Describing as a 'shameful decision' to change the conditions of the highly skilled migrants programme affecting thousands of Indians, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats Lord Navnit Dholakia has urged the Gordon Brown government in Britain to rectify the mistake.
Participating in a debate on the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill in the House of Lords on Wednesday, Lord Dholakia said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had raised the issue with Brown during his last visit to India.
"Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just returned from his visit to India. This is his second visit. I am aware that during his previous visit, prime minister of India discussed with him the impact of retrospective changes affecting migrants and their families who entered the UK legally from the Indian subcontinent under the HSMP," he said.
While the Joint Committee on Human Rights in its report on the HSMP had stated that these retrospective changes were 'unlawful', The Human Rights Commission and the Commission for Racial Equality said these were discriminatory and breached the Race Relations Act, Lord Dholakia pointed out.
Explaining the reasons for raising the issue, he said the changes in the HSMP rules had a catastrophic effect on HSMP visa holders.
"We are criminalising groups of people who may be reluctant to leave the United Kingdom. There are those who have returned to India with their families and have lost everything," he said.
"They felt that the British government had cheated them. The UK government unfairly went back on their promise that the HSMP would lead to settlement, but the retrospective changes made that impossible. They have nothing left in their home country -- no jobs, no assets, no hope and in some cases not enough money to travel back," Lord Dholakia said.
These people were deemed to have skills which were required here and to 'retrospectively alter their status and ask them to leave is inhuman and does not fit with the liberal values we espouse,' the Liberal Democrat leader said.
He said: "if we are concerned about the impact of the Human Rights Act on those who damage this country and wish to remove them -- as we intend to do in this legislation -- should we not, by the same token, meet our obligations to those whom we trusted under our Highly Skilled Migrants Programme? This was the golden opportunity to rectify this hameful decision, but it does not form part of the government's legislative programme."
He said his party would certainly explore ways to see if this 'gross injustice' could be rectified.
An estimated 30,000 Indians were affected by the changes in the condition and some of them have even received eportation orders.
