Immigration Control

I am not a member of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, so I am a bit of an interloper in the debate, but I have read the report with interest. I come at the issues that it raises from a slightly different and quite particular angle. I am chairman of the all-party Chinese in Britain group, members of which have raised concerns with me about the highly skilled migrant programme and work permits for skilled migrants. The issue is one that, I have rapidly found, has an effect way beyond the Chinese community in the UK. It affects many people. The problem that has been raised with me is the change to the qualifying period for settlement in the UK from four to five years. That change was announced in February 2005, but it took effect in April 2006. I have no objection in principle—nor have the people on the highly skilled migrant programme—to the change in the rules, which is supposed to align the UK rules with those in the rest of Europe. However, there is a strong objection to retrospective application of the rules—the decision that the new rules will apply to people who have already come to the UK expecting to be able to settle here permanently after four years. That is utterly unfair. In the summer my hon. Friend the Minister met a delegation of people affected by the change, whom I brought to meet him. He gave them a sympathetic hearing and I thought that I should make progress in convincing him of the utter injustice of what had happened. I also presented him with a large petition, which stood about 3 ft high, from people throughout the UK who were concerned about the matter. I was told in a letter that I received a few days ago that the rules were not going to be changed back and that there would be no transitional arrangement. The Minister thought that the people concerned would now need to be in employment for five years rather than four, and added:"““I do not believe that this should be a problem for those people who want to settle in the UK and make a positive contribution here.””" I think that he must have been at a different meeting from the one that we attended, because we gave many examples of real people with problems caused by the change. One of the people who went to see the Minister was Mr. Mikhail Spivakov, who is a molecular biologist, originally from Moscow. He is working on a four year fellowship at Imperial college, having previously turned down offers at some of the world’s leading universities, such as Harvard. He was promised that he could get settlement after his current four-year contract expired. A permanent visa was important to him because research scientists freely change employment to get experience in different laboratories. It would have meant that he could get a mortgage. More importantly, from his professional point of view, he would be able to travel far more easily to overseas conferences, which he has to do about once a month. Now he has found that he is no longer eligible when his current contract and visa expire. Mr. Spivakov says that it is no longer in his interest to stay in the UK and that he wants to move on. He would have to get any new employer to apply for a work permit for him and renew his visa and, even more importantly, it would be necessary to seek a restricted range of grants to fund his research compared with what would be available to him if he were here permanently. All that would take time. There would be a gap in his employment history and because of that he would be back to square one, having to start all over again with a five-year period. He says:"““This makes me feel betrayed by the country I chose to contribute to, since it now looks like I was tricked into coming here…I am…now considering moving out of the UK and to the US, following…the scientists’ ‘brain drain’…which UK science managers are so much trying to prevent.””" Someone else who went to see the Minister was Mr. Omar Massoud, who is Egyptian and works as a consultant for a British international engineering consultancy. He is here on the highly skilled migrant programme. He says that the change has had"““a significant professional, financial and personal impact””" on his life and the lives of his wife and newly-born child. He now has to pay prohibitive international fees if he wants to continue professional development at any university, and he has missed the opportunity of doing a PhD as a result. His wife has had to return to Egypt with their baby, to study at the American university in Cairo, even though the couple have been paying taxes and national insurance in the UK, because they cannot afford the international fees. The change has also meant that for another year Mr. Massoud cannot participate in some of his company’s international projects, because of the visa problems; this is especially relevant when his UK visa is near expiry. He tells me that last year his company missed a new business deal in the middle east, costing it at least three month’s worth of work and revenue. He says that it is difficult to get a mortgage on a house, because he is stigmatised as a non-resident. When he and his wife borrow money it has to be at exorbitant rates because he is regarded as having a high-risk profile for financial transactions and dealings. They can get loans only at 14 and 17 per cent. interest rates, because they are not residents. Of course, although their child was born in the UK, they cannot claim child benefit because of the additional year’s