Many foreign companies in Britain, particularly from India, have brought in thousands of non-EU workers through ‘intra-company transfers’ route, and can easily bypass the new immigration cap reducing it to a “sham“.
The Home Office has admitted that the interim cap will not apply to “intra-company transfers”, or ICTS, which allow firms to bring in non-EU nationals who are already on their payroll, The Sunday Telegraph reported.
According to Home Office data, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) sponsored 4,600 of its employees to come to Britain in 2008 through the ICTS route.
Although there is no suggestion that TCS has broken the rules, the scale of immigration from India through ICTs is startling, the report claimed.
Another Indian company, Infosys Technologies Limited, sponsored 3,235 people to come to Britain in the same year while Wipro Technologies, brought in 2,420.
While the Home Office said there were 30,000 arrivals under the ICT system last year, this was down from a total of 46,000 the previous year.
Indians made up 70 per cent of those brought to Britain on ICTs.
Others were from nations including the US, South Africa, Japan and China.
Although the system is intended to help companies that cannot recruit suitable candidates within Britain, critics claim that in practice much of the work could easily have been done by Britons.
The Home Office has disclosed names of about 20,000 employers registered to bring skilled migrant workers into Britain on so-called “Tier 2” visas.
Names on the list, published on the UK Border Agency website last week, range from Chelsea football Club and Conservative Campaign Headquarters to hundreds of Thai restaurants, Indian takeaways and kebab shops.
Of the companies on the list, about 2,700 are permitted to use ICTs. Yet the UK Border Agency has only 125 staff responsible for visiting sponsor companies and keeping checks on them.
Unions and professional bodies claim that ICTs are being manipulated by some companies as a source of cheap labour, undercutting Britons and forcing them out of work.
Damian Green, the immigration minister, said: “It is important that we attract the brightest and the best people who can make a real difference to our economic growth, but immigration is too high and needs to be reduced.
“The Government has announced it will introduce a limit on economic migration from outside EU as part of work to scale back net migration to the levels of the 1990s, to tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands”.
