By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
London : A powerful Indian delegation led by Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath is expected to argue that sudden changes made by Britain to its Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP) visa is a protectionist barrier that severely disadvantages thousands of Indians who are already living and working in Britain.
The Joint Economic and Trade Committee (JETCO) meeting Wednesday is the fourth in an annual series but assumes importance as it comes just ahead of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s planned visit to India in January next year. Inputs from the discussions will be taken forward to meetings between Brown and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Britain introduced the HSMP in 2002 in a bid to attract highly skilled workers, such as doctors and scientists, but political opposition coupled with its obligation to accept workers from new member-states of the European Union saw it make changes to the scheme in 2006.
Significantly, however, the new rules – favouring younger, higher earners and doing away with some previous criteria – were made applicable retrospectively, which meant that many of those who had come in before 2006 could face deportation.
There are no accurate estimates of the numbers involved but thousands of Indians are thought to be among 49,000 people that the British parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights says could face deportation.
The committee also says the government could be in breach of the European Human Rights Convention by retrospectively applying the new HSMP regulations, but Home Affairs Minister Vernon Coaker gave an assurance in August that the majority of highly skilled migrants would be allowed to live and work in Britain.
From New Delhi’s point of view, the issue is one of globalisation and fairness because its huge pool of highly skilled workers – a major economic asset – needs to be able to live and work freely in wealthy countries in order to realise its full economic potential.
India, leading a broad-based coalition of large developing countries at ongoing world trade talks, has been arguing forcefully for rich nations to dismantle barriers toward the temporary movement of skilled workers in so-called Mode 4 negotiations.
Faced with arbitrary changes to their visas and having spent money in settling down, many Indian workers in Britain feel frustrated and unwanted.
Many have already moved out to the United States, Australia and other countries and some have returned to India, according to pressure groups that have formed around the HSMP issue. And this is a constituency that Indian governments cannot ignore if they are to promote economic reforms at home.
From Britain’s perspective, too, this is a prickly issue. On the one hand the country is faced with a demographic trough of increasing numbers of old people, requiring migrant labour. On the other, the Labour government, after a decade in power, is facing mounting criticism from political opponents over bunglings on migration, which has become a major issue.
According to figures released Monday, more than 80 percent of the 2.1 million new jobs created between 1997 and 2007 were taken by migrant workers, prompting one Tory Party MP, Chris Grayling to say: “This finally destroys any claim the government has to be able to talk about British jobs for British workers. It also destroys any confidence about the government’s claims on their record on jobs. Gordon Brown’s… policies have clearly been an abject failure and all he’s done is create British jobs for foreign workers.”
Apart from the JETCO talks, Minister Nath will also launch a book that he has written, titled ‘India’s Century’, at a reception organised by the Confederation of Indian Industries in the presence of business leaders Sunil Bharti Mittal, Laxmi Mittal, Mukesh Ambani and others.