Farage
Promises Mass Deportations if Elected U.K. Prime Minister
The plans
announced by the leader of Reform U.K., which is leading opinion polls in
Britain, illustrated how he is driving a hardening of the debate around
immigration.
Mark
Landler
By Mark
Landler
Reporting
from London
Aug. 26,
2025
A year
ago, Nigel Farage, the right-wing populist who has rattled British politics,
declared that deporting hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from the
country was a “political impossibility,” not worthy of discussion.
On
Tuesday, Mr. Farage presented a plan to do just that: deport up to 600,000
undocumented migrants from Britain if his insurgent, anti-immigrant party,
Reform U.K., were voted into office in an election expected to be held in 2029.
Mr.
Farage’s about-face was striking, if not altogether surprising, given his
protean political career and quicksilver instincts. But it reflected a broader
hardening of the debate over immigration in Britain, not just on the fringes
but also among mainstream leaders, including in the governing Labour Party.
“The
elite conversation is shifting,” said Sunder Katwala, director of British
Future, a research organization in London. He said that reflected the
polarization of politics, the influence of social media platforms like X and
the rising popularity of Reform, which has ridden the immigration issue to the
top of the opinion polls in Britain.
Critics
said Mr. Farage’s mass deportations would mean sending asylum seekers back to
countries, like Afghanistan or Iran, where they could face persecution, and
even torture and death.
He
brushed that off, saying, “We cannot be responsible for all the sins that take
place around the world.” And he asserted that most of the objections to his
plan were on practical rather than moral grounds.
“There’s
very little pushback from the media against the idea that we really are in very
big trouble in this country,” Mr. Farage said to an audience of journalists and
party supporters in Oxfordshire, west of London.
Prime
Minister Keir Starmer now regularly posts on social media about measures his
government is taking to crack down on illegal immigration, including a new, not
yet operational, agreement that will return to France some asylum seekers who
cross the English Channel on rickety boats.
“If you
come to this country illegally, you will face detention and return,” Mr.
Starmer posted on X after Mr. Farage presented his plan. Mr. Starmer added
photos of young men being rounded up, fingerprinted and interviewed by the
authorities.
Robert
Jenrick, a lawmaker and rising star in the Conservative Party, has taken a
position that is at times more hard-line, at least in tone, than that of Mr.
Farage. He has thrown his support behind demonstrators, some from far-right
groups, who are protesting in front of hotels used to house asylum seekers.
“Nobody
wants to live in areas with illegal migrants from backward cultures in the
parks and outside the school gates,” Mr. Jenrick recently posted on X. “This
can’t go on. Change our laws. Deport illegal migrants.”
Mr.
Jenrick, who once served as immigration minister in a Conservative government,
is viewed as a likely challenger to the Conservative Party leader, Kemi
Badenoch. He resigned from his cabinet post in 2023 to protest a plan devised
by a former prime minister, Boris Johnson, to put asylum seekers on one-way
flights to Rwanda. Mr. Jenrick said it did not “go far enough.”
Ms.
Badenoch responded to Mr. Farage’s deportation plan by saying he was merely
imitating a proposal rolled out months ago by the Tories. “He’s copied our
homework but missed the lesson,” she said on social media.
Ms.
Badenoch suggested that Reform’s plan lacked the granular policy details that
would make it workable. But the lesson for Mr. Farage may be less about policy
than about politics: Once-radical proposals like mass deportation are no longer
taboo among the political classes.
“There’s
no doubt that Rishi Sunak and his obsession with stopping the boats made people
think about the boats,” said Anand Menon, a professor of European politics at
King’s College London, referring to Mr. Starmer’s predecessor as prime
minister, who made halting channel crossings one of his government’s top
priorities.
“Now that
it’s there, it’s very hard to dislodge,” Professor Menon said. “It exemplifies
a lack of control over your own borders.”
At the
current rate, the number of channel crossings is on track to set another record
this year, according to Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration
Observatory at Oxford University.
Mr.
Katwala cautioned that the shift in the public debate did not necessarily
mirror a major shift in broad public opinion. Concerns about immigration in
Britain have been on the rise since 2022, when the crossing of the channel by
asylum seekers started becoming a political issue.
While the
number of people claiming asylum in Britain reached a record high of 109,000 in
the year ending in March 2025, overall net migration plummeted by nearly half
in 2024, from its peak of 906,000 in 2023. There is little conclusive polling
data about public attitudes toward mass deportation. A poll earlier this summer
by the market research company YouGov found that nearly half of people surveyed
believed, incorrectly, that there were more illegal, than legal, migrants in
Britain.
Not
everyone in British politics has changed tone. Daisy Cooper, the deputy leader
of the Liberal Democrats, condemned Mr. Farage’s plan, saying in a statement
that he would pay the Taliban “tribute” payments to take back Afghan migrants.
To shield
Reform’s plans from legal challenge, Mr. Farage said Britain should withdraw
from a battery of international treaties that govern human rights, most notably
the European Convention on Human Rights. That is a position echoed by Mr.
Jenrick, though not by Ms. Badenoch or the government.
Mr.
Katwala said polls showed that most people favored staying in the European
Convention on Human Rights, a share that has increased since President Trump’s
return to the White House. That, he said, reflected a backlash to Mr. Trump’s
tariffs and to his hostility toward international organizations.
For his
part, Mr. Farage made no reference to Mr. Trump, a longtime ally. But Mr.
Farage’s former party chairman, Zia Yusuf, who devised the deportation policy,
said Reform had studied the methods used by the Trump administration, including
its hasty construction of a large-scale detention center in Florida. A federal
judge has ordered that facility, nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz, to be closed.
Much
about Mr. Farage’s plan seemed challenging to achieve, including its proposed
use of abandoned military bases to house detainees and the incentives he would
use to persuade countries to take back immigrants. But analysts pointed out
that Mr. Farage is not held to the same scrutiny as other politicians in
Britain.
“It’s not
clear to what extent Farage is going to be criticized on the basis of his
policies,” Professor Menon said. “As long as he gets the media attention,
that’s all he needs.”
Mark
Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom,
as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has
been a journalist for more than three decades.
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