Among the most shared conspiracy theories about migration embraced in the last 25 years by far-right and right parties - especially in Europe and in the U.S. - we have The Great Replacement, The Kalergi Plan and the “George Soros caravan”. None are legit- and we will explain why, so you are armed for your next uncomfortable dinner party.
Great Replacement: The Great Replacement theory claims that there is a plot to substitute the white population of Europe and U.S. with non-whites from Africa, amid a declining white birth rate. It was popularized by right-wing French philosopher Renaud Camus in the 2011 book “The Great Replacement.”
This conspiracy was embraced all over the world by white supremacists and it was cited as a motivation and source of inspiration by several racist terrorists including in Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand (51 deaths), Uvalde school shooting in Texas (22 deaths) and supermarket Buffalo shooting in New York State (10 deaths).
After the March 2019 massacre of 50 people in New Zealand mosques, Camus distanced himself from the theory, calling it the “nephew” of Nazism. “They share the same genealogy of horror. We cannot be associated with that,” he said. Before the massacre, the New Zealand attacker posted a 74-page manifesto titled “The Great Replacement.”
There is no proof to support the idea that a global elite is orchestrating a plot to substitute the white population of Europe and the United States.
Data shows that since 2015 immigration levels have dropped significantly and that Muslims are a small minority in every European country.
Kalergi Plan: This conspiracy is in a way the progenitor of the Great Replacement and related to the antisemitic conspiracy of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pamphlet forged in Russia in the 1903 describing a Jewish plot to dominate the world.
The Kalergi Plan says that in the 1930s the Austrian-Japanese politician Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi conceived a plan to mix the white race in Europe with other races through immigration. Kalergi never drew up a plan to forcefully mix races and the conspiracy was generated by the misinterpretation of a sentence he wrote in 1925 book Practical Idealism: “The man of the future will be of mixed race.” Kalergi was a pioneer of European integration and one of the spiritual fathers of the European Union.
Soros/Caravan: This conspiracy started to emerge in 2018 falsely stating that the 93-year-old billionaire George Soros, a Hungarian American Holocaust survivor, had secretly financed the migrant caravan to bring migrants from South and Central America to the United States. This claim is not true and it was backed by Donald Trump and by other MAGA aligned politicians, including the Republican U.S. representative from Florida, Matt Gaetz.
