A UK-based influential think-tank wants the British government to offer tax breaks and other incentives to highly skilled “super-mobile” migrants from India and other non-European Union countries, instead of imposing new curbs on immigration.
The Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), which has close ties with the ruling Labour party, said in a new report that Britain could lose out on sought-after skills offered by mobile immigrants if they re-migrate to other countries.
More efforts should be made to encourage them to stay in Britain, it said.
There are indications that many highly skilled professionals are not interested in settling in Britain and instead prefer to work here for short periods and move on elsewhere.
The IPPR report, titled ‘Shall we stay or shall we go: Re-migration trends among Britain’s immigrants’, dismisses fears over population growth due to immigration. Tim Finch, IPPR’s head of migration, said many more immigrants were coming to Britain for short periods of time before leaving.
“The migration debate in the UK is fixated with the idea that immigrants come to settle and not enough attention has been paid to the fact that more and more immigrants are spending only short periods in the UK,” he said.
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He added, “Our research shows that many groups of migrants are now increasingly mobile. They are coming to the UK to study and work for short periods and then they are moving on.”
“As global competition for highly skilled migrants increases in future years, schemes to retain migrants may become as important as attracting them in the first place,” Tim Finch said.
The report says: “We need to be making migrants feel more welcome in this country, both in the way we talk about them, and in more practical ways. In particular, we need to ensure that integration policies and service provision take account of the fact that many migrants will be in the UK for relatively short periods.”
The report listed measures to encourage migrants to stay longer in the UK: extending schemes to encourage and help foreign students to find jobs in the UK after they graduate; awarding extra points under the new points-based system to high skilled migrants who are committed to staying in the UK longer term; simplifying processes for visa and work permit extensions, allowing skilled migrants to bring in their families more easily; and creating tax incentives that encourage such migrants to stay in the UK.