Immigration news

A leading UK lifestyle management company has said that it may have to move parts of its operations overseas because it has become so difficult to bring in skilled staff with Tier 2 (General) skilled worker visas.

Alex Cheatle, the founder of Ten Group, told the Financial Times 'If you cannot recruit managers for a team here, you have to shift the entire department offshore'. He continued 'I am very passionate about being a British-based business but it becomes much more difficult to sustain that when you have got a global company'.

The UK's tech sector has been growing fast in recent years. Industry insiders say that this is, at least in part, because US tech companies cannot get visas to bring skilled workers into the US.

London's growing tech industry, centred on 'Silicon roundabout' in the Old Street area of East London, has been growing particularly fast recently. The Financial Times recently reported that 15,720 new businesses were created in the EC1V (Old Street) postcode area alone in the year to March 31st 2013. Most of these were tech start-ups.

As predicted by workpermit.com in June, Quebec's Immigrant Investor Program (QIIP) is to reopen on 1st August 2013.

The QIIP will accept only 1,750 applications before it closes again. Applications will only be accepted between 1st August and 16th August 2013 by post. A maximum of 1,200 applications can come from any one country. In the event that more than 2,000 applications are received, there will be a ballot to decide which applications will be accepted for consideration.

A UK education body has called on the UK's Home Office to stop changing in the rules for Tier 4 sponsors. The Higher Education Better Regulation Group (HEBRG) says that the UK's Home Office has created uncertainty among colleges and universities and says that this lack of clarity has cost them about £67m in administration costs in 2012-13 alone.

Diplomats serving in Canada have warned that international visitors are avoiding Canada because the application for Canadian temporary resident visas is so complicated.

While visitors from the US, the UK and many EU countries do not need Canadian visas, citizens of most other countries do. There are fears that the over-complex visa forms are damaging Canadian trade by encouraging potential business investors and entrepreneurs to go elsewhere.

The total number of cases in the UK's immigration backlog rose by 190,000 in the last three months of 2012 to over 502,000 cases according to the House of Commons' Home Affairs Committee (HAC).

The figure, the HAC says, includes all outstanding immigration cases. It said that the rise was accounted for not by a sudden rash of new applications but because the new acting head of immigration at the Home Office, Sarah Rapson, had told MPs about a new collection of cases known as the 'temporary and permanent migration pool' in June.