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Europe|Farage Promises Mass Deportations if Elected U.K. Prime Minister
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/world/europe/farage-deportation-plan-uk.html
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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.
Aug. 26, 2025, 2:37 p.m. ET
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.
