Skilled Indian migrants get court boost in Britain

Thousands of Indian doctors, engineers, technocrats can continue working in the UK after a British court ruled that new immigration rules were unfair and illegal, reports Vijay Dutt.

Thousands of Indian doctors, engineers, technocrats can continue working in the UK after a British court on Tuesday ruled that new immigration rules were unfair and illegal.

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The High Court judgment came as a relief to nearly 49,000 highly skilled migrants, about 30,000 of them from India, who faced deportation under the new rules. These people had come to the country under the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP) introduced in 2002. The programme was to provide a migration route for skilled people whose experience was required by the UK to compete in the global economy. “It is ironical that the UK government chose to play tough with the very category of migrants who are making valuable contribution to the economy,” said Amit Kapadia of of HSMP Forum, which challenged the new laws in the court.

The forum had filed a petition against unfair retrospective changes to the HSMP in November 2006. The government had introduced a new points-based system and had retrospectively imposed it on the highly skilled migrants who entered UK as per the earlier scheme.