requirement. Mr. Massoud’s family is now divided between the UK and Egypt and he and his wife feel vulnerable to what he calls the ““inexplicable swings”” in the Government’s mood regarding highly skilled immigrants. He says:"““We never thought that the government would pick on those who contribute most to the economy…we feel deeply betrayed””." There are many similar examples, such as that of Mr. Yan Zhuang, a highly skilled migrant worker who came from China to the UK to work as a senior engineer for the European Space Agency. He is working with his wife and is a higher rate taxpayer. He needed additional qualifications and was going to read for an MPhil at Cambridge. Now he has had to put that back and the rest of his career progress has been severely disrupted. He and his wife have lost confidence in the Government and he feels that they have failed to give him the trust that he should have from them. Mr. Nizar is part of an international team based in the UK working for Barclays bank. It has 40 other employees who are either work permit holders or work in the highly skilled migrants programme. The new arrangements do not make clear how much time he can spend outside the UK, but as highly skilled professional bankers he and his colleagues are required to travel all over the world. If they unknowingly stay too long, they will probably be refused entry when they come back to the UK. Mr. Nizar also says that he has lost confidence in the UK. He is a highly skilled banker working in one of the largest financial institutions in the world. There are many more such examples, including scientists. Another is that of a teacher, Nirvani, who came from South Africa. She faces losing her job because she could not apply for indefinite leave to remain in the summer as she was expecting to. The school says that it is too late to reapply for a work permit and wait for approval because it wants to know who will be on its staff in the new term. Nirvani and her husband left good jobs in South Africa and their children were uprooted. Her husband resigned as a captain in the South African police force and is now working as a security guard because he cannot join the police here. He would have been able to do so in September when the four years were up. Dr. Badri is a Cambridge-based public health consultant with an international reputation. He came from southern India in 2002 and his 19-year-old son had been accepted at university. He now has to pay £12,000 in fees. There are many more examples, with which I shall not bore the House, but plenty of people’s lives have been disrupted. They believe that the Government have shattered the legitimate expectations of their families, themselves and their employers through what they consider a unilateral change in the terms of the agreements under which they came. Such people now have to apply for extensions, and thousands of people are making new applications to the IND which, as the report shows, is already overworked. There are already delays for a lot of people and we have just increased the work load by thousands of unnecessary extension applications. That means more bureaucracy, and the individuals concerned have to pay an additional £300 fee. Highly skilled migrants pay taxes and national insurance contributions, but more importantly, by definition, they fill important gaps in our labour market. They are part of the international labour market and have skills that are in short supply. They are the sort of migrant that our country needs and whom my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) mentioned. We should be attracting them to the UK, but they feel cheated and betrayed. That feeling is relayed back to their home countries, so the people whom we want to attract from Russia, India, China or the United States will think, ““Well, if the Government have changed the rules this time, what is to stop them doing it again retrospectively? What is the point in going to the UK? We might as well go somewhere else where we feel we will not be cheated in this way.”” It will deter from coming here the people whom our economy desperately needs. The Government accept that some lessons have been learned from how the change was introduced, and I believe that they are going to set up a body, the migration advisory committee, to try to ensure that such problems are dealt with more sympathetically in future. That is simply not enough for such people as I have mentioned, who make a huge contribution to our economy and pay their taxes. They are not the sort of people who are at the bottom of the pile, who come illegally as economic migrants to work in the sweatshops to which my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) referred. We must reflect on what has happened and introduce transitional arrangements so that those who arrived in the UK under the programme in question before the changes were announced in April 2005 can be allowed to settle after four years rather than five. That is the only decent, honest thing for our Government to do. I fully understand the feelings of betrayal and of being cheated that many people have expressed to me since I got involved in the matter. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will think again and reflect on the human tales that he has heard from the people who have come to see him. I thought that he had sympathy for them when he heard those stories, but he has rejected their tales of hardship, family break-up, financial loss and disruption to careers.