Drop annual cap on immigrants from non-EU states, UK govt told

Several British firms and industry leaders have asked the Cameron government to drop the policy to place an annual cap on immigrants from India and other non-EU nations as the move will threaten the country's economic recovery and force companies to relocate abroad.

The deadline for public consultation on the coalition government's policy ends on Tuesday.

The Migration Advisory Committee of the Home Office is expected to later this year announce the number at which immigrants from India and other non-EU countries would be capped annually.

Damian Green, Immigration Minister who recently visited India, insisted that placing "a limit on numbers migrating to the UK will not prevent us welcoming the brightest and best from India, and elsewhere."

The annual cap, to be in place from April 2011, is likely to adversely affect professionals from India, who constitute a large immigrant group taking up jobs in Britain every year.

'London First', the influential business membership group whose mission is to make London the best city in the world to do business, has urged the David Cameron government to drop the annual cap and instead continue the current points-based immigration system.

It claims that the policy to cap non-EU immigration will affect only 55,000 of the 567,000 migrants who came to the UK, based on last year's figures.

Those professionals, mostly from India, come under Tier 1 and Tier 2 of the points-based system.

"I do not think the public had these people in mind when they voted for this Government's plan to cap immigration," Baroness Valentine, chief executive of London First, said.

London First is said to be particularly keen on inter-company immigration, a route used by thousands of Indian professionals, to be uncapped.

Green has announced that the objective is to reduce net immigration from the current 500,000 per year to tens of thousands.

But London First questions how this is possible by targeting the 50,000 Tier 1 and 2 migrants that arrive each year.