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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