President Donald Trump issued a hearty dose of advice on British immigration policy—even as he admitted he has no idea what he’s talking about.
As he greeted U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer outside his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, Trump fielded questions from reporters about the contentious “small boats” debate—a reference to the small vessels undocumented immigrants have used to cross the English Channel from France to claim asylum.
“I know nothing about the boats,” the president began before holding forth on the issue.
“If the boats are loaded up with bad people, and they usually are because, you know, other countries don’t send their best; they send people that they don’t want, and that’s stupid people, and they send the people that they don’t want, and I’ve heard that you’ve taken a much stronger stance,” he said.
Starmer has assumed an increasingly hard line on immigration since the center-left Labour Party ousted Britain’s right-wing Conservative Party in a landslide last year, pledging to “smash the gangs” of human smugglers facilitating these crossings in what critics have described as a bare-faced attempt to deflect from accusations of poor economic management.
Before the two leaders sat down on Monday morning for their scheduled discussion on trade policy and the war in Gaza, the early portion of their press conference was drowned out by the overly enthusiastic musical stylings of Trump’s own bagpipers at his golf resort.
Once the noise subsided, the president continued his remarks about immigration.
“If they’re coming from other countries … and they don’t know they are … are they coming from prisons? We have them where they came in from prisons. We’re moving them all out,” he added. “We had a border last June … just recent … last month. We had zero people come into the country, zero people other than come in through legal means. If you’re stopping immigration and stopping their wrong people, my hats are off to you.”
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