The UK is going to launch a new unsponsored points-based visa system for professionals working in fields like finance, science, research, and technology. On March 3, UK’s chief financial minister Rishi Sunak said during declaring budget, “I’m announcing ambitious visa reform aimed at highly skilled migrants, stressing plans to make post-Brexit-Britain “internationally competitive.”
One further good development made was that Sunak also mentioned a relaunch of the so-called Global Talent Visa program. This visa stream has been active now for a long time to attract people who are leaders in academia, research, and those excelling in arts and culture.
The astonishing point that differs the program from the newly announced innimgration policy is that no sponsoring company is required for the endorsement. The new planned visa stream for tech, science and entrepreneurs specialist does not till now reveal any obvious points for the eligibility requirements, still the factors will count such as minimum salary thresholds, linguistic ability, age, education and other qualifiers.
Further details are expected to be revealed in July 2021 whereas the whole visa system through the immigration law system could take up to a year to complete and in action. New unsponsored points-based visa will be used as a gate to attract the best and most promising international talent in science, research, and tech, new, improved visa processes for scale-ups and entrepreneurs, and radically simplified bureaucracy for high-skilled visa applications.
The new immigration policy may well bring down the numbers of immigrants as currently, 70% of immigrants are low-skilled workers who will no longer find a route in the future.
Unfortunately, the UK is once again ignoring the lower-skilled worker that could be an asset after post-Covid reforms. The country will have a great dependence on such lower to middle-skilled workers (the so-called blue caller workers). Since the UK is no more willing to have low-skilled workers, it is said that the 3.2 million EU citizens who have applied to stay in the UK could help meet labor demands for the coming future years (for low-skilled jobs).
The earlier announced “Global Talent Visa” scheme has been slowly running due to any difficulty in its eligibility requirements. The applicants, usually need an endorsement from the UK governments’ recognized endorsing body. But in the future, endorsement, and recognition from international organizations such as the Nobel prizes and academy award will automatically make the applicants eligible for the visa.
According to previous changes in immigration rules, the Global Talent route, which has replaced the Tier 1 (Exceptional Talent) route, will be extended to EEA nationals. Under this route, talented individuals will be granted immigration permission to work without restriction if they are endorsed by a specialist endorsing body following peer review. The new policy will also aim to get quality migrants through global talent visas and post-study work visas (both routes are for highly qualified immigrants). Highly-skilled scientists and researchers would be able to get to the UK without a job offer. The scheme has first been opened for EU nationals. UKBA is also making changes to the Global Talent rules on the criteria for senior appointments and to the definitions of qualifying academic and research roles.