to a country that was never theirs. Why the nativist waving his DNA purity score is holding a document that says the opposite of what he thinks, and why remigration arrives not as trains but as letters.
