Amid record net immigration and a collapse in deportations, Britain’s nominally Conservative government is dishing out even more visas to foreign graduates, undercutting skilled Britons.
Priti Patel MP, who heads the Home Office government department responsible for controlling immigration — or not, as the case may be — in the Boris Johnson administration hailed the opening of its so-called“high potential individual” immigration route as an “exciting” opportunity to “put ability and talent first, not where someone comes from” in the wake of Brexit.
Patel’s statement is something of a non-sequitur insofar as the United Kingdom already had almost full control over non-EU immigration prior to Brexit — and there is little to no evidence that Brexit or Conservative Party voters were clamouring to increase it prior to 2016, with YouGov trackers suggesting that only 2 per cent of the former and 3 per cent of the latter think immigration in general has been “too low” over the last decade.
80 per cent and 77 per cent of Brexiteers and Tory voters in Britain say it has been “too high”, respectively, the research states.
The new visa policy will allow graduates of supposedly top universities such as Harvard in the United States and Tsinghua in Communist China to come to Britain for at least two years — along with their family members — if they have a bachelor’s or master’s degree and at least three years if they had a PhD.
“While the government says it is ‘putting talent first’, it is really sending British graduates to the back of the queue,” pointed out Alp Mehmet, chairman of the Migration Watch UK think tank, in comments to Breitbart London.
“Despite promises of firmer border control, the UK had a record million visa grants in the past year, including skyrocketing study and work immigration and rocketing numbers of family members. Opening the borders even wider will only push the level of mass, uncontrolled immigration even higher,” Mehmet explained.
“UK young people will be further punished by this uncapped scheme because they will have to compete with an even larger pool of global recruits than presently but this time with no minimum salary threshold to protect them from the real risk of undercutting,” he continued, adding: “This is madness.”
“Last year record numbers of immigrants came to Britain to live. Well over a million people are likely to have migrated to the UK in the past year,” concurred Ben Harris-Quinney, chairman of Britain’s oldest conservative think tank, the Bow Group.
Harris-Quinney emphasised that the Conservative Party was allowing in “higher numbers than came in under Labour, or any government in history.”
He further suggested that Britain’s rapid, immigration-driven population growth is the reason “why all of our infrastructure is collapsing [and] house prices have skyrocketed whilst wages stagnated.”
“Brexit happened because the people strongly oppose mass immigration, and they expected a Brexit government that would completely reverse mass immigration and make the British public the priority again when it comes to jobs, housing and healthcare. This government has done the opposite,” he lamented.
Even Diane Abbott, a notorious far-left Labour MP who is far from hawkish on immigration, found cause for concern in the Tories’ latest border-relaxing measures.
“Government boast[s] it is opening up visas to the world’s top graduates. But many originally come from third world countries,” she noted on social media.
“Why is Britain asset stripping poor countries like this?”
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