By IRNA,
London : The UK government’s introduction of a cap on immigration threatens the country’s future as a centre of scientific excellence, a group of Nobel prize-winning scientists warned Thursday.
The group of eight UK academics said that the UK must not isolate itself from the increasingly globalised world of research, which the country depends on.
‘International collaborations underlie 40% of the UK’s scientific output, but would become far more difficult if we were to constrict our borders,” they said in an open letter.
‘The UK produces nearly 10% of the world’s scientific output with only 1% of its population; we punch above our weight because we can engage with excellence wherever it occurs,” the letter said.
After coming to power in May, the government announced a temporary cap of 24,100 work visas for non-EU immigrants, which will be replaced by permanent measures from April 2011.
‘The government has seen fit to introduce an exception to the rules for Premier League footballers,” the Nobel prize-winners said in a joint letter published in the Times newspaper.
‘It is a sad reflection of our priorities as a nation if we cannot afford the same recognition for elite scientists and engineers,’ their letter said.
One of the signatories, Sir Harry Kroto, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said that one of his own researchers had been refused permission to study at Cambridge University under the rules and will now stay at a US university.
‘The UK loses out and in the future we can see the UK can only survive on its intellectual property, rather than as a country that provides things, with countries like India and China providing things more cheaply, so we need to look at that,’ Kroto said.
‘If one looks over the years, one quarter of the Nobel Prizes that came to the UK were won by immigrants from outside. It’s probably very unwise to not look very carefully at the scientists, engineers and technologists who could come to this country,” he told the BBC.