UK tightens immigration rules

LONDON: The UK government on Wednesday announced a raft of measures to supposedly strengthen its borders and cut down on immigration abuse; measures that are likely to kick up a storm over racial discrimination and create a whole new dimension of grey areas to keep visa officers and immigration lawyers occupied for years.

This includes an exhaustive overhaul of the visitor visa regime, setting up of a Migration Advisory Committee to advise the government on areas where migration is required to fill in the UK’s yawning skills gap and biometric testing for all visas. And yes, the big one is that all foreign nationals who are non-EEA will have to carry a biometric identity card to visit, live, or work in the UK.

A proposal for such a national identity card scheme has been greeted with howls of protest and violent opposition from locals, but it will be instituted for foreigners from 2008. Technically, this gives rise to the rather fascinating prospect of the likes of Ratan Tata and LN Mittal being finger-printed, iris-scanned, and having to carry their ID card around, if they want to work in the UK.

“Compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals will be a vital buttress of our defences giving businesses and public services the choice to check whether someone is who they say they are,” immigration minister Liam Byrne said. This, at a time when the government is setting up its migration advisory service, an independent body that will advise the government on how best to use an Australian-style points system to ensure “desirable immigration”, to suit the needs of the highly-skilled labour market and ageing demographics.

Next, all visa applicants will be subject to biometric testing; with the data checked against the UK government database. The UK is planning to expand its border control to include three-quarters of the world’s population, and to institute a US-style visa-waiver protocol. In a paper released on Wednesday, the government announced that all non-EEA countries would be “assessed” on various risk parameters on the basis of the “overall harm posed by travellers from a particular country”, which includes parameters such as issuing secure passports.

Just to put things in perspective, the UK has only recently begun trying to ‘reform’ its passport issuing laws to include such intensely stringent measures as a face-to-face interview – usually a British citizen can get a new or replacement passport with the minimum of documentation or checks. Some of the other measures which seem targeted at the Indian sub-continent include raising the marriage age to 21 for marriage visas, an English test for spouses – ostensibly to check forced marriages — and increasing the liability of a sponsor of a family visitor visa to fairly rigid levels.

“The people’s highest priority in this country is to see a fair and effective management of immigration,” said John Reid while announcing the measures. The whole caboodle is being widely seen as a further tightening of controls against non-EEA (read non-white) travellers, workers and countries, and of increasing the scope for racial profiling and discrimination. “It’s essentially a measure to let in white EU residents, but discriminate against the rest of the Commonwealth, African and Moslem countries,” said African commentator and analyst Jesse Mashate.

Even locally, human rights groups are very aware that these measures may end up as counter-productive. Policy director of human rights group Liberty said in a media interview: “When ethnic minorities are repeatedly targeted to present identification the end result is resentment and discontent.” That discontent and resentment was pretty much evident from the Asian and African contingent at the Foreign Corps briefing in London itself. And it’s only likely to get a lot worse, especially at a time when the rest of the UK government, from its trade arms to its tourist authorities, are falling over themselves to woo visitors and investors from India and China.