Obama, a Democrat, and Farage, an admirer of current President Donald Trump, hail from different political traditions but the Reform leader wrote that there’s an area he’d like to emulate the former U.S. president — immigration enforcement.
If he were to ever hold the country’s top job, Farage pledged to operate a “zero tolerance policy,” through new “legally robust” reforms and bilateral agreements to facilitate returns.
“It’s worth saying that deportations on the scale we envisage do have recent precedent,” he added, citing Obama, who he said “earned himself the title ‘Deporter in Chief’” after he formally removed 3 million noncitizens from the U.S. over two terms between 2009 and 2017.
Between 800,000 and 1.2 million unauthorized migrants were estimated to live in the U.K. in 2017, the most recent year for which reliable data is available.
