Immigration Cap - Home Affairs Committee Contents


Supplementary memorandum submitted by MigrationWatch UK

  Thank you for the opportunity to give evidence to your Committee on Tuesday morning. It was a valuable occasion for us.

There is one point that I omitted to make. It concerns the Free Trade Agreement between the EU and India.

  I understand that the agreement is being fast tracked even now, and that Mode 4 (that is provisions for transnational corporations to bring in workers for service contracts) is the core demand of the Indian government.

  Mode 4 concessions provide for effectively unlimited movement of skilled workers by corporations, as Intra Company Transfers (ICTs), with no Resident Labour Market Test or Economic Needs Test. Clearly this is not only about senior management. The potential effects on UK workers, in IT and in other sectors, are very significant and very damaging. And as a trade agreement undertaking, the Mode 4 commitment will be effectively irreversible.

  The exclusion of ICTs from the cap will allow this to go ahead as a trade relations matter. Indeed, the Migration Advisory Committee Tier 2 report of August 2009 indicates that any national labour migration policy making is subordinated to the requirements of the trade agreement.

  Despite this, there is as yet, no public information on the interrelationship between the exemption of ICTs from the cap and Mode 4, nor on the nature of Mode 4 in EU trade agreement commitments, nor is the significance of the EU/India FTA being discussed publicly.

  You might like to consider asking the government for an explanatory note on the subject. My particular concern is that there may well be something in this agreement that would prevent the ICT threshold being raised to a level that would make it apply only to senior management. In any event, it is, despite its apparent obscurity, a potentially significant matter of which the committee and, of course, the public will wish to be aware.

September 2010





 
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