Asked about the votes in an interview with the BBC Turkish Service that was broadcast late on Tuesday, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said: “There are currently 170,000 Armenians living in our country. Only 70,000 of them are Turkish citizens, but we are tolerating the remaining 100,000.

“If necessary, I may have to tell these 100,000 to go back to their country because they are not my citizens. I don’t have to keep them in my country.”

Erdogan’s comments met with a stern reaction from Armenia.

“This kind of political statement does not help improve relations between the two states,” said Prime Minister Tigran Sarksyan.

“I agree with the assessment that when the Turkish prime minister allows himself to make such statements, the events of 1915 immediately return to our memory,” he added.

Thousands of illegal Armenian immigrants, mostly women from the impoverished countryside, work as cleaning ladies and in other low-skilled jobs in Istanbul, where many settled after an earthquake in their homeland in 1988.

The exact number of Armenian immigrants in Turkey is unknown. But Turkish-Armenian groups say Turkish politicians inflate numbers of illegal workers and threaten expulsions whenever tensions escalate between Ankara and Yerevan.

Erdogan said Armenian immigrants had been allowed to work in Turkey as a “display of our peaceful approach, but we have to get something in return.”

Suat Kiniklioglu, foreign affairs spokesman for the ruling AK Party, played down Erdogan’s words, saying the premier felt the need to “remind the public” about Armenians living illegally in Turkey.

He said Erdogan was “not talking about something that would happen today or tomorrow.”