Joseph
Mobility business
Jun 30th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Bureaucrats are tightening rules on passports for the wealthy and talented
CLEVER, rich or both—almost every country in the world has some sort of programme to attract desirable migrants. The only exceptions are “weird places like Bhutan” says Christian Kalin of Henley & Partners, which specialises in fixing visas and passports for globe-trotters. Competition is fierce and, as with most things, that lowers the price and increases choice. Britain has two programmes, one for the rich—who have to invest £750,000 ($1.36m) in actively traded securities—and one, much larger, for talented foreigners.
Both have worked well. Unlike some other countries, Britain does not make applicants find a job first: with good qualifications, they can just turn up and look for work. That helps keep Britain's economy flexible and competitive. But now a bureaucratic snag is threatening the scheme.
The problem comes with anyone wanting to convert his visa into “indefinite leave to remain” (Britain's equivalent of America's Green Card). This normally requires four years' continuous residence in Britain. After a further year, it normally leads to British citizenship.
The law defines continuous residence sensibly. Business trips and holidays don't count, if the applicant's main home is in Britain. As a rule of thumb, an average of 90 days abroad was allowed each year. But unpublished guidelines seen by The Economist are tougher: they say that “none of the absences abroad should be of more than three months, and they must not amount to more than six months in all.” Over the four years needed to qualify, that averages only six weeks a year.
For many jet-setters, this restriction is a career-buster. Six weeks abroad barely covers holidays, let alone business travel. Alexei Sidnev, a Russian consultant, has to turn down important jobs because he cannot afford any more days abroad. If applicants they travel “too much”, their children risk losing the right to remain in Britain.
Roger Gherson, who runs a specialist immigration law firm, reckons that, including such dependents, the new rule could affect 750,000 people. “Panic will reign in Canary Wharf [in London's financial district] when they start implementing this,” he says. Next week his firm is going to court to try to have the guidelines ruled illegal. They came to light in a case involving a wealthy foreigner who runs an international property business. His application for permanent residency was rejected in April, though in the previous four years he had been abroad for only 351 days, and never for more than 90 days at a stretch.
The Home Office insists that the rules have not changed since 2001. That would confirm Mr Gherson's suspicion that the new policy has come in by accident, probably as a result of zeal or carelessness by mid-ranking officials. Their attitude is at odds with the stance of the government, which has been trying for years to make the system more user-friendly for the world's elite. It even moved processing of business residency cases from a huge office in Croydon, notorious for its slowness and hostility to would-be immigrants, to a new outfit in Sheffield.
But lawyers such as Mr Kalin are in no doubt of the risk Britain is running. America, he says, is already losing out in the global talent market because of its “painful and humiliating” immigration procedures. If Britain's rules stay tight, he says, foreigners will go elsewhere. Likely beneficiaries are Ireland and Austria, European Union countries whose residency visas and passports confer the same convenience as British ones, with less hassle.
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