Immigration newsletter 26 Oct 2005

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New figures show that about 111,000 workers arrived legally to work in the UK from the new member countries of the European Union in the past year. That figure is up from 20,000, the number that arrived before EU enlargement in May 2004. News reports say that the new immigrants are transforming parts of London into Slavic and Baltic enclaves where pickles and Polish beer are stacked in delicatessens and Polish can be heard on the streets almost as often as English. The eight new EU countries now send as many workers as Asia and the Middle East combined.

The European Union needs substantial but controlled immigration, said Joaquin Almunia, the EU economic and monetary affairs commissioner. Mr Almunia, a Spanish socialist, called for active labour market policies, and reform of its public finances, including changes to its tax base, pensions and healthcare systems, to achieve the greater economic growth that is needed in order to overcome the challenges caused by Europe's ageing population. Mr Almunia made a plea for legal migration to expand the European labour force but, pointing to the recent racial tension in Birmingham, England, said this had to take account how many immigrants each society could absorb.

Poor countries across Africa, Central America and the Caribbean are losing very large numbers of their college-educated workers to wealthy, industrialized democracies, according to a recent study by the World Bank. Researchers found, for example, that 25 to 50 pecent of the college-educated nationals of Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Nicaragua and El Salvador live in member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For Haiti and Jamaica, the number rises to more than 80 percent. The World Bank's study is part of a broader intellectual discussion about how migration affects poor countries. Scholarly research has tended to focus more on the impact of foreign aid, global trade and foreign investment, but there is a growing sense that the movement of people is also a major and little-understood factor.

Under a measure proposed by a US Senate committee, the US government would issue 30,000 more H-1B visas to high-tech and other skilled foreign workers each year and increase fees for those visas. High-tech firms and other businesses have been complaining that, for the third year in a row, they have reached the annual limit on the popular H-1B visas just 20 days into the government's 2005-06 fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Congress limited H-1B visas at 65,000 per year in 2004. The fee for each visa would increase by $500 under the proposal.