Nigel Farage wants to be ‘like Barack Obama’ as he eyes PM job ahead of local elections

Populist firebrand Nigel Farage is looking to follow in the footsteps of former United States President Barack Obama when it comes to cracking down on illegal migration.

“If I become the next Prime Minister, I’ll be deporter-in-chief — like Barack Obama,” was the headline of a Daily Mail article written by Farage, published Saturday.

His comments come as the United Kingdom braces for a round of English local elections on Thursday, where Farage’s Reform UK party is set to field the most candidates, while the Conservatives are defending almost two-thirds of the more than 1,600 seats up for grabs.

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.