UK to announce Tough immigration, asylum measures Today
Pakistan Times Monitoring Desk

LONDON (UK): Unskilled foreigners will find it harder to migrate to Britain under new proposals due to be announced today, Monday, which also call for stricter screening of asylum seekers and tighter border controls, the country's interior minister said Sunday.

The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair has drawn up the five-year blueprint just three months before an expected general election in which immigration will be a major theme.

Economic Migrants

"We believe that economic migrants are of great value to this country. They provide skills and goods which help us to establish and strengthen our economy, as indeed do students coming into the country," Home Secretary Charles Clarke told BBC television in an interview.

"But we want to ensure that the people who do come into the country are the people who do bring us those benefits," the minister said.

"We will establish a system... which looks at the skills, talents, abilities of people seeking to come and work in this country, and ensures that when they come here they have a job and can contribute to the economy of the country."

The Influx

About 140,000 people per year move to Britain to work, according to Clarke. At the same time, he acknowledged that it was "very difficult" to estimate the number of people who enter the country illegally.

"One of the key issues of our proposals today (Monday) is to ensure that we are able properly to identify absolutely everybody who comes into the country," the minister said.

Tests and Fingerprint

To this end, the government wanted to establish a system by 2008 to conduct proper tests and fingerprinting of everybody who obtains a visa, Clarke said.

Asylum Seekers

As for the question of asylum, the minister warned that a proper process must be installed to remove people who fail in their request for refuge. "A very much larger number of people claim asylum than are in fact entitled to it," he said.

"As they come and claim asylum, we have to be sure that people can't falsely claim, can't come into the country when they ought not to be able to, and secondly if they appeal for asylum and that is turned down, that they are then removed from the country."

In addition, the new proposals will call for identity cards for everybody who migrates to Britain while also offering new measures to crack down on people-trafficking.

Perspective

Clarke's announcement follows recent tough proposals by the main opposition Conservative Party to put an absolute cap on immigration numbers, and to limit asylum seekers by withdrawing from the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees.

The Observer newspaper reported that under Monday's plan only "desirable" professionals, such as doctors and teachers, will be granted leave to remain permanently in Britain, and even then only if they pass English tests.

Others who come to Britain on work permits will not be able to apply to remain indefinitely, and will be forced to leave once their time in the country has run out.

The measures are not expected to affect citizens from other European Union countries who, under EU rules, are free to seek work and remain in Britain except in some conditions in the case of people from eastern Europe.●