Since 2022, an average of about 37,000 migrants have arrived in the UK by small boat each year, based on UK Home Office data analyzed by the Migration Observatory. The top nationalities include Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Albania, Syria, and Eritrea. Photo courtesy of the UK government.
At a press conference in Dover, Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s spokesperson on immigration, policing, and national security, launched the party’s mass deportation proposal. He described the UK as “invaded” by migrants and said the plan would be the largest deportation programme in British history. Reform has stated it would deport more than 600,000 people in its first term, using a dedicated unit to track down, detain, and remove those in the country illegally, at a rate of up to 288,000 per year.
Yusuf was born in October 1986 in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, Scotland, the son of Sri Lankan Muslim immigrants who came to the UK in the early 1980s. His father is a doctor and his mother a nurse, both working for the National Health Service (NHS). A Muslim son of immigrants leading a party strongly associated with anti-immigration politics, Yusuf nonetheless shares many concerns familiar to American conservatives.
Reform UK’s platform addresses illegal immigration, welfare dependency among foreign nationals, and terminating a permanent residency system that gives non-citizens lifetime access to benefits and the right to bring unlimited family members into the country. The party also demands that legal migrants be net contributors to the economy and speak English.
On security, Yusuf argues that Islamist extremism, the dominant share of MI5’s caseload, has gone unaddressed by a government that has preferred to promote right-wing extremism as the primary threat. He links that same culture of avoidance to the grooming gang scandal, in which organized child sexual exploitation by men of Pakistani heritage was covered up for decades by authorities unwilling to confront it. When warnings were ignored and attacks occurred, no one in government was fired and no one was held accountable.
His Reform Party also wants to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which has been used to block deportations of foreign nationals, including convicted criminals, and which British voters have no power to override.
On legal migrants, Yusuf drew a clear line between tolerance and subsidy. Those in the country on a legal visa, he said, are expected “to pay your way, i.e. be a net contributor to the economy and not be a burden on the taxpayer, to speak English and to not commit crime.” Reform also plans to abolish permanent residency, replacing it with a system requiring visa renewal every five years or a defined path to citizenship.
“This country can ill afford to continue to be a food bank for the world,” he said, pointing to the £9 billion ($12 billion) spent on universal credit (the UK’s main welfare program) for foreign nationals in the previous year alone. He warned that figure would grow as the 3.8 million people who entered under Boris Johnson become eligible for permanent residency (indefinite leave to remain), at which point they gain lifetime access to the welfare system and the right to bring unlimited dependents into the country.
“It’s totally unfair to expect them to foot that bill,” he said of British taxpayers, “and even worse to brand them racist.” Just like in the US, anyone who speaks out against open borders risks being called racist, except that in the UK it can land you in jail. Over 12,000 people were arrested in 2023 alone for social media posts under UK communications laws, a number that had more than doubled since 2017. In one case, Luke Yarwood received an 18-month sentence for anti-immigration posts on X that had been viewed just 33 times.
Yusuf has also argued that British citizens’ rights are being placed “beneath those of criminals” under the European Convention on Human Rights, and Reform has pledged to leave the treaty. More broadly, he has described current immigration levels as “unsustainable” for public services.
Yusuf told reporters that the majority of MI5’s caseload is “Islamist terrorism, so that is a fact,” and accused the government of performing “the most extraordinary gymnastics in order to not actually address the problem.” He pointed to official language in a recent report that used the word “alleged” when describing grooming gang crimes, despite hundreds of convictions.
“We know there’s been an almighty cover-up,” he said, adding that Labour had acknowledged this only by permitting partial inquiries rather than the full national inquiry Reform is demanding. He accused the government of being willing to “sacrifice the lives of its own people at the altar of this virtue-signalling diversity.”
Yusuf also invoked the July 2024 Southport attack, in which Axel Rudakubana, a British citizen of Rwandan heritage, stabbed and killed three girls at a dance class: Bebe King, aged six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, aged nine. He pleaded guilty to murder, attempted murder, possession of terrorist material, and producing ricin.
Ricin is a highly toxic poison derived from castor beans. It is one of the most dangerous naturally occurring substances and has been used in assassination attempts and terrorist plots. There is no antidote.
He was sentenced to a minimum of 52 years. Authorities had flagged Rudakubana to the government’s counter-extremism program three times between 2019 and 2021, when he was between 13 and 14 years old.
Each time, he was assessed and cleared. Yusuf demanded accountability: “Who has been fired? Who has paid a price for this inside the state system? Not a single person funded by the taxpayer whose job it was to keep those little girls alive has paid any penalty.” A subsequent government inquiry found an “inappropriate merry-go-round” of agencies passing responsibility and concluded the culture of unaccountability “has to end.” No one has been fired.
The grooming-gang prosecutions at the center of this debate involved perpetrators who were overwhelmingly men of Pakistani heritage. Operation Stovewood, the largest such investigation in UK history, identified 323 suspects in Rotherham, nearly two-thirds of Pakistani background, and secured 42 convictions. The Jay Report confirmed most victims were white British girls. The 2025 Baroness Casey audit found the same pattern across Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and South Yorkshire.
Convicted perpetrators included Mohammed Amar, Mohammed Siyab, Yasser Ajaibe, Mohammed Zameer Sadiq, Abid Saddiq, Tahir Yassin, and Ramin Bari in Rotherham, and Zahid, Shahzad, Ahmed, Bashir, Khan, Akram, and Hussain in the separate Rochdale prosecutions, which covered crimes committed between 2000 and 2006. The Casey report cautioned that ethnicity data was not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators nationally, making broader conclusions impossible.
In the end, American conservatives would see Reform UK’s platform as the kind of common-sense policies held by the Trump administration and that many wish would become enshrined in law in their own country.
What Yusuf is describing, however, is not current UK law but proposed policy. These measures can only take place if Reform UK wins the next election and Nigel Farage becomes prime minister. Even then, the UK would have to withdraw from international treaties to carry out mass deportations, and that withdrawal could itself be challenged in court, a scenario that will sound familiar to Trump voters who have watched activist judges thwart immigration reform while the clock ticks toward the midterms.
As bad as things are in the UK, they are worse in the European Union. Meloni in Italy, working within EU constraints, has found that her best efforts to stop the endless flow of migrants have fallen short. Orbán in Hungary defied those constraints and was taken to court by the EU and stripped of billions in funding. However, he managed to keep his country’s borders largely secure but was voted out of office on April 12, 2026, after 16 years in power.
For now, the situation in the UK serves as a cautionary tale and a teachable moment for Americans on how the left can erode a country and how joining supranational treaties can hamstring government reform.
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