A group representing Indian and non-European Union highly skilled migrants has threatened legal action against retrospective provisions in a new immigration bill currently working its way through the British parliament.
The Highly Skilled Migrants Forum today said the Labour government faced a wave of legal challenges to its new immigration and citizenship bill, which allegedly ignored High Court rulings that the Home Office cannot change rules for migrants already living in Britain.
The HSMP Forum has won two landmark judicial review cases where the Home Office was ordered to honour the original terms of migrants' visas after it tried to alter them retrospectively. The government's legal fees ran into tens of thousands of pounds and analysts say it now faces individuals' compensation claims that could be in millions.
"Yet Ministers Jacqui Smith and Liam Byrne are determined to press ahead with the new Borders, Immigration and Citizenship Bill, which tries the same thing all over again," Amit Kapadia of the campaign group said. Among many discriminatory provisions, the new bill retrospectively lengthens the waiting period for citizenship to eight years.
"If long-standing, taxpaying, completely legitimate migrants want to make a commitment to citizenship after six years - as originally promised when they came here - they are reduced to the status of criminals by effectively being sentenced to a community service order," Kapadia said.
"We are urging MPs from all sides to scrap this bill - or ensure it is heavily amended so that no legitimate migrant already living in Britain is caught up in these latest arbitrary and retrospective rule changes, which are doomed to failure," he added. Speaking on the recent Gurkha vote against government Kapadia said that it displayed a sense of fair play among MPs towards foreigners who had shown a commitment to Britain.
"We ask that MPs show a similar sense of fairness towards legitimate working Indians and other non EU migrants by challenging this Bill," he said. "We accept that the UK can change its immigration rules, but those changes must not be applied to existing legal migrants in Britain", he said.
Kapadia also added that skilled migrants felt it was time the government left them alone and focused on the real problems with Britain's immigration system. "If the Bill goes ahead in its current form, HSMP Forum will have no hesitation in going back to court and we are completely confident of victory," he said.