Visa for Cream

A hangover from that old intoxication of getting to Britain somehow is finally being cleared at last. It lasted long enough from the early ’50s to set up an almost two-million strong Indian community in Britain, including those who came here illegally—nice chaps a lot of them. The migration story that originated mostly in a few districts of Punjab and Gujarat will now come to a close with the introduction of a new system for migration that will keep out just about every Indian or subcontinental of the sort who moved to Britain in the first place.

Every factory worker and coolie of old made it good here—some spectacularly so. But Britain now wants to exclusively import IT brains from India for the skills that it lacks, and the Indian money to create the activity that it needs. The opening of these doors and the closing of others is an expression of Britain’s needs of course, but also of where India is seen to be going. Seen from the outside, India looks a lot more shining than it does to many within.

Shining enough now to begin to attract Indian IT talent from Britain—and there is a good deal of it here—back to India. "We are getting young Indians here who say they want to work in India because the money is good and the lifestyle is a lot better than here," says a manager with a major Indian IT company. Which of the early migrants from India would have thought they’d hear that from an Indian in Britain? And in this business, India means opportunities, Britain very much less so. The reverse flow stories are scattered but frequent; it’s not a rush but a definite trickle, and these are the early days.

"There is now a circularity to our links with India which means as many professionals are going back to develop and refresh their skills in Bangalore and elsewhere as there are people coming here to enrich the IT sector here," migration minister Tony McNulty told Outlook. "So there is this fascinating, really developed and mutual two-way traffic that can only be to the good of the sectors in both countries." And beyond that, he said, "you will know, too, that Indian IT investors and the owners of those companies are investing more and more in the UK so there is a wonderful relationship between the IT sector in the UK and in India, and that will continue and grow."

So there’ll no more be a growth of migrants-turned-settlers in Britain, but of the new "circularities in the migration story," McNulty said. And the circularity does not arise from a single circle. East African nations want expelled Indians back to help revive their economy. "My constituency in north-west London is 40 to 45 per cent Indian, overwhelmingly people from and relatives of the East African expellent of the ’60s. They are here because their parents were thrown out of East Africa without a penny, and now the first among the foreign governments who want them back are precisely the Tanzanians and the Kenyans...because Gujarati constituencies like mine and others have been so successful in even such an unusually successful migrant story in this country. There’s this enormous complexity coming into the system which makes it so fascinating."

The circularity has come into investment before it could be modelled into migration. Indian companies now invest more in Britain than British companies in India, and the new migration system McNulty announced is intended to encourage more of that. Britain is naturally looking after its own interests here. "The whole driver behind the system is the needs of the UK economy and, of course, that will include entrepreneurs bringing with them inward investment from India." The basic kind of work the old immigrants did will be opened to workers from the expanded European Union rather than the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean as before.The declared baseline of the new system is to attract migrants "who have the most to contribute to the UK". And, therefore, also students who brought over £5 billion in fees to British universities last year.

"The scheme is skewed against lower-skilled migrants from developing non-European Union countries," Habib Rahman, chief executive of the independent Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, told Outlook. "This new move will squeeze them out of the system." As it shuts down its doors to the old immigration order, Britain is looking to protect its own labour force, British Indians among them, McNulty said. "We need principally to address the concerns of the economy and the British workforce having their ability to grow and develop, and given—and I think people will forgive me for this—that any number of the workforce now, especially at the professional level, are the sons and daughters of non-resident Indians, and we need to look after them, so that’s again part of the circularity."

So is the British government in part protecting Indians in Britain from Indians from India? "It’s a very interesting point," McNulty said. "I don’t think the answer is yes because I think there’s a mutuality there. If you’re saying to me that if we get to a stage where there are sufficient workers—say in the IT sector—and no shortages, so we don’t need any from outside, then the answer might be yes because the IT professionals want to come from outside—they may even come from India—and the workers I am trying to defend here may be second or even third generation Indians."

The new circularity is more Indian than it is most else. As the new system is designed, it will be emphatically not Pakistani or Bangladeshi, the other big immigrant communities from the subcontinent. On present skill patterns, almost no one from either Pakistan or Bangladesh could move to Britain any more. Britain has taken a typically disguised but undeniably clear decision that it has no more need for Bangladeshi waiters or Pakistani mini-cab drivers. Or, odd-job adventurers coming out of Punjab and Gujarat, for that matter. Only the cream really matters.

And even among Indians, the circularity is more around IT than anything else. Britain will continue to offer settlement to highly skilled people and entrepreneurs, but the keyword for the new story might be movement rather than settling. "For the Indian IT sector, people I was speaking to today and others, one of the key things they do want is a more keenly developed system of inter-company transfers," McNulty said. "People who want to come here from India for three months, six months, nine months, to do what the company needs and then return—and then the flow happens the other way. And I think this system and all the other systems we put in place today works toward that, and works to a finely developed and strong relation between the UK and Mother India."