600million
That’s how many foreign workers would be eligible to work in UK under Priti’s new points scheme
MORE than 660million people of all nationalities will be eligible to apply for a UK work visa under the new points-based immigration system, critics warned last night.
migration Watch UK said the scheme announced by Home Secretary priti patel could allow immigration to ‘spin out of control’.
the figure from the campaign group, which wants tougher border controls, includes more than 250million people from India and China alone.
It said the work visa system must be revised in the wake of the pandemic to give rising numbers of unemployed Britons the chance to find jobs.
migration Watch UK has repeatedly urged mrs patel to cap the number able to secure work visas under the scheme, which begins in January as Britain leaves the EU.
It said the business sector will take advantage of the system to hire ‘cheaper, non-unionised overseas labour’.
Chairman Alp mehmet said: ‘this scheme was drawn up long before the Covid crisis.
‘now, with unemployment heading for several million, we cannot simply blunder on with unlimited immigration from all over the world.
‘Immigration could easily spin out of control as it did under Labour. the only way to avoid a crisis is to put a cap on the numbers and then adjust as necessary. What is the point of taking back control over immigration only to hand it over to business?’
A Home Office paper said this year that the ‘potential supply of eligible labour’ outside the EU was ‘unknown’. However, migration Watch UK’s own analysis, published today, estimates there is a pool of 590million young adults outside the EU who are educated to at least secondary level in the current top 15 ‘source countries’ – those whose citizens are most likely to come to Britain to work.
In addition, there will be a likely pool of 77million EU nationals eligible to apply for
‘Could easily spin out of control’
visas, bringing the total to more than 667million, it said.
the non-EU figure includes 141million Indians and 117million Chinese who could be eligible, the report said.
It added: ‘We can... expect the potential pool of labour on which employers would be able to draw to be enormous. It can plausibly be assessed to comprise hundreds of millions even if restricted to young, educated people in the present most popular “source” countries for employers.
‘Even if the proportion actually coming to the UK was only a tenth of that coming from eastern Europe when the doors were opened to those countries, there would be a massive increase in work immigration.’
migration Watch said: ‘Instead of weaning business off their remarkable addiction for cheaper non-UK labour, the government will, in effect, be encouraging employers to continue to overlook UK talent.’
When Labour opened the doors to eastern European migrants in 2004, it was predicted only a few thousand would come to work in Britain.
In fact, 700,000 came here in the space of six years from the former Communist countries that had just joined the bloc.