We show that the recently proposed integer-forcing linear receiver provides an attractive approach to the problem of mitigating external interference in MIMO channels. The integer-forcing receiver proceeds by first decoding a set of full rank integer linear combinations of the data streams. The resulting full rank equations are then inverted to find the original data. By selecting equation coefficients in a direction that depends on both the interference space and the channel matrix, the impact of external interference can be effectively reduced. We show that this technique attains a non-trivial gain over traditional linear receivers. Furthermore, the integer-forcing linear receiver achieves the same generalized degrees of freedom for the M×M MIMO channel with K dimensional external interference as the joint decoder.