By Alistair Smout
LONDON (Reuters) -Britain said on Monday it could cut the number of visas granted to countries that do not accept the return of migrants with no right to remain, after talks with allies including the United States on how to assert more control over borders.
Britain’s new interior minister Shabana Mahmood said counterparts from the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – a decades-old intelligence-sharing partnership collectively known as Five Eyes – agreed to the principles at a meeting in London.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer appointed Mahmood to the role on Friday in a shake-up of his government as he faces mounting public criticism over immigration and the arrival of migrants via illegal small boat crossings.
“This announcement sends a clear message to anyone seeking to undermine our border security. If you have no legal right to remain in the UK, we will deport you. If countries refuse to take their citizens back, we will take action,” Mahmood said in a statement.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who has been a leading figure in the Trump administration’s crack-down on illegal immigration, said that the countries agreed to share background information on any criminal history of migrants, and work against cartels “utilising social media and technology companies to push their message”.
“We need to be just as aggressive in partnering together to push back on those kinds of new developments,” she told reporters on the sidelines of the meeting.
Noem defended the detention of hundreds of mainly South Korean workers on a Hyundai Motor car battery facility under construction in Georgia last Thursday, saying the administration was following the law, and adding the tough U.S. measures might be an inspiration for other countries to do the same.
Starmer is a former human rights lawyer who took office in July last year after his Labour Party won an election landslide. His new-look government is prioritising a harder line on immigration – an issue that leads opinion polling as the public’s top concern and that has fuelled a poll lead for Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK.
Mahmood said she would take a strong approach.
“That does mean saying to countries who do not take their citizens back, that we’re not simply going to allow our laws to remain unenforced, that they do have to play ball,” she told broadcasters in an interview. “And if cutting visas is one of the ways to do that, then I’ll do whatever it takes.”
(Reporting by Alistair SmoutAdditional reporting by William James and Sam TabahritiEditing by Frances Kerry)
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