Immigration caps won't touch tech transfers Home Secretary Theresa May's announcement of restrictions to immigration have met a mixed response - because intra-company transfers, well used by technology companies, are excluded from the deal. The minimum salary for those entering the UK under intra-company transfers has been raised to £40,000 and their stay will be …
"The minimum salary for those entering the UK under intra-company transfers has been raised to £40,000 and their stay will be limited to five years."
The above statement is not true. If you are here for 5 years, by then you will have had the opportunity to apply for permanent residency - this is normally granted if you've been here for at least 4 years without significant break.
Skilled foreign workers are likely to bring in wealth, taxes and jobs.
Restricting this type of immigration is, at best, going to see the work off-shored. At worst, multinationals won't bother doing business here.
What we really need to do next is halve our rate of corporation tax, and try to persuade Germany to sub us the difference.
"Skilled foreign workers" if there is such a thing, as it seems many states have jumped on the misrepresent skills sets for the people bandwagon. They may pay sales taxes or in the case of a transfer where they are hired in abroad and brought here may actually pay other taxes but must head shops have schemes where their taxes are reimbursed or in the case of Tata, not so.
We could all learn from the PRC and like they do kick any company out who seeks to damage the economy, in this case by off-slaving.
The ICT exclusion and 40k threshold is disappointing. But it is better than no effective controls at all, which has been the case for several years. There is officially no shortage of IT skills now. Graduate unemployment is high among IT graduates - 17%. One suspects that the habitual ICT abusers will be only slightly hampered by these new rules. Heck they pretty much ignored the old ones.
It seems to me that companies bringing in staff in under these conditions ought to be made liable for schooling, health and other social costs for dependents as the tax on a £40K salary is not going to come near to covering those, especially if it involves special costs to state schools.
It would, surely, be relatively straightforwards to insist that there was medical insurance for dependents, school fees were paid and so on.
John Cridland, director general designate of the CBI, said: “Exempting most ‘Intra-Company Transfers’ from the cap will also allow firms with international operations to manage their global workforce effectively. This will make sure that the UK remains an attractive place to base new projects and investment, which means more jobs for UK workers."
This is funny because ICTs seem to be mostly used to bring in Indians so that locals in the UK can show them how to do their jobs, after which the locals are made redundant and their jobs are offshored to India. This may be advantageous to the bottom line of some companies by reducing their wage and tax bills but it results in less jobs for UK workers and less revenue for the UK.
RBS is sending thousands of jobs abroad (India), making thousands redundant and using UK cash to do it, not just call centres but branch workers, IT professionals etc. (where's your data now?).
The amount of tax from migrant workers far outstrips the benefits given, this policy is just to make the government look good in the eyes of the Sun/Mail readers who don't know what's really going on, it has no practical benefit.
Instead they should stop offshoring (more so when the company doing is owned by the government) and sending wages abroad, they might save 25% in their wage bill (potentially millions) but that's cash lost abroad rather than keeping UK citizens in jobs and paying their UK bills, buying their UK things and keeping other UK people employed, but instead they send money abroad and make UK people redundant making jobs rarer and requiring more benefits, and the UK as a whole a hole.
With all due respect that was what highly qualified labour was paid around 10 years ago. In fact I was paid 57K in those days for technical qualified non-management labour as a foreigner on a work permit.
40K today is exactly the salary of a "from-offshore" temporary worker who has been brought to offshore the work at a later date. Even if it is slightly higher today, it will definitely be so in 5 years at the projected rate of inflation.
This should be at least 50 (if not 55) a+nd indexed annually with inflation till further notice. Until then it is a scam. As far as industries not ready to pay that amount of money - tough, learn to live with what you got or match the requirement.
Affects small companies who have to follow the rules but larger companies, better placed to donate money to political parties, employ MPs (and their sons, daughters, concubines, porcupines, etc.) as consultants, non-executive directors etc.) can use the 'inter-company transfer' route (probably I am the 100th of such comments in the moderation queue in which case feel free to delete this one).
I see that the article says:
"The coalition government has also pledged to reduce the number of foreign students studying in the UK."
Doesn't this mean that, if this is true, the coalition government are being a bunch of dumbasses? Unless I am mistaken, foreign students must pay much more to attend UK Unis? If this is true, less foreign students means less income for Universities... (somebody in the Coalition did not pay attention in their Economics class ;-)
On the other hand I agree with tougher entry criteria such as English language tests and limiting students' rights to work or bring dependents into the country... perhaps the answer is not in reducing the amount of foreign students allowed in, but ensuring that they meet these rigorous standards especially vis-a-vis language and dependents?
However, thinking about it, I don't think foreign students should be able to bring dependents in to the country period: If you're here to study, then fuckin' study, you're here to learn and make productive use of your time that you have been given the privilege to use, and if you can't "man up" enough to leave mommy and daddy for 3 or 4 years of study, then you should move back home... (Any complaints on this send to dev > null please, as I went to Uni away from home for 4 years, and "survived" being away from the family just fine, thankyouverymuch...)
About half of foreign students attend "sub-degree level" courses and attend private educational institutions of somewhat less top grade standards. Many of these course have very large elements of practical versus academic components - in other words, the worst of them are really not much more than a cover for bypassing the work permit system.
Lots of scams here - and the state degree level institutions are not really the target. Whether there will be more attention to dependents is another question.
Hire your staff through your foreign subsiduary, "transfer" them to UK, adding housing and such as part of their pay structure 40K, less tax but as they're "employed" oversea's they dont pay it in UK, less housing costs (company reclaims these as tax freeexpenses) and presto, seventeen Indian coders for the price of one, fat, workshy union coder in the UK who wants to start at 8 dead, leave at5 dead and take 5 ciggie breaks an hour.
the only choice is between a hard worker from overseas or a workshy english person for the same money
And if you are a mature student coming to do a degree you leave your kid back home in day care for 4years? Or a PhD student leaves their husband/wife behind?
There is a simple solution to the scam language schools - pull their accreditation.
And those coming for 'sub-degree courses', that includes those attending Eton and Sandhurst - who are probably admittedly scum but you can't really blame them for that.
1. A novice from India with an tech degree and barely a couple of years under belt, comes to UK for 5 years, builds some "real" skills and goes back.
2. An Indian company hires him and 4 other novices. Shows the "team" to the UK company. The "skilled" guy does the talking, win the project. Runs a tight ship initially.
3. Result: 5 UK jobs lost. Probably the well-paid-but-not-top guys. Probably the guys who knew some module history very well though.
4. Our "skilled" guy leaves for a new project, leaving a deputy in charge.. but as a result quality of code goes down. Dev team in UK starts firefighting the customer issues.. product innovation suffers.
5. product starts losing reliability/credibility/market share/mindshare and has to be killed.
No new dev means the dev team in UK is fired. 20 jobs lost.
6. Entire product (basically support at this point) is moved to India. Indian outsourcing
firm hires another 15 novices.. some of them as replacements for attrition in their ranks.
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Instead:
- if a company hires from outside, they should put in a deposit with the govt that this person will not go back and they will sponsor his/her citizenship.
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