Brexit fuels fourfold rise in Turks seeking work in UK

THE number of Turks seeking to come and work in the UK has more than quadrupled in a year as they seek to exploit the exodus of Europeans post-brexit, official figures show.

There were more than 37,000 applications from Turks in the year to June 2021, up from 9,000 in the year to March 2020 and putting Turkey on a par with India for work visa applicants.

Both Turkey and India had more than double the number of applications for UK work visas of any other nation, with Ukraine the nearest to them on 15,000, followed by the Philippines on 11,000 and the US on 9,000.

The surge has been fuelled by changes in the UK immigration rules, which has seen the ending of a longstanding Uk-turkey agreement on work visas and a new post-brexit regime which has lifted the cap on skilled workers from non-eu countries.

The race to enter the UK peaked at 20,000 applications in the last quarter of last year just before the deadline for the closure of the Ankara Agreement at the end of the Brexit transition period on December 31.

The Ankara Agreement, dating back to 1963, enables a business people, entrepreneurs and skilled workers from Turkey to apply for work visas with the hope of being granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK after five years.

“There was a huge demand to beat the deadline and there were a lot of last minute applications,” said Vatan Oz, editor of the London-based Avrupa Gazette, which he founded after he came to the UK in 1996.

He said the exodus was also driven by critics of the Erdoğan regime and professional people in Turkey seeking to flee the country.

“There is a huge pressure on secular modern democratic people, doctors, students and others, because they don’t want to live in Turkey,” he said.

“Over 60,000 or 70,000 have left Turkey in the last five to 10 years.” There was also the pull factor of a large Turkish diaspora, mainly in London, which has grown from 40,000 in the 1990s, when Mr Oz arrived in England a quarter of a century ago, to more than 700,000 now.

It also coincided with the departure of many Europeans back to their own countries, and particularly workers from East European countries like Poland, where the economy has been thriving in recent years.

Official UK statistics show that around 150,000 Polish citizens have left the UK since the Brexit referendum, which heralded the ending of free movement with the EU.

The Government’s new Brexit regime has not only lifted the cap on skilled workers but also reduced the salary threshold to £26,500, lowered the qualifications bar to include A-levels and similar technical qualifications and expanded the shortage occupation list.

“Of course, there are more opportunities for Turks if Europeans leave the UK because of Brexit,” said Ali Guden, a British-trained solicitor in Istanbul who has helped many Turkish clients move to the UK.

“The Turks want to enter into the market before Brexit, replacing the Europeans.”

The irony is that the “leave” campaign warned that remaining in the EU could allow 76 million Turks to flood into Britain.

Despite the surge, there are, however, relatively high rejection rates of Turkish business people lodging applications under the Ankara Agreement